As mentioned in Friday’s post, yesterday I needed to do some shopping, particularly to get an extra case to carry my excess loot. To do this we had to go into one of the big market areas in the city of Monrovia. This place was absolute chaos! Hundreds – probably thousands – of stalls selling everything you could possibly imagine. In one of the tiny country towns we lived in when I was a child there was a store – the only store in town – that boasted of selling “everything from a needle to an anchor”, and that would be a very fitting motto for this market.
Not only is there this vast number of stalls, but they are packed closely together, with only the slimmest of walkways between them if you want to get to a stall further in to the middle. As it turned out, we were headed for a shop (permanent stall?) and had to pass through a couple of rows of temporary stalls to get there. As I squeezed through one of those tiny walkways, my shoulder brushed the adjacent stall and a whole display of shoes came crashing to the ground. Glares from the stall owner (I don’t blame him.) Ooops, sorry! Thank the Lord it was shoes, not something breakable!
At first when we reached the shop I thought Mac’s wife had brought me to the wrong place – they seemed to be selling electrical appliances. But yes, they had luggage as well. They had a case the size and type I was looking for. I’m sure the price was probably inflated because of my skin colour, but it was an amount I could manage so I walked out with it. Realized later that I should have asked if they had it in a different colour, as my trademark red flowers (for easy recognition of my case at airports) will not show up on black. I will have to find a different way of marking it as mine.
We made our way out of the market, with me being extremely careful to keep my shoulders in as we passed the shoe stall, all the while watched by an unhappy stall holder.
There are a couple of things that I have encountered in West Africa that I have not seen anywhere else, and that I think are to say the least a little strange.
The first is the normal way of taking drinking water. They have bottled water, as do all African countries, but most of the people seem to prefer taking it in these little plastic bags. I would guess there is about 300ml in each bag, and they are sold cold or sometimes frozen, often by street vendors. The idea is to simply nip the corner and suck out the water. Personally I find that water from them tastes strange (probably due to the plastic) and that they are fairly difficult to drink from – and difficult to keep if you don’t want to drink the whole bag at once. I did find, however, that a cold one makes an excellent cold pack to take the sting out of sunburn – which I managed to acquire again yesterday.
Whilst the water bags are weird, there is one West African practice that totally freaks me out. All along the roads are stalls selling petrol in glass one gallon or half-gallon bottles. Yes, you read that right. PETROL! (Gas, to any Americans who happen to be reading this.) It is considerably cheaper than buying from the petrol stations. Mac explained to me that the petrol tanker drivers will often sell off some of their load cheaply to these roadside merchants. The government here also provides vouchers for people to get petrol, and sometimes people need cash more than gas so they sell their vouchers to the merchants. Every time I see one of these stalls I think, This is a disaster just waiting to happen! The government is trying to clamp down on them, but taking a good income source from people who have very little money is never going to be an easy task.
