Fes the strange and wonderful

Hostelling is great because even if you're travelling alone, it seems there's always some way to make friends with your fellow solo backpackers and wander around the city with them. That's exactly what I did - banded together with a group of other people travelling alone, and hit up the city.

Being in a city as old as Fes and having a medina as ancient as it is, it's easy to forget that you're in the 21st century at all. So when we decided to head to Fes's New Town, I think it was safe to say that it was not at all what I was expecting.



Perfectly landscaped boulevards with paved roads and even a retinue of guards.



Back again at the palace, watching local Moroccan people go about their everyday lives in their traditional Moroccan costume, the djellaba.





Always being awed by the intricacy of design in the mosaicked gates and yellow earth walls, and how they contrasted against the clear blue sky.



We headed to the top of a hill which held the ruin of the Tombe dei Merenidi.





We looked out over the sprawling chaos of Fes, again, stretching out as far as the eye could see.



Spring seemed to be in full swing, for which the birds were chirping and the flowers were out in bloom. I thought the flowers were all the more beautiful for being wildflowers - a riot of colour, purple white and yellow.





I thought it was pretty cool that even after all that passage of time, there were still archways standing.





Somewhere along the way back down to the medina, we happened to pass by the dodgiest hostel sign ever.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] Seems legit.[/caption]

In the medina, there were carts full of mini-tajines and other tourist souvenirs.



Saying no to shopping is always hard, especially when you're looking at ceramics and pottery like this.



Fes is a city full of cats. And I really do mean, full of them. I love cats, so I was squealing every time I saw one - which seemed to be something like every 5 minutes.

I mean, would you look at this darling kitten I found sleeping by the side of the street?!



I wanted to take her home, but I don't think she would have fared terribly well in my luggage.



We passed by some perfectly manicured public gardens.



Walked a little further down and found ourselves back on a busy road.



We found donkeys casually grazing on the sides of the road, right in front of the medina walls.



I saw donkeys being used around the Fes medina, pulling carts through the narrow and uneven streets. I don't know if there's anywhere else in the world where you don't look out for cars, but for donkeys. Also, donkeys here share a road with cars and other vehicles.



At least this little brown guy was friendly.



As wonderful as Fes was, there were moments that were just downright disturbing. While I was walking with one of my friends, I got accosted by a fake tour guide who wouldn't stop leaving me alone.

(Even if the tour guides say at first "No money no money," they'll come up to you afterwards and insist on some sort of monetary compensation - and I really didn't want to pay for a tour that I wasn't all that interested in.)

That, and this guy was just being ridiculously annoying. You see, I'm the sort of person who is usually pretty patient with most things - but if there's something I don't want, I'm firm about it. With this guy following me around even after we had repeatedly told him no over and over again, it was starting to piss me off. With this guy, it took effort to try to remain civil and polite.

After some 10 minutes of him following me wherever I was going, I finally told him to piss off after he took my hand and tried to kiss it.

Kiss my hand! Seriously! Eww, gross, no thank you.

But even as strange as some things in Fes are, I guess it is all in all a really nice city - old ancient and somehow seemingly stuck in time.



Just as long as there aren't any hand-kissing fake tour guides.

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Photo Friday: The Medina of Fes

Make no mistake - the medina in Fes is intimidating. Even for the most experienced shopaholic, the number of shops and their shopkeepers shouting at you to buy from them can be overwhelming.

That's not to say that deters people from wanting to buy, though. If anything, it makes you want to buy even more, just so that you have that experience of bargaining that makes you feel like a true local. Also, everything looks a thousand times more appealing when you're walking through streets full of fresh olives, fruit, vegetables, pottery, herbalist recipes, and occasionally also fresh snails.

Not that I would buy the snails though.



They also had fresh camel meat for sale. You can tell the camel meat stall because there's a camel's head hanging from the front of it.

Having just gone camel-riding a couple of days previously, I wasn't sure how to feel about seeing a dead camel's head.



There were tonnes of more normal-looking foods there too - beans and grains of all sorts. I had a fleeting moment of thought where I considered buying these things as groceries, and then I realise that might not be the wisest idea.





In some sections of the medina, we could hear people banging away at metal, their hammers shaping lifeless pieces into gorgeous copper pots, pans, teapots and cooking spoons. It was the first time I'd seen a pot being made by hand.

The banging of hammer against metal sounded like music. Like rhythmic drums beating one after the other as the metalsmiths went about their work.



There was an almost entrancing, captivating quality to watching them.



When we went to the tanneries, we were both excited and dreading it - excited because we expected them to look amazing, but dreading it because we'd heard that pigeon poop was used in the process of tanning.

The tanneries were literally going to smell like shit. I was pretty glad when we were given a sprig of mint leaves before we  entered, to hold under our nose and mask the smell. Even with the mint leaves, we could smell the stench of pigeon poop and excrement occasionally reaching our nose - but I had to admit that the smell wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been expecting.

