Fes I

Monday, February 28, 2011

After following assistance from many people in Chefchaouen, we arrived at the bus station in time to take the bus to Fes. The four-hour ride was lovely and rural, with a half-hour stop at a café and WC. There we picked up bananas and oranges for lunch. I spent most of the trip knitting and gazing out the windows. Dave’s been reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which takes place in Spain.

In Fes we decided to take a taxi in to the medina. This was fortunate as it was pretty far. But in trying to lose the many men who wanted to help us get to their hotels, we lost our way and did a loop of one part of the medina. We finally found it and realized when we saw the business card that one of those guys has been showing us the card for the hotel and could have helped us if we’d paid closer attention. Sigh.

We have a small room that barely fits a double bed, two twin beds, and a fully enclosed bathroom – enclosed like a translucent shower stall with a sliding door. It's brighter pink in real life than in this picture.

It’s not the most private or most odor-free bathroom we've ever seen. The beds were pretty uncomfortable and we didn't sleep well at all. But it’s quiet and we enjoyed sitting up on the sunny terrace for breakfast. This was coffee, french bread, pastry bread made in the terrace kitchen, honey, butter, and my own avocado.

We ate a late lunch at a nice little place and had a huge pile of cookie veggies: a vegetable tajine. (A tajine is steamed vegetables with or without meat served in a clay pot with a conical lid.) It was delicious. Later we tried a variety of cookies, all of which had a lot of sesame. We didn’t find cookies with chocolate, but we did see pastry bars with chocolate frosting. So far we’ve passed on them.

This is the medina during the day. It's pretty active and can be crowded, especially when a mule or cart is being pushed through. (There are no motorized vehicles in the walled city.)

We peaked into the old library, but as non-Muslims we couldn't get very far.

Fountains are an important feature of Moroccan architecture. These are in the medina around the mosque.

We couldn't enter the mosque, but Dave did by accident (he was attracted to the fountain in the middle) and was chased out! This is one of many entrances to the mosque.

It took us a couple of days before we realized that there were separate buildings in the medina -- that everything wasn't connected. Every building seems connected because it feels as if you're walking in a corridor. Below is a random doorway.