"Soyez les Bienvenus"

Inside the médina in Meknes

A month since my last post, and to my credit its been because I've been on the moooove. The first weekend in February I went skiing again in the Alps, then two days after getting back it was the February holidays and I had bought tickets to go to Morocco with my friends Amy and Alberto from Toulouse.

Morocco is a place I had wanted to visit for some time. For me going Morocoo was exotic and just the name conjured up images of brightly colored emboridered fabrics, tiles, fountains, mint tea and deserts. Also, it was the home country of so many North Africains, or pieds-noirs, who live in France, flouting the typical and much protected "French" culture with their head scarves, arabic-tinged French, darker skin, and markets mannerisms that refuse to fit into the quiet and closed French mold. So, in a mixture of ambition and nativité I booked a week in Moroco and agreed to meet Emma and Helen (my American girlfriends from studying aborad who are also assistants in France) in Budapest for the second week. 

One of the babs in Meknes

In Morocco we split our time between Fez (a larger city) and Meknes (a smaller town) with two daytrips to villages of Sefrou and Moulay Idriss. The best way I think to describe a place like Morocoo is a Kerouacian-like stream of consciousness, as to put a place such as that into any kind of Cartesian order as an outsider would be contrived and nearly impossible. For me the best part of Morocco was the ambiance, people watching, and wandering around in the médina - or old city center. As far as monuments go, the mosques are closed to non-muslims, and the royal palaces tthe majority of all the cities and towns are closed to everyone but the King. We did however get to go into a few beautiful mausomeums and medreas or coranic schools.

We landed in Fez and took a cab to the city center. At the airport we were ushered into an old Mercedes by a man wearing basically a fleece snuggie with a pointed hood (think KKK meets Harry Potter) which I would later recognize as requisite tenue for all men, and gives you the impression you're at some wizarding convention. We bargained for the price as we had been instructed to do, reluctantly threw our luggage on top of the car, and were off into the setting sun. It wasn't quite the desert I was expecting, more rocky and hilly with tons of olive trees everywhere, almost like Southern Spain. The layout or Morocco is very medieval in the sense that the villages and cities end very suddenly and you find yourself in the countryside with fields and farms immediately after. From a high point in the towns you can clearly see the end of urbanism and are surrounded on all sides by rolling green hills.

Main square in Meknes

All the cities are centered around a médina which is a labyrnth of winding streets and alleys within old ramparts accessible through keyhold shaped "doors" or babs spaced throughout, usually with roads for cars and other commere expanding out from this center, yet still not in any kind of mappable order. Near the bigger main cities there is usually a nouvelle ville, or new city with bars and restaurants that are more lax about Muslim customs. 

The cab spit us out at one of the several Aladdin-like babs to the médina, since cars cannot pass through the tiny streets. It being impossible to pass as anything but a tourist (but at least French and not American tourists) we were immediately assailed by patrons of restaurants, hostels, stores, everyone is trying to entice you into their restraunt shoving a menu under your nose, calling you friend, offering up indiscriminating « bonjours » « hellos » and « holas » trying to guess your nationality. We plopped ourselves in the first hostel with running water we found.

