Market Day

Put simply, market day is way fun. In my village, market day is on Fridays, so people start bustling around town a little earlier than usual. This also means that there are a few guys at the bar with a beer by around 9am. I usually head over around 11 or 12 - to the market, not the bar - with money and some objectives.

The first goal is obviously to buy some food for the week (or next couple days). I usually end up getting some tomatoes, onions, garlic, lettuce, and maybe some oranges or avocados if the trucks made it up from the south that week. Most of the vendors at the market have one thing that they sell, so there are several guys that sell only onions, several ladies that sell only tomatoes, ladies that sell only spices, so it's all very categorized. And the funny thing is that the market is organized so that all of the onion people are in the same spot, all of the spices are in another, etc. So it gets pretty touchy when you come across five guys selling the same thing next to each other, and you can only buy from one. I'd hate to hurt their feelings...

And most of what people sell is in pre-sorted piles that cost either 50 or 100 francs (10 or 20 cents American). So I know that I'm not getting ripped off on prices because it's all pretty standard. And the fun part is that when you buy a pile, they'll put it in a plastic bag, but they always throw in extras as a present. By the way, EVERYTHING here comes in a plastic bag.

So the market has different areas for people selling food, clothing, shoes, pots and pans, fabric, meat, livestock, hardware like nails and locks, and a section for miscellaneous crap. And for everything else besides food, there's ALWAYS bargaining to be done. You usually shoot for a little less than half of what they originally quote you for a price, and even then I never really know if I'm on par or not. I usually bring a friend along to do the talking because a) he'll know what a good price is and b) they'll get really mad at me later on if I overpay, so it's easier just to have them handle it from the start.

In the meantime, there are people wandering through the market with all sorts of delicious snacks on their head for sale. I usually buy a bag of these little fried bean balls. They're hard to describe, but just imagine if you ate falafel balls one by one, with a spicy pepper powder on them. Soooo tasty.

And of course, no market day in Cameroon is complete without alcohol. The drinkers have a separate area to drink their bil-bil (see a previous post), and on fridays the bil-bil market is HOPPING. People come from surrounding villages to hit up the regular market, so they usually brighten up their walk home by drinking a little booze before they leave. They usually try to offer me some, but I politely refuse by saying it's a taboo to drink during the day in America. That doesn't seem to make any sense to them, but they let it go and get back to their drink.

And market day in general is a really social day. Everyone goes to the market, whether they need to buy something or not, just to see who they can run into. Thus, EVERYONE runs into me (because I'm pretty hard to miss). So I make obligatory small talk and keep moving along. As my plastic sac fills up I get ready to head back toward my house, and usually find a friend headed in the same direction to walk back with me. Another Friday well spent.