"That's because we're nearly at the end of the process now," my guide told me. "You're lucky, two days ago the smell was even worse than this."

I had to admire the people who worked here, working all day and taking the tanning process from start to finish by hand. Their noses, I thought, must really have been desensitised to standing around in what was essentially animal excrement all day.



Yet for some reason there was an enchanting quality to how oddly photogenic the tanneries looked - vats full of colourful liquids, vegetable dyes made from herbs like turmeric, henna and mint.



The hides that were processed at the tanneries were made into leather goods of all sorts - jackets, bags, belts, shoes, and even some iPad covers. The colours looked almost unreal - almost too bright to be real leather. Each and every single piece handmade, stitching beading and all.

It took me a lot of effort to walk away without buying something, especially with babouches for €10.



As we continued walking around the medina, we found more shops selling jewellery and metalware. But really, I just want to show you this really pretty turquoise door that I found.



And also these pieces of beautiful metalware, especially this Moroccan teapot.



We kept walking around the rest of the medina, stopping where we saw beautiful things, which seemed to be just about everywhere because the architecture was gorgeous.



We saw the Blue Gate which is the entrance to the medina.







We walked down alleyway after alleyway, looking past shops selling all kinds of goods - rattan, leather, cotton jackets and rugs. I went on a mission to find the perfect pair of baggy cotton trousers.







The colours in the fabric were stunning, and I considered buying table runners just for the colour even though I had no use for them.



So I guess the most important thing to remember in Fes is really to keep a level head and not be whisked away by the multitudes of pretty things for sale.



Or you may find yourself not having enough space in your bag to take it all with you.

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The Athens of Africa, Fes, Morocco

Fes is, according to Wikipedia, the world's biggest car-free urban area. It's a complete maze and labyrinth - streets so close to each other and all looking so similar that you wonder how on earth it's possible to navigate through all of this.

My hostel was pretty good about providing activities, so I joined up with a group that was doing a Fes tour. Although I usually like exploring cities on my own, with everything in Arabic and the streets being such a maze I figured a tour would be a good way to orient myself first.

Because I'd got into Fes at 3AM the night before, I had no idea what Fes was like - so when I saw the overview of Fes from the top of one of its hills, I had to do a double-take to be sure of its sheer size.

It is a city very unlike any other I've been to. Sprawling but dense, and everything is just so old. Ancient and medieval.

I'd had the good fortune to befriend some of the people who were staying with me at my hostel (true hostel experience, making traveller-friends!), and we set out to explore all of Fes together, sightseeing and getting some good ol' shopping in along the way.

Fes, which is the cultural capital of Morocco, maintains a strong tradition of handicraft. Even in the age of mechanisation, everything is still done by hand here.

In a ceramic and mosaic factory, intricate designs are hand-painted on clay that has been moulded by hand and fired in a kiln. I was amazed by how precise their hand movements are - with only a few pencil guidelines, all the designs were painted on so quickly and without any mistakes, too.

How many years would it take for someone to achieve that level of precision?!

Some of my new friends were doing study-abroads at the Florence University of the Arts - musicians, sculptors, painters and all. When they saw one of the sculptors for the factory, one of them commented that he'd probably do a pretty good job as a sculptor in her course!

Seriously though, these people are so practiced at what they do that they churn out pieces like it's nothing. This guy churned out five tajines in something like three minutes!

But the real highlight of this factory is its mosaic - hundreds of thousands of tiles that are painted, glazed and fired, then chipped into tiny pieces and arranged around each other. Creating the mosaic takes a long time, needing to individually select the pieces that will go toward creating the final product so that they line up perfectly with one another.

One of the guys even offered to make a little turquoise heart tile for me! How cute is that?

It takes so much effort to produce every mosaic tile it's really quite remarkable when you see just how much mosaic there is. Mosaic fountains, mosaic walls, mosaic vases, mosaic display pieces of all kinds. How long would it have taken to create all this?

The answer - a very long time. (And they've got a price tag to match too, or I'd've taken one home.)

My friend Ryan was going crazy in the shop, trying to decide which pieces he should buy. There were selections of tajines, ash trays, teapots, tea cups, dish-ware, jewellery... Everything you could possibly ever want.

It was a case of even-if-you-don't-want-to-buy-it, buy-it-anyway-because-it's-so-pretty.

Me? I wound up being so spoilt for choice that I didn't buy anything in the end.

Then we headed to a little look-out at the top of another hill, overlooking the old medina walls. Fes sure does look pretty from high above.

Our last stop on the tour was the Sultanate Palace, or Dar el-Makhzen. We weren't allowed to go inside because it's still a residential palace (and they have serious guards, to boot - we weren't even allowed to take pictures of anything besides the fountains and doors) but the outside is pretty fancy.

Just look at those doors!

Joely and her cool headscarf.

All I could think about was how there might be a real-life Princess Jasmine behind those walls and we would never know.

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