Stalls at the food market in Meknes

The next day we had our introduction to the 1,300 year old médina. It's buzzing with activity in every cubit of air. It is an impossible labrynth resonating with the sound of life. Kids shreiking kicking an empty water bottle off walls that are 3 feet apart, men shouting « balak balak » as they push handcrafted pushcarts chock full of everything from blood oranges to bread to sardines jockeying with donkeys and pedestrians. Everyfew meters are intricately carved cedar doors set into dizzying mosiacs of colored tiles.  Everyone seems to be doing something: setting up or breaking down endless displays - handmade leather sandals next to knock off Nikes, platters or almonds and dates, barrels of olives, heaping piles of pastries dripping with honey,  shuttling trays of steaming mint tea from one boutique to the next, There are women and men squatting in every available space bundling mint, herbs and other greens I've neve seen before.  Veiled women order from sacs overflowing with couscous, rice, and other grains, men dole out change in scale encrusted hands over crates filled with silvery sardines surrounded by a gaggle of alley cats. People stop around pushcarts laden with steaming pots to eat a bowl of snails standing up, or drink a bowl of hot milk. A call to prayer sounds like a bomb drill at first to untrained ears. Then the giant key-shaped doors open and you catch a glimpse inside the unassuming facades that open into tiled courtyards, the sound of running water, green the color of life, shoes are taken off at the door, someone washing themself at the fountain in the middle of the courtyard. Take another turn and you are among the ironworkers or ferroviaires with loud banging and sparks flying everywhere, another and the stench tells you youre in the tanneries district where they use pigeon droppings and ammonia to clean the raw leather, take another turn and webs of string criss-cross he length of the street. You are in the couturier district where kids with trained hands stand in the street holding colored strings making mechanical patterns in the air while their counterparts, operating out of tiny windowless workshops with doors ajar weave the fabrics.  

Crowded street in Meknes

What I found the most mesmerizing was how every meter was occupied, the spaced people work out of could be literally a single square meter, and if it is then that 's where you go to work for the day, everyday, probably for your entire life.

It is such a consumer society but the rapport is completely different than that in the US or Europe. It is so much more social, loud, unconfined. There are always tons of people in the streets, men women and lots of children – so much life. I couldn't stop thinking that all the North Africans who immigrate to France must have such a difficult time adapting to a place with comparatively fewer and muted social interactions. In France when in the street or in the metro you have the impression that people are just there to get to where they're going and rendez vous are always planned, in Morocoo the daily life plays out on the streets and in those spontaneous exchanges with neighbors and venders.

I much prefered Meknes to Fez as its a town much less accuspomed to having tourists, so while you still can't exactly « blend in », no one solicits you to buy things. We were lucky enough to have the chance to stay a few nights in a riad or typical Moroccan home with colored glass windows, high painted cedar ceilings, a roof terrace and an open patio with banana and orange trees in the middle. A man I give English lessons to in Toulouse lived there for 7 years and turned his families old house into an Inn now kept by a Moroccon couple. It was a much needed respite from a country where bathroom is a loose term that encompasses anything from a hole in the ground to an actualy bowl, and warm running water is a luxury.

Mint

Amy and I also tried a Moroccan bath, thinking that after Istanbul last winter we had seen it all, au contraire. The first thing we did afterwards was take showers, and I had visible scabs from how hard this woman scrubbed my dead skin away!!

Inevitably, I got sick from the water, the kind of sick where you don't know to sit or kneel when you get to the toilet. Of course this didn't happen while we were at the riad but the three of us sharing a tiny room in Fez. The local remedy is eating spoonfuls of dry cumin washed down with tea, so that was a first. 

Wandering around the médina

Dead end

Coranic school

Fez

Outside a mosque in Fez

Tanneries in Fez

Morocco was was my first experience in a place where so little for me is so much for someone else, and interactions with locals were often hard to judge. Overall people were incredibly nice, and always welcomed you with "soyez les bienvenus", literally: be the welcome ones. For me, this invitation seemed like an olive branch in such a foreign place, yet took on such a complicated sense. You  never knew if people were helping you only to demand money at the end, which leads to tourists being overly cautious and closed in my opinion, and that really limits the human interactionly and you feel especially badly when the person was actually just trying to give you some local advice, or talk to you about life in France. We experienced everything from a really uncomfortable encounter of having to, in no uncertain terms, tell a local boy to stop following us home, to playing soccer with a gang of kids who spoke no French, to exchanging addresses with an old man who ran a bathroom whose dream it was to come to France with promises to send him a postcard.

It was a beautiful place with an irreplicable culture, but by the end I was ready to be in a city where they use toilet paper, I didn't have to bargain the price of everything from water to a cab ride, I could open my mouth in the shower, and look at a legible map and know where I was.
On to Budapest...

View of Fez at sunset