Market trip

I had two days off, so on Tuesday, some of my galley team members decided to go to the market. On the way out of the gate, we met a day worker named Caleb who had the rest of the day off and was kind enough to accompany us. Here are a couple of pictures that I took during our trip:



The Grand Market in Lomé sells just about everything: vegetables, shoes, fabric, handbags, African clothes, second-hand Western style clothes, hair weaves, bathroom products, children's toys, men's belts. It actually reminds me a lot of the markets in Korea-- save for the massive amounts of sand and the naked babies. No Korean naked babies. There are no fixed prices at the market, and the vendors will automatically triple or quadruple the normal price when they see that you're white. I've never been a big fan of bargaining even in Korea, as I always feel I'm being slightly cheated one way or another, so it was nice to have Caleb with us who knew the actual price, as opposed to the quoted Yovo price (white person price).

Things are generally organized to different sections in the market by category-- and I use the words "organized" and "category" quite loosely. It's nice, in the sense that you can find everything you could possibly want-- our group ended up buying some small African souvenir statues, Converse shoes, African fabric, and a leather bag in one go-- but I imagine it must take forever to locate something specific when you actually need something, as the roads have no signs or names and everything basically looks the same. If you don't know where you're going, you can end up just walking around in circles for a few hours. I keep hearing the phrase "Africa time" on the ship, and I'm now starting to see why people run on a slower time schedule here-- the way that everything is set up, even something as simple as a "quick" trip to the market is rendered impossible.