Black Friday (aka the After-Thanksgiving Crazy Shopping Day That I Love to Avoid) came one day early here in B-town. On the outskirts of the city, one can find a huge dirt field that’s empty every day except Thursdays, when clothes/houseware/food vendors set up what seems like a million tents to sell their goods.
Coincidentally, L-Eid L-Adha (aka Feast of Sacrifice or L-Eid L-Kbir) happened to fall two days after Thanksgiving this year. How do Moroccans celebrate this holiday? Replace one turkey per a household with one mature sheep and gorge. Children wear new clothes, girls get henna-ed, mothers bake sweets, men pray together outdoors in the morning, and everyone looks forward to eating meat (I have yet to meet a vegetarian). This celebration means that this Thursday’s souq day was a madhouse as everyone rushed to buy holiday things (more meat skewers, grills, new/used clothes, the sheep, charcoal…) and a week’s worth of seasonal produce.
Walking to the souq, my host sister, Rabia, and I passed men rolling wheelbarrow carts of live sheep, men carrying sheep in their arms, men walking alongside sheep, and women carrying loaded striped plastic bags of groceries. We shook hands with and cheek-to-cheek kissed so many people, which is the standard greeting protocol.
Rabia bumped into an old friend and her daughter, Sara, who’s studying English at a nearby university. So, like 4 middle school girls at the mall, we just like, totally had to, walk together for all three hours we were, like, there. It’s not an easy task, and we bumped into kids running around, families trying to stick together, tent poles, carts, and vendors who set up their wares in the middle of the narrow dirt paths. The whole time, Sara mentioned how small this souq was compared to the big Moroccan cities and patiently answered all of my what/why questions. We hit it off.
How We Spent the Time:
-Negotiated prices on new shoes for Rabia’s son, who scored a pair of knock-off Converses.
-Found the used purses section of the market. Over the next two years, I will spend hundreds of Dirhams on 3 Dirham bags Spanish women have “donated to Africa.”
-Walked back and forth between two tents selling pajama sets, as Rabia and her friend decided between purchasing the pink or red outfit for the holiday for a family member in Casablanca.
-Picked through piles of tomatoes, onions, apples, bananas, celery, and eggplant. This week, we didn’t buy as much veggies because L-Eid mandates that we eat meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
-Dropped our shopping bags off with the friendly olive oil guy to do more shopping.
-Greeted the chicken man, who we bought a chicken from last week. Right in front of your eyes, he will take a live chicken and turn it into a plucked, clean whole-carcass-in-a-plastic-bag.
-Held up pedestrian traffic by greeting other shoppers.
-Stuck my tongue out at a little boy who stuck his tongue out at me first (the heat and exhaustion from walking around so slowly and aimlessly was getting to me). He then tripped, which means I won. Yes, I am 25 years old.
-Spent 100 Dirhams on goat meat for the week, just in case the whole sheep wasn’t enough for me, Rabia, her son, and grandma.
-Took a horse carriage back to the house with all of our goods, finally. Sara told me she always wears socks to souq, and I understood why since my feet were covered with dust. And no, we didn’t have to haul a sheep home because we ordered one to be delivered there. …Sheep Hut…Pizza Hut may want to think of expanding its franchise line.
Overall, Moroccan Black Thursday reminded me a lot of American Black Friday. Next year, inshallah, I’m going to skip it, like I do in the states. L-Eid was a nice time. I visited many hospitable, warm families, and I ate a lot of cookies, cakes, and sheep. Even though I’ve only been in town for a couple of weeks, so many people kindly (or very insistently) opened up their houses to me. I look forward to returning the invite next month in my own home!
At my host family’s house, we hired a butcher to slaughter our sheep on our roof. So many big smiles, mishwi (bbq) and kebabs, Darija shouting that I don’t understand (grandma’s slightly deaf), and jokes about drinking my home (Hawai soda). Living in RIM desensitized me to the act of the slaughter and butchering of meat, organs, and waste. What disgusted me instead was grandma’s lack of using soap throughout this whole butchering to bbq-ing process. In my head, I could hear my mom saying, “eww eww eww,” but that only made me smile and pray to everyone’s god that I don’t get too sick from digging in to the mutton. You only live once, right? Thanks RIM for making my stomach so strong.
