The vendors kept busy straightening rows and stacks of fish, and, when they saw us passing, trying to come up with ways to get us to stop and chat. Usually this involved handing us a recently-deceased sea creature to hold. In the northeast corner of the souk, there’s a small section devoted to a mind-boggling array of dried fish products. There are tiny dried shrimp smaller than a fingernail all the way up to massive sheets of ochre fish the size of my entire lower body, all hung in the sun and stacked or piled high in a barrel. Whole fish, fillets, just the heads, tails, and some ground to a powder; it’s all here. At the east end of the market, there is a fish cleaning station where rows of men stand, carefully and incredibly quickly zipping off scales and rinsing out fish innards. (This side of the market also holds butchers—goat heads or lamb brains, anyone?)
