Money in Morocco
One thing that drives me crazy is Moroccan currency. I suppose we are used to it now, but it has taken a lot of getting used to. The strange thing is that you would never notice how 
bizarre the system is unless you speak Arabic! As you may know, the official currency of Morocco is the dirham (MAD). 1 MAD is about 0.10 USD right now, and has been for our year in Morocco. A tourist could easily come to Morocco, visit some big cities and leave thinking that Moroccans use the dirham, ask for prices in dirhams, and conduct all business in dirhams, except that taxi drivers will gladly accept euros. So you can imagine our surprise when we tried to purchase vegetables and we were told the price was 40 rials!
Ok so that’s not exactly how we found out about rials, but it sure makes for a better story. It actually happened in our language class. Our teacher told us about it, and we couldn’t believe her. “People don’t actually use this system?” we asked. “Uhhh, yeah guys, they do,” she answered.
As it turns out, 1 dirham also equals 20 rials. Ok not so bad. We can handle that. Just knock off a zero and divide by two. So 400 rials = 20 dirhams. Easy to do in your head while speaking a foreign language, right? And then someone asks for 2,750 rials. Ahh!
But wait, it gets better. Some people also use the franc. It turns out, 1 dirham also equals 100 francs! Now fortunately these conversions are all fixed rates. It never changes so that somedays a dirham equals 98 francs and 21 rials…because francs and rials don’t actually exist! Sure some Arab nations use the rial and some former French colonies currently use the franc as their currency, but not Morocco. There is no separate set of coins and bills circulating through Morocco with those names on them. Everything says dirham.
If only that was where it ended. Would you like to purchase something worth more than 1,000 USD? Well then, let’s talk santim. Santim is the Arabic word for cents. Every dirham is made up of 100 cents, and when you want to buy a car, a house, or a donkey you use santim. Why? …I have no idea…
I can shed some light on the rials and francs. After asking around, I got the impression that beyond Morocco’s past as a French colony and that must have something to do with the Franc, no one really knew why. That didn’t satisfy my need to know, so I turned to the internet (thank you Wikipedia!).
It turns out that Morocco, as I suspected, formerly used the rial as their official currency. Then in 1912 it switched to the franc. 1960 it switched to the dirham, and there were 14 years when the two were both used in Morocco, and the exchange rate was…anyone? 100 francs to 1 dirham! Then again, this is all from Wikipedia, and I may have typed that entry myself just so it would all make sense.
But why do they switch to santim when talking about expensive things? And why do 20 rials = 1 dirham? I have no idea. The only time that rials and dirhams were used at the same time seems to be when 1 rial was equal to 10 dirhams…so it beats me.
