MW Mobile Blog

For friends, family and the random search engine visitor. This blog started as an experiment in mobile blogging from my Palm TREO 600, 700, Prē, HTC Evo, Samsung 5, Pixel 3, Pixel 6 Pro. Now it serves as a simple repository of favorite activities. Expect bad golf, good fishing, great sailing, eating, drinking, adventure travel, occasional politics and anything else I find interesting along the way including, but not limited to, any of the labels listed here...

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Shoe Saga

Updates have been delayed as I have been wrestling with some Windows problems on this machine. I am not optimistic that this computer will survive this trip.

One street of the Africa Market.

Some follow-up on the excursion through the African Market near the hotel. One of the first things we had to buy was, of course, shoes.

This was the opening of the negotiation, at one of many street side stalls. When a price could not be agreed, the sandals/shoes in question followed us through three more blocks of exploring the market. A deal was finally concluded in a dark wood-working "factory" far down a back alley of an unknown street in Dakar:



Sigrid and I each purchased sandals. When we got back to the hotel and re-caclulated the exchange rate for CFA's, we determined that we paid about the same price we wouldhave paid for comparable product at Macy's on Union Square in San Francisco. The stitching on the toe strap for my shoe broke after one days wear. - The story does not end there.


On an excursion two days later, I ran into Kamu again on the street outside the hotel. I explained that he had taken me to a street stall that sold me overpriced shoddy merchandise. He assured me that I had paid a fair price, but asked me to bring the sandals back down. In this picture I am showing him the damaged goods (Sigrid photographed withher spy scope from the window of our room). He and his friend disappeared with the sandals. I went down the block to get some food at the grocery store. When I returned, Kamu was there with the repaired sandals. It only cost me an additional 2,000 CFA for his cab fare.

2 comments:

Harlan Wallach said...

I am not satisfied with your posting. The lack of updates was disturbing to your readers. Please try to make more regular updates.

mw said...

You need to clear out your cache. There have been five postings since this one.