Bonjour, hello, just looking, best quality

It is our last day in Marrakech and after our usual late breakfast, we stepped into the souks to shop. We played the haggling game with the guy who sells tassels. Every type of tassels imaginable - in difference sizes, colors, and ornamentation. This was our first foray into Moroccan haggling. As always the vendor would start with a ridiculously high price and then gauge our response to see where to go next. Lily was very good at laughing (literally) at this first offer saying "too much." As what seems to always happen next, they ask how much you have to spend. We of course do not respond but rather start looking at other options in the store. The vendor always talks about "best quality" (which every vendor seemed to have) and tries to show you the differences in sizes. We played this game for a while and entertained options for higher and lower priced tassles just to get more price ranges going. As this grows old, Lily would come up with a creative "package deal" for several items at a low price. We found that suggesting a multiple item purchase would easily drop the price. His final game was to pull out a large calculator and show how things add up. The funny part was that he often mistyped the numbers so we just let him play with the calculater for a while until the numbers got lower. In the end we got to a 40 dirham impass and agreed to split the difference (ok not exactly, as I gave him 5 dirhams more just to end it). It was a decent deal but we probably could have gone lower. Overall it was a succesful first buy.

Then Lily bought a drum and Berber castinets. Next we bought 5 fez hats for Sabaya. I personally think that the fez hats were the best deal as we ended up getting all 5 hats for the price initially quoted for one.

We then wandered to Djemaa el-Fna and sat on the terrace of Cafe Glacier to watch the busy square. At about 4pm, the food stall vendors start to roll their carts in to the square, the carts include tables and chairs for seating, all their cooking utensils, and food for cooking. We also saw lots of unsavy tourists get trapped by monkey peddlers and snake charmers, who pester you for a tip because you didn't know you wanted to take a picture with their pet. They often put the snake/monkey on your shoulder before you can say no and then try to get a tip out of you. It's a lot like the windshield washer guys at intersections in America. Once you start to tip they hound you even more for a few extra dirhams. It's a game we avoided entirely.