IV. Nmshi issouq. In which I go shopping with Latifa.

I had an Arabic lesson last night about vegetables and fruits, and another one this morning about buying things. I’m not entirely sure that my Egyptian Arabic is helpful. Moroccans use so many different words…some seemingly completely unrelated, some so contracted I barely recognize that they have the same root. But I’m getting better, and “big” Latifa, my teacher, assures me that I’m progressing quickly compared to someone with no Arabic. But I’m finding it hard to remember the Moroccan words a lot of the time, and fall back on Egyptian instinctively, which is not what I want to do. The Moroccans understand me, and I’m understanding more of what they say, but it’s slow going.

After my lesson, I went on a shopping trip with “little” Latifa, one of the cooks. She is a short, round woman, maybe in her late 20’s. Inside the guesthouse she wears pants with a tunic/shirt and a scarf on her head. To go shopping, she put on a djellaba, a long gown that goes over the clothes and two scarves to cover her head and neck. We walked about 10 minutes to the first shop…a fruit and vegetable shop. A shop is open in front, and most of the wares are out on the street under an awning. Latifa made me ask for the vegetables and pick them out and the vendor was helpful and patient with my Arabic. They had very nice fruits, but the vegetables were a little less attractive, but she said it was the best shop in town. The tomatoes were the best I’d seen, but they would be sauce tomatoes in our markets. A caterpillar has recently invaded from Spain and is devastating the tomato crops. In Casa, all the tomatoes I saw had ringspot, a disease, so clearly tomatoes are a problem this year. Big Latifa told me the price of tomatoes has almost tripled this year over last, and they are very poor quality. They are mostly smallish salad type tomatoes, I have not seen any cherries, and only a few really big ones like some of the heirlooms.
Then we went to a meat shop, for lamb. Apparently each kind of meat is a separate shop and the meat shops are mostly open in the morning. They have the butchered lamb legs and other parts hanging on big hooks out front. I had to ask for ‘nuss ikkilo ghanim’…half a kilo of lamb – just over a pound. Then I asked the vendor if I could take his picture, but unfortunately my pictures of the meat shop didn’t turn out…next time. We walked by a goat shop where there was a small goat head set on the side of the counter (the real thing - probably from the meat hanging in front)

Finally we went to the pastry shop…full of trays of all kinds of little pastries, some sticky, some like dry cookies, and some chocolate. They looked really good, but generally I’m not fond of the pastries. Then we had to walk home with a big basket of produce for making dinner at the guesthouse. It was heavy, and Latifa is so small, I just wanted to carry it, but she insisted that we share the load…each of us holding one handle. We must have been quite a sight – she’s more than a foot shorter than I am, so one of us was struggling to hold it at a reasonable height the whole way home, but we made it!