To market, to market

Mom and I decided to make a whirlwind trip to market this morning to look for curtain cloth. Now, it might help to realise that there are lots of different kinds of shoppers in the world. There are the type who go to every single store and look at every single product before deciding that nothing’s good enough. Then there are the type who know exactly what they want but still have to look through every product to find it. There are picky people and laid back people.I’m no interior decorator. Curtains are to cover the windows, not to show off my chic style and taste. Then again, I have to look at them sometime, and guests may notice them, so I certainly don’t want to come across as dull or grubby. But I’m cheap and simple. I don’t go for elegant and expensive, or even elegant and cheap. Mom said at one point, “You’ll have to think about whether your blankets and bedspread will match the curtains.” I just laughed. Why bother matching? Besides, our Nigerian blanket is black and gray, and our bedspread (hand-delivered from China) is cream and gold, so already we’re going for an eclectic motif.

To get to the curtain places, it’s easiest to park on the main downtown street, Ahmadu Bello Way, and walk through a bit of market. It’s muddy. It’s crowded. There are vendors with umbrellas and wooden stalls selling raw meat, fish, vegetables, and plastic doodads. It smells…well…different. Later in the day they’ll have live chickens down there, tied by the legs and clucking up a storm. We passed through all the muck and started to the shops. Not too many shops were open on our way down the strip, as it was just 9 o’clock. But we looked anyway. We got all the way down to the very end and finally stopped in a store that sold wrapper material. After much debate, Mom and I decided this would be simpler than buying curtain material (and probably cheaper). So we started hunting in that shop for cloth.

We already have curtains in our living room, which we’ll take over to our new place. The problem is that they’re sheer and don’t provide a whole lot of privacy. So we decided to get some thicker material and do a double-layer. The sheers can be up all the time, and we can close the thicker drapes when it gets dark. We found a lovely slate blue shada (with a sort of shimmery watermark), which. I think will be splendid. For our bedroom, I found some pink-and-green cloth I really liked. It’s your typical Nigerian wax (I’ll just have to show you what I mean), nothing special. But it’s bright and cheerful, and I’m not very picky. Simple. The shopkeeper wanted to charge us a lot for our purchase of 16 yards, but Mom asked him if he couldn’t sell it to us for less since we were buying so much. He was reluctant, and I thought for sure he’d say no, and that would be the end. But he saw the tape measure around Mom’s neck and asked if she were a tailor. Mom answered, “Not professionally, but I certainly have done a lot of sewing!” And the owner relented, saying he sold to tailors “wholesale.” Cool! So we got our two pieces of cloth and were outta there.

We stopped at a store two doors down to get some lining material, just a thin solid colour. We found a darling light blue for the living room drapes and an off-white for the bedroom curtains. We got the price reduced by 8 cents a yard, and since we were getting 16 yards, the owner knocked off a whole N40 ($0.31) off the total for us! I was satisfied with our purchases and ready to help Mom find something she liked. Mom was amazed. I’m the kind of shopper who goes into a store with an open mind, sees something she likes, makes sure it’s within budget, and buys it.

Well, Mom is another kind of shopper altogether. I wouldn’t call her picky, but she definitely has particular ideas about what she wants-which is great as long as that sort of thing is available. On our way back along the strip of shops, we stopped in a few stores, but Mom couldn’t find anything she liked for her bedroom (the curtains of which are in rather sad shape). At our very last stop before we headed back to the car, we found some curtain cloth for Luke’s room. It was cute, the right size, and a good price to boot. So she bought 2 yards (it was 90″ long!), and we were off. Back through the muck, back past the vendors hawking their wares, back past the beggars coming up to us with their plastic bowls extended and heaping blessings upon us in Hausa, back to the main street. In an hour-and-a-half, we’d fulfilled most of our mission. Another successful trip to market!