Dramatrekking: "YOU HAVE TO GO TO FEZ."

As I pack to leave for Marrakesh tomorrow, I think I should probably write about my last trip, to Fez, first. I should begin by saying that (or thanking, rather) Ryan McKittrick, my boss as the literary intern at A.R.T./my soon to be professor told me literally about twenty times before I left Boston, "Sara, you HAVE TO GO TO FEZ AND MARRAKESH!!!" in this really intense voice with a scary look in his eye. So since I was worried that he would never speak to me again/fail me in class if I didn't go, I arranged to spend a weekend there with Hannah, the other intern at AMIDEAST.

Ok, I should back up. When I arrived in Morocco and met with Joe, the country director for AMIDEAST, I was worried I might have too much free time on my hands outside of French lessons. Luckily, he really needed another intern for the summer. So I'll write more about that later, but there are two others, Hannah and Michael. Hannah is a rising junior religion major at Princeton from Durham, NC, and Michael is a rising senior anthropology/Arabic major at Bard. We all get along pretty well, and Michael actually studied abroad last summer in Fez and last fall semester at AMIDEAST in Rabat, and his Moroccan Arabic is pretty good. Hannah's French is about on par with mine.

So the three of us went to Fez together, Hannah and I sharing a hotel room and doing more stuff together, Michael staying with friends and doing some fieldwork and research. Fez is HOT this time of year...well over 100 degrees F, but we were lucky that it rained the first night we were there and cooled off our first day a bit. We stayed at an Ibis Hotel, which is always right next to the train station and easy to find...and more importantly, has AIR CONDITIONING. Hannah and I were all kinds of excited about that. It was the first time I really slept well in awhile, since Rabat had a really hot week before I left.

Our first night there Hannah and I went to this restaurant in my trusty Lonely Planet guide

book, Le Kasbah in the medina. I thought it might be hard to find but it was literally right there when we went in the main gate to the Medina, Bab Bou Jeloud. It had a great view and good food at decent prices, but what was funny was how we were surrounded entirely by tourists...and I actually saw a couple with their own copy of Lonely Planet. That's one of the things that struck me immediately about Fez, the tourism atmosphere. There isn't much of that in Rabat, so in a way I felt less out of place in Fez.

View from our restaurant the first night, Bab Bou Jeloud

Saturday morning at 9am we met our tourguide Driss at the hotel and spent the next four hours or so with him. The medina (old city/market area) in Fez is a maze, and it's also where most of the city's sights are, so if you want to be able to find them you really need to get a guide. With Driss we went to the palace first, where we saw the most amazing and beautiful gates. It was close to the Mellah, or Jewish quarter. Fez used to have huge Jewish population, but now there are only about 250 families there. After walking through the Mellah, we made our way over to the Medina.

I don't think I can fully recount everything we saw there in the next three hours. But we were able to see the inside of a mosque (non-Muslims are banned from entering most mosques in

Morocco), saw a man painstakingly hammering away an intricate design on a brass plate, men weaving fabric, and my favorite part, the tanneries. It was really amazing to watch how these men treated and died leather the same way their ancestors had hundreds of years ago. 850 families share the same space in the medina, which is hard to imagine. All the dyes they use are completely natural. We also learned about the different types of leather and succumbed to buying some products ourselves. I bargained two purses down to almost half what they started at my second day there (and thank goodness Moroccan friends later told me that was a decent price).

Fez is also known for it's blue on white pottery (sometimes with other colors, but traditionally without). This is because blue is the color of Fez. Green is the color of the prophet Mohammed, and that's why the Bab Bou Jeloud is blue on one side and green on the other. Fez pottery is absolutely gorgeous, in my opinion. I can't tell you how much I wanted to buy more, but it's pretty heavy and I don't have enough room in my suitcases. It's not terribly expensive, either. I got two small beautiful bowls as gifts for people, at 20 dirhams each...about $2.50 each. Morocco in general is mind blowingly inexpensive for me...a 10 minute taxi ride to AMIDEAST from the apartment in Rabat costs about 12 dirhams or $1.50, less than a one way ride on the T in Boston!

Hannah and I had lunch with Michael at this great ex-pat hang out place, Cafe Clock, but I'm afraid we weren't the best lunch partners, we were so exhausted from the day we could barely make conversation. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening either indoors in the air conditioning or by the pool, going out only to get something to eat quickly.

The next day Hannah and I ventured on our own to see the Jewish cemetery and synagogue. After leaving the cemetery we were plagued by this hustler we couldn't seem to lose (I mentioned him in my last post), but it was worth putting up with him bugging us on the five minute walk to the synagogue once we got there. Michael's guide book that he loaned us mentioned a "very enthusiastic caretaker" who is happy to show you around the Ibn Danan Synagogue, and that was exactly what we found. He was the cutest little man, and so sweet. He showed us around the fairly recently restored small synagogue, which was originally built in the seventeenth century. He spoke to us in French, and upon discovery that we were Jewish exclaimed, "Shalom!" The walls were covered with photos of other synagogues around Morocco, and he showed all of them to us, along with the torah in the ark and the rather rank and green looking mikva.

It was a good trip, and as I began to read my guidebook on the way back, I got even more excited for Marrakesh. So Ryan McKittrick, if you're reading this...thank you!

In case you didn't see my facebook photo album, here are a few other favorite photos: