Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Fez, Morocco. How does one explain Fez? It would make perfect sense if you had grown up in a medieval souk, but someone who grew up in the hills of southern Indiana is at a distinct disadvantage to tackle that definition. The Riad al Pacha is right inside one of the outer walls that circle the medina. In Morocco the three main areas to visit are the Ville Nouvelle (built by the French), the Fez el Djedid (Fez the New, built in 1273 by the Merenid dynasty), and Fez el Bali (Fez the Old, founded in 808 by Moulay Idriss II, the son of Morocco’s founder, Moulay Idriss I). The medina itself is in the Fez el Bali so I was in a perfect location to just step outside the Riad, cross the dusty parking lot, and enter one of the endless side streets. The more traditional approach would be to enter through one of the famous babs, or gates, the ring the walls.
Out of the week and a half I was away this was the only day that was really set aside for sight-seeing, so I was really excited about entering the medina. Once you are inside the medina you are faced with a bewildering and seemingly endless series of narrow streets, and I’m using the word streets in the most inappropriate sense of the word. With the exception of the occasional square where the streets magically and illogically come together to open up and allow the sunshine in, you are usually walking through a series of shady narrow corridors with alleys jutting off left and right at random. The average street is only around six feet wide (if that). In addition, there are over a thousand derbs (dead-end alleys) in the medina so the question is not whether or not you might get lost but rather when. With me it took about five minutes. In a way it was sort of liberating. There was no point really concentrating on which turn you had taken off what street because it was completely impossible to make sense of any of it unless you had grown up here. There weren’t many street signs, and if there were they were in Arabic or occasionally in French. The streets are too narrow for cars and especially for trucks so the only means of conveyance are donkey and horses, which means that in addition to having to watch out for a myriad of shop-keepers, religious scholars, women shopping for their daily household needs, children and tourists, you also have to look out for pack animals loaded down with so many goods that they took up the width of the entire derb. I’m proud to report that I was only knocked over by donkeys a couple times, which means that I was paying attention more than usual.
I actually found walking through the medina to be wonderful. The shops included butchers, every conceivable type of vegetable, electronics, call centers, e-cafes (which, again, proves my point that the only place you can’t find a Internet café is Burlington), pastries (I was hoping to get to taste pastilla, which is supposed to be remarkably sweet pastry made with pigeon meat, but it didn’t work out), tanneries, metal works, ceramics, fabrics, etc. – all sharing space with mosques and religious schools. For the most part people left me alone. One elderly shop keeper did yell at me for taking a picture of a boy cutting fish in his shop. I can’t blame him, and it’s just one of the chances you take – even when you’re trying to be inconspicuous. One teenage boy and one little girl of around seven followed me for about ten minutes a piece trying to forge a relationship that would lead to them being my unofficial guides. As in India, if you happen to just make eye contact the negotiations have begun. I try to maintain a look somewhere between total distain and absolute rage, hoping that will scare folks off and it generally works – of course, it’s the look that my friends tell me I’ve flashed at faculty senate meetings for years.
One of the places that I wanted to see in the medina was the Terrasse des Tanneurs, the medieval tanneries which are still producing leather goods today. I kept walking around the labyrinth of streets with quite finding it so I stopped back in a little shop for a Sprite and asked the shop keeper for directions. He fetched his son, Mohammed, and had him walk me to the tanneries, for which I gave him ten dirhams. As with most of the shops, as soon as you walk in one of the salesmen latch on to you and you get the official tour with the understanding that he’ll get paid for it somehow. You walk up winding steps to look down into the ancient dyeing vats where the sheep, goat, cow and camel skins are prepared and dyed. The skins are placed successively in saline solution, lime, pigeon droppings, and then a number of natural dyes – poppies for red, saffron for yellow, and mint for green. The barefoot workers pick up the skins with their feet and work them (sort of like crushing grapes for wine, I suppose) before the skins are laid out to dry in the sun. Today they were dyeing red and the skins drying in the sun were yellow. The negotiations for a couple goods were a grand opera of good cop/bad cop and a period when I was supposed to meet the salesman on the upper balcony for a bribe so that he could face his “angry” boss to explain the incredible “deal” I had just received. As is always the case, I’m sure I was ripped off magnificently, but I don’t worry about these things – as an Indian taxi driver told me once when haggling, “But you’re so big and I’m so small,” meaning that as an American I was “rich” and he was poor. One never knows where the great wheel of life will stop spinning and what life you’ll end up with, and as Americans we skip along so luckily it’s hard for me to get too angry for being ripped off a little (although I still get really angry at times when negotiating, so don’t take the philosophical spin too seriously). In the end, I’ll usually end up losing more sleep over giving up too many players in a fantasy baseball trade.
Earlier, when I was thinking about plunging alone into the chaos of the medina I considered calling Samil, the tour guide who picked me up the first night. I normally steer clear of tour guides like the plague, but even the tour books say that one of the few good times to hire a tour guide is when facing the medina at Fez. However, tour guides also tend to spend a lot of time taking you to shops where they get a commission, so I ended up not doing it. After visiting the tanneries I was sitting in the shade trying to cool off when I saw two Italian women, Laura Carraro and Viola Bollalia, who I had talked to the night before over dinner at the Riad. As I popped out to say hello I suddenly heard, “Ah, Mr. Gary.” It was Samil, and he was taking them on a tour. I figured if it was their fourth trip to Morocco and they were hiring Samil I might as well just give in, and I joined the tour. Of course, typically, he took us to a rug shop and then about four other shops where it was obvious he had deals. At one point I told him that the usual commission for tour guides and taxi drivers in India to take tourists to prearranged shops was between 15-20% and wanted to know what it was here. He admitted 5%, although I suspect it’s higher. Even so, he was an invaluable guide to the medina and helped me find the university and gave me directions for getting back to the Riad – not to mention all his help the first night, so I won’t begrudge him a few (well, a lot more than a few) dirhams.
At the end of the day I was finally able to get to Kairaouine University, which is the west’s oldest university. It’s still in existence although it only has a few hundred religious students. You can’t get too far inside, but it does have a lovely and ornate central plaza. There is also a mosque there and prayers were going on just as I was let into the courtyard, which was a little unsettling. Several Muslims made their way through the little crowd of French tourists and went to the tiny central fountain to cleanse themselves physically and more importantly spiritually before stepping into another area for prayers. The area for prayer was separate from the central courtyard by only a small wall and what looked like a dry moat. Non-Muslims are not allowed into mosques, generally, although I did get to enter a huge mosque in Amman one time. I think there is only one mosque in all of Morocco (I think in Casablanca) that allows non-Muslims to enter, so it was a unique experience to be able to watch the Muslims prostrate themselves during prayer.
Abdul just stopped by to wish me a safe trip. He apologized that he would not be able to deliver my 3:00 a.m. wake-up call but assured me that someone would. Mohammed is coming to pick me up at 4:00, and then my flight from Fez to Casablanca takes off at 6:00. By some miracle my luggage actually showed up at the Fez airport on Monday night, I wonder what the odds are that my luggage will get lost again on the trip home?
Fez, Morocco. How does one explain Fez? It would make perfect sense if you had grown up in a medieval souk, but someone who grew up in the hills of southern Indiana is at a distinct disadvantage to tackle that definition. The Riad al Pacha is right inside one of the outer walls that circle the medina. In Morocco the three main areas to visit are the Ville Nouvelle (built by the French), the Fez el Djedid (Fez the New, built in 1273 by the Merenid dynasty), and Fez el Bali (Fez the Old, founded in 808 by Moulay Idriss II, the son of Morocco’s founder, Moulay Idriss I). The medina itself is in the Fez el Bali so I was in a perfect location to just step outside the Riad, cross the dusty parking lot, and enter one of the endless side streets. The more traditional approach would be to enter through one of the famous babs, or gates, the ring the walls.
Out of the week and a half I was away this was the only day that was really set aside for sight-seeing, so I was really excited about entering the medina. Once you are inside the medina you are faced with a bewildering and seemingly endless series of narrow streets, and I’m using the word streets in the most inappropriate sense of the word. With the exception of the occasional square where the streets magically and illogically come together to open up and allow the sunshine in, you are usually walking through a series of shady narrow corridors with alleys jutting off left and right at random. The average street is only around six feet wide (if that). In addition, there are over a thousand derbs (dead-end alleys) in the medina so the question is not whether or not you might get lost but rather when. With me it took about five minutes. In a way it was sort of liberating. There was no point really concentrating on which turn you had taken off what street because it was completely impossible to make sense of any of it unless you had grown up here. There weren’t many street signs, and if there were they were in Arabic or occasionally in French. The streets are too narrow for cars and especially for trucks so the only means of conveyance are donkey and horses, which means that in addition to having to watch out for a myriad of shop-keepers, religious scholars, women shopping for their daily household needs, children and tourists, you also have to look out for pack animals loaded down with so many goods that they took up the width of the entire derb. I’m proud to report that I was only knocked over by donkeys a couple times, which means that I was paying attention more than usual.
