Money
I’m sure that all of you know that the Moroccan currency is the Dirham, right? And luckily for all people on the US-Dollar economy, the conversion rate is just about 10 Dirham to 1 US-Dollar. Coming to Morocco, I thought, ‘whew I’m glad I’m not going someplace like Turkey where the currency rate is about 1,302,498,580909835,2.3 Turkish Lira to the dollar.’ BUT NO! I swear the Moroccans knew I had that thought; I’m convinced that there was a convention and that all 30 million decided to switch the system on me: the actual hard currency is in dirham. This is to say that a 20-dirham note has the number 20 on it, etc. However, when you purchase something, they’ll quote you a price, say 64 for a Coke. No, the price for that Coke is not about $6.40, but rather the price was quoted in Rial and not Dirham. There are 20 Rials in a Dirham and 5 Franks in a Rial. It doens’t seem too difficult to divide the price by 20 to Dirhams and then 10 to US-Dollar (200 in total). But when they tell you a price like 1023, it still takes a while to register that the number is 1023, then you have to stand there looking like a foreigner, dividing by 20 because you should be thinking in Dirhams and not US-Dollars, but then yes truly giving in because you want to really know its relative value and then finally dividing by 10 again. By the time I’m finished here in Morocco, I should be able to get my masters in abstract algebra at MIT without a calculator.