An aMAZEing city

Fes, Morocco

The guidebook says that Fes can be a sensory overload. I think I agree with them. The medina of Fes is the largest living midevil city in the world. It's a complete labyrinth, with some of the streets only about a person and a half wide. The only modes of transport are walking, and horses and donkeys act as tucks. We saw the coca cola delivery donkey go past one day. It seems about half of Fes lives in the Medina, which is divided into two parts - Fes al bali (where we are staying) and Fes al jadid (the "new" part). Then there's the ville nouvelle built by the french, and the modern city built after the french left. There's only one problem with Fes, and that's the amount of hustlers. Every one wants to be your tour guide, or to sell you something, or to take you to the tourist resturant so they can get a kick back, or something. This makes it very hard to get good directions anywhere, and because the Medina is such a maze, it makes it very hard to find certain sights.

But we did manage to see a lot of Fes al bali. Yesterday we visited the tanneries, the stinkiest place in the city. They still tan leather the old fassion way, which involves a lot of pigeon shit, lime, and dyes. All the different chemicals for all the steps are in different pits, and the leather moves from one to the other, often sitting in one pit for up to a month. The pits remind me of a honey comb. After accedentally walking into the middle of it all, we backtracked, went up into a shop and up on their roof to get a view from the terrace. They gave us mint sprigs to try to make the smell less. We could see the guys working. Some of them were standing knee deep in the pits of chemicals.

William's Arabic teacher, Muhammed, is in Fes for the summer with his family, and so yesterday morning we walked around the Medina with him, and then yesterday evening he and his wife brought us to his mothers house for coffee. I should have known it wouldn't be just coffee. They also had mint tea, cookies, croissants, a layered flat bread and non-sweet doughnuts, in other words, a feast. We got to meet their two adorable children, and his mother and sister. It was really nice to see how a real moroccan house and family, and to actually get to talk to a woman. Fatihah, Muhammed's wife is very nice. Most of the time on the streets we see men, in the hotels it's men except for the cleaning ladies, in the resturants it's men, etc. Although we see women, being a tourist, the only people we had talked to were men. After coffee, they took us in Muhammed's brother's car to the ville nouvelle, and we walked up and down the streets and stoped at a sort of traditional arts exhibition with music.

Today we hired a driver to go see some of the cities surrounding Fes. First was volubilis, a ruined roman city. Not much of it is left standing after it was sacked for its marble and then there was an earthquake. There were still some very impressive mosaics, such as the one that displays the twelve labors of hercules. They had reconstructed the triumphal arch, and some of the basilica. The city was on a hill, and had originally been surrounded by forest, but it was all cut down to grow wheat for the empire. And today the land is still used to grow wheat.

Next we went to Moulay Idris, where the first Moroccan king is burried. The entire town used to be closed to non muslims, but now it's been opened, although they still can't visit his tomb. In addition to being king, he was a grand son or great grand son of the prophet, and is considered a saint. Five pilgramages to his tomb can replace the required trip to Mecca. Deciding not to eat lunch here, we went to Meknes, the first imperial capital of Morocco. Our driver took us to two fancy tourist resturants before we could convince him that we really just wanted to eat sausage and bread on the square. And the sausage was great! We walked into the medina, then visited the old stables, where they quartered 12,000 horses back in the day. The place is cooled by water running underneath in pipes. At the time it was a major engineering accomplishment, and the place was indeed very cool. We drove past the king's palace, and then tried to go to the tomb of Moulay Ishmael, the one tomb we were supposed to be allowed to go into, and they wouldn't let us because it was supposed to be closed for the holiday.

Our last stop was one of the potteries of Fes. Fes is famous for its pottery and mosaic. They burn olive pits to get the kilns hot enough, ad there was a ton of black smoke pouring out. Although it was really interesting seeing all of the steps involved, the place made me feel ucky. Back in the car I realized that if I had to pick working in the taneries or the potteries, I would pick the tanery. The potteries really reminded me of a sweat shop, where guys were working in dark rooms doing the same thing over and over. In the tanneries, however, it had a more communal feel, even though guys were knee deep in chemicals.

Tomorrow I plan to really get lost in the Medina here, and then we head to Rabat, the capital, and the coast. Across the river from Rabat is Sale, a former pirate capital.