The Known in an Unknown way

Saturday afternoon I decided to go to Marjane, or the Supermarket, with my friends. It was an exciting experience, because we had been doing all our shopping in the little souk stores around the Medina and we wanted to see how it was different. Marjane is probably more like a Super Target or Walmart than a simple Supermarket. It had clothes, it had books, but even so, it was mostly food. It was interesting to see what we were most excited by: getting cheetos, seeing American candy (they have imitation american candy everywhere, but it's not the same), yogurt, but most of all, cheese. You can get Happy Cow (a soft white cheese) everywhere in the souks, and sometimes even edam, but at the supermarket there was everything, camabert, bleu cheese, goat cheese, everything. Edam is also significantly cheaper than in the US, a huge ball being only $20 rather than the $40. Whole sides of aisles were dedicated to jam. It kind of reminded me of Sweden just in that the prices looked similar (although a bit lower). It felt like a normal supermarket in someways, in other ways totally unfamiliar.
The Marjane is also one of the only places you can buy alcohol. It was interesting looking in that area, since technically Muslims aren't supposed to drink alcohol. However, everyone in that area, except for me and my friends, were Moroccan men (not a single woman).
When I talked to my parents about what they buy in the supermarket vs. in the souk, it was interesting. I first thought that they would buy most of their non-perishibles at the supermarket and their fresh goods at the souk, which was partly the case. However, they usually bought meat at the supermarket as well as things that were on sale. I think that tomatoes are cheaper at the supermarket at well, although avocados were cheaper in the souk. They also said that some things, like diapers, were actually cheaper to buy at little specialty shops. In my own experience, you really couldn't tell what would be cheaper in the souk or not. Some candies were significantly cheaper at the supermarket, other were not... it might be that imported stuff is cheaper at supermarkets....