I actually found walking through the medina to be wonderful. The shops included butchers, every conceivable type of vegetable, electronics, call centers, e-cafes (which, again, proves my point that the only place you can’t find a Internet café is Burlington), pastries (I was hoping to get to taste pastilla, which is supposed to be remarkably sweet pastry made with pigeon meat, but it didn’t work out), tanneries, metal works, ceramics, fabrics, etc. – all sharing space with mosques and religious schools. For the most part people left me alone. One elderly shop keeper did yell at me for taking a picture of a boy cutting fish in his shop. I can’t blame him, and it’s just one of the chances you take – even when you’re trying to be inconspicuous. One teenage boy and one little girl of around seven followed me for about ten minutes a piece trying to forge a relationship that would lead to them being my unofficial guides. As in India, if you happen to just make eye contact the negotiations have begun. I try to maintain a look somewhere between total distain and absolute rage, hoping that will scare folks off and it generally works – of course, it’s the look that my friends tell me I’ve flashed at faculty senate meetings for years.
One of the places that I wanted to see in the medina was the Terrasse des Tanneurs, the medieval tanneries which are still producing leather goods today. I kept walking around the labyrinth of streets with quite finding it so I stopped back in a little shop for a Sprite and asked the shop keeper for directions. He fetched his son, Mohammed, and had him walk me to the tanneries, for which I gave him ten dirhams. As with most of the shops, as soon as you walk in one of the salesmen latch on to you and you get the official tour with the understanding that he’ll get paid for it somehow. You walk up winding steps to look down into the ancient dyeing vats where the sheep, goat, cow and camel skins are prepared and dyed. The skins are placed successively in saline solution, lime, pigeon droppings, and then a number of natural dyes – poppies for red, saffron for yellow, and mint for green. The barefoot workers pick up the skins with their feet and work them (sort of like crushing grapes for wine, I suppose) before the skins are laid out to dry in the sun. Today they were dyeing red and the skins drying in the sun were yellow. The negotiations for a couple goods were a grand opera of good cop/bad cop and a period when I was supposed to meet the salesman on the upper balcony for a bribe so that he could face his “angry” boss to explain the incredible “deal” I had just received. As is always the case, I’m sure I was ripped off magnificently, but I don’t worry about these things – as an Indian taxi driver told me once when haggling, “But you’re so big and I’m so small,” meaning that as an American I was “rich” and he was poor. One never knows where the great wheel of life will stop spinning and what life you’ll end up with, and as Americans we skip along so luckily it’s hard for me to get too angry for being ripped off a little (although I still get really angry at times when negotiating, so don’t take the philosophical spin too seriously). In the end, I’ll usually end up losing more sleep over giving up too many players in a fantasy baseball trade.
Earlier, when I was thinking about plunging alone into the chaos of the medina I considered calling Samil, the tour guide who picked me up the first night. I normally steer clear of tour guides like the plague, but even the tour books say that one of the few good times to hire a tour guide is when facing the medina at Fez. However, tour guides also tend to spend a lot of time taking you to shops where they get a commission, so I ended up not doing it. After visiting the tanneries I was sitting in the shade trying to cool off when I saw two Italian women, Laura Carraro and Viola Bollalia, who I had talked to the night before over dinner at the Riad. As I popped out to say hello I suddenly heard, “Ah, Mr. Gary.” It was Samil, and he was taking them on a tour. I figured if it was their fourth trip to Morocco and they were hiring Samil I might as well just give in, and I joined the tour. Of course, typically, he took us to a rug shop and then about four other shops where it was obvious he had deals. At one point I told him that the usual commission for tour guides and taxi drivers in India to take tourists to prearranged shops was between 15-20% and wanted to know what it was here. He admitted 5%, although I suspect it’s higher. Even so, he was an invaluable guide to the medina and helped me find the university and gave me directions for getting back to the Riad – not to mention all his help the first night, so I won’t begrudge him a few (well, a lot more than a few) dirhams.
At the end of the day I was finally able to get to Kairaouine University, which is the west’s oldest university. It’s still in existence although it only has a few hundred religious students. You can’t get too far inside, but it does have a lovely and ornate central plaza. There is also a mosque there and prayers were going on just as I was let into the courtyard, which was a little unsettling. Several Muslims made their way through the little crowd of French tourists and went to the tiny central fountain to cleanse themselves physically and more importantly spiritually before stepping into another area for prayers. The area for prayer was separate from the central courtyard by only a small wall and what looked like a dry moat. Non-Muslims are not allowed into mosques, generally, although I did get to enter a huge mosque in Amman one time. I think there is only one mosque in all of Morocco (I think in Casablanca) that allows non-Muslims to enter, so it was a unique experience to be able to watch the Muslims prostrate themselves during prayer.
Abdul just stopped by to wish me a safe trip. He apologized that he would not be able to deliver my 3:00 a.m. wake-up call but assured me that someone would. Mohammed is coming to pick me up at 4:00, and then my flight from Fez to Casablanca takes off at 6:00. By some miracle my luggage actually showed up at the Fez airport on Monday night, I wonder what the odds are that my luggage will get lost again on the trip home?
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