There’s hustle and bustle and people elbow their way through the crowds. They have lives and they’re going about them. The stalls where they build and sell enormous intricate wood and sheet metal Moroccan wedding “thrones” are not there for Western tourists.Īnd while French is spoken widely, English is rare and signs are for the most part entirely in Arabic script. The man with an enormous bucket of live snails is not looking for tourist business. (And when he sees my camera pointed in his direction, he screams at me in words I don’t understand, but in a tone of voice that is unmistakable: Get out of here!) The butcher with a marble slab filled with severed sheep’s heads is definitely not selling to tourists. There are tourists here, for sure, but most of the businesses in the medina – and at the street level, the medina is one vast marketplace – are not tourist-oriented. (Do I need to say again that this is definitely not Disneyland?) They’re not hostile, but they’re not going out of their way to be welcoming either. Those narrow streets are crowded, jammed with people busily intent on going about their lives – which most definitely do not include you. Everything is delightful and deluxe, warm and welcoming.ĭuring the day, Fez is different – but also still the same.ĭuring the day, it’s perhaps not scary. We walk into the courtyard, the night clerk welcomes us back by name. It’s an unassuming wooden door with only a tiny sign – “Maison Bleue” – to distinguish it.īut immediately inside that door is our welcoming Fez home. Moments later, we turn up another unlikely dark alleyway and we are suddenly at our riad. “If I did, I might have to answer him and it could be unpleasant.” “I don’t let myself listen,” he tells us. Later we ask him what the man had shouted. Our guide doesn’t answer, but he walks a little more quickly. It should trigger the appropriate response: “Alaykum As-Salaam” – “And upon you be peace.” And that way it is official that everyone has peaceful intentions.Ī block further on, we pass another cluster of men and one of them shouts something at us. Later he explains that in any unexpected encounter at night, he always starts with that phrase immediately. Our guide quickly says “aSalaam ‘Alaykum” – “Peace Be Upon You.” We turn a corner and come face-to-face with a large, hulking man. He gets his bearings back quickly, but it’s late and it’s dark and, as we walk through the narrow streets, we’re suddenly very aware of the small groups of men hanging out on the corners. So, OK, our guide is walking us back to the hotel and suddenly he stops, looks around and says (in French, our only common language) that he missed a turn and he’s a little lost. But it’s mostly because, as I was saying, Fez can be a little scary. To some extent, all this guiding is necessary because it’s way too easy to get lost in the medina. Then, when we are finished with our meal, someone will walk us home again. The restaurant will have someone come to the hotel and walk us to the restaurant. It’s only a few minutes walk from hotel to restaurant, but everyone insists that we cannot go on our own. The restaurant where we have dinner is also very elegant, but it is in the same rough neighborhood. At night, all of the medina is a rough neighborhood. Our riad is quite luxurious, but it is in a rough neighborhood. More details later, but I really need to keep going right now. It’s a “riad,” an old mansion turned into a kind of very deluxe bed-and-breakfast. We are staying in a wonderful hotel – well (another explanation coming up), it’s not really a hotel. Sometimes almost too narrow for walking.Īnd there is no “nice” part of the medina. It is an endless maze of tiny, mostly nameless, winding streets, alleys and dead ends. The heart of Fez, the part you are there to see, is the “medina,” the old town. Case in point: On our second night in Fez, our guide was taking us back to our hotel after dinner and … OK, wait.
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