Our last day.....I think we have an alcohol problem.....there is none left!!!

We were up up quite late this morning, which is hardly surprising considering the amount of booze we drank last night, and I admit that my head is a bit delicate today. Still things need to be done, and attentions turned to more admin related adventures where we discovered just how much we owed the riad. We have charged lots of things to the room, so when the bill came it was no surprise it was 6,000 dirhams, which is abut £450. This is not bad considering the amount we have dined in and all the drinks we have had here before going out into the city.It also included the tourist tax and the expensive trip into the Atlas Mountains too, so i am not too shocked.

 The breakdown of our bill makes for a sorry tale though - we drank 24 bottles of Casablanca and 4 bottles of wine. This excludes the drinks we have been having when we have been out too - oh dear!!

As it happens, rather embarrassingly, the owner of the hotel we are staying at has actually told us that we have pretty much drunk them dry they have no wine left for your meal tonight, and so we have had to go to the local supermarket and buy a bottle for our last meal. Also, we ordered a couple of Casablanca beers and Shareef sheepishly admitted that these were the last two beers the riad had as well. Indeed, I heard him tell a French couple, who are staying here and saw us quaffing our nice beer on the roof terrace, that they would like that too, only to be told they couldn't. I can't help it, but that beer tasted just that little bit sweeter at that moment.....

Anyway with all the admin sorted out, we headed into the souks for some present shopping and to do a bit of haggling. It turns out Sarah is a bit of a whizz at this as she works out the price she is prepared to pay, and if they are not prepared to sell at that price then she walks off....I was most impressed with her skills at this and I don't think I did nearly as well with my haggling over fridge magnets - I guess there isn't much of a mark up on those.

The shoe souk - no Jimmy Choos here though

the assortment of musical instruments souk

The olives and spices souk gave off a wonderful aroma

One thing that Sarah and I decided was that to remember Morocco it would be quite nice to own a tagine. I know it is bulky, but we had space in our cases so we decided to haggle for it. I used the souk owners as a guide for how much to pay for a tagine and they started out at 170 dirham (about £13) but with a bit of me ignoring him he came down to 100 dirham (£8). It just so happens that outside our riad there is a shop that sells them. So armed with this pricing information, I wandered back there to buy from them (partly because I didn't want to carry a heavy tagine all the way from the souks back to the riad).

The earthenware souk

I was armed and ready for the storekeeps patois, but had to admit that the wind was taken out of my sails when he told me the tagine I was looking at in the souks would cost me 20 dirham (£1.50). At that point I thought "f*** it, I will push the boat out" and bought an even nicer tagine than I was originally looking for, and paid him the princely sum of 50 dirham for it (under £4).

Lanterns aplenty here.....

Textiles are the order of the day in this souk....

The moral of all this is that you have to haggle, the price they are saying is not the price at all. I suppose being in Egypt and Jordan we have become a bit acclimatised to this, but i can't stress enough the need to haggle. Work out a price you want to pay for something and stick to it. Sarah was actually going in at a 1/4 of the price they were asking and more often than not she was getting it for that price. It is not conning them at all, they expect that people will go in low and so they set their initial price high and it all works its way down from there....

Well that is pretty much all we have time for now, tomorrow we will be home and I will do my final blog post summarising the things I have learnt from this trip.