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Published: January 25th 2020
Joe Camel
Butcher shops that sell camel meat advertise this way.Departure 1
When making a to-do list for an upcoming trip, I work backward. I imagine my return. Cats alive? (Buy cat food.) Electricity on? (Pay bills.) At least a pot's-worth of coffee? (Buy beans.) The hardest part of making travel arrangements is getting to and from airports. It's easier to get from San Francisco to Fes than getting from home to SFO. Jennifer, my travel companion, spent an evening searching through options to get from Newark to her connecting flight from JFK to Austin. In the end, it was cheaper to simply abandon the JFK ticket and buy a new ticket from Newark to Austin.
Also, the friendly skies aren't so friendly anymore. I used to look at my itinerary with a sense of satisfaction, a completed jigsaw puzzle with every piece neatly locked into its neighbors. But the puzzle pieces don't seem to fit as well as they used to. Did I miss some fine print excluding luggage on one of the legs? Should I wear pants with lots of pockets in case I have to ditch my suitcase in Paris? Will a three-hour layover in Madrid give me enough time to go through security again so
Jawa on Duty
I expected to see the Millenium Falcon come blasting out from behind the building. they can check for weapons I may have picked up while in the air? Most airlines charge $5 for drinking water; I can't imagine how much they would charge for an Uzi. Oh, and will Stormy Skies Airline actually get me to Madrid when they say they will, or will they wait on the tarmac in Reykjavik an extra two hours for passengers connecting from similarly delayed flights?
At my age there's always the nagging worry about my ability to notice things that would have been obvious 10 years ago. Did I book the ticket for this year or next? (No wonder they were so cheap.) Does the flight leave at 6 AM or 6 PM? Am I returning to Oakland or Auckland?
Even when all of the connections connect it seems as though travel is more of a beating than it used to be. The seats are closer together, the movies are worse, the food is bad, and the top half of my body is too warm, but my feet are freezing, as though they were resting directly on the metal of the fuselage. I contemplate purchasing a paper-thin blanket from the flight attendant for 10 Euros.
roofscape
View of the medina from our rooftop. When at last we are discharged into the chaos of a foreign airport, I dash from one confused mob of passengers to the next. In Barcelona seven policemen are called in when I ask where the Air Arabia gate is located. Being policemen, the only thing they know how to do is check my passport and search my luggage. So that's what they do, in the middle of the airport!
Fes
I think the term "Riad" comes from the Koran, and means something like "Heavenly Garden". In Morocco it describes the typical Moorish-style home—a windowless exterior that hides a beautiful intricately-tiled inner courtyard, the architectural analog of the hijab. When I saw a three-bedroom riad in the Fes medina (old city) on Airbnb for $50/night, I snapped it up. For the next few months Jennifer and I spun fantasies of lounging in the courtyard in silk pajamas, puffing on hookahs, and sipping mint tea. Be careful what you ask for ... as the old saying goes. In our case trying to shoehorn 21st-Century lifestyles into a house built for 14th-Century lifestyles was a challenge.
The Riad was beautiful. A blue-tile stairway led from the ground
Escher-eseque
The stairways were confusing, even in person! Sometimes I would accidentally get on the wrong one. floor to the courtyard. A typical Moorish salon and a master bedroom opened onto the courtyard. A second staircase led from the courtyard to more bedrooms and eventually out onto the roof for a view of the medina. But getting from room to room was a bit like mountain climbing, perhaps with some spelunking tossed in. For example, to get from the courtyard to the bathroom I must take a giant step over a crevasse formed by a steeply descending staircase. As if in an Escher drawing, I'm now standing on the staircase that ascends to the roof, but I must descend this staircase to the door of the bathroom. It's dark. I brace myself by pressing my back against one wall and my hands on the opposite wall. After a few steps I reach one hand through the Hobbit-like doorway and stab at a panel of light switches, many of which control lights in unknown parts of the house. All of the doorways in the house were small, their lintels well-polished by a half-millennia of heads banging into them. I curl up like a sow bug to squeeze through the door. The ceiling in the bathroom is quite low.
Lean in
These old timbers might be there to keep the buildings separate. I only manage to shower standing up because my head fits neatly between the rafters.
To go from the entry to the courtyard one must climb a narrow twisting staircase. Some steps are broad and two feet high, others are narrow and only a few inches high. It's so steep that I must use my hands like I'm on a ladder. As the kitchen is on the ground floor this makes bringing a tray of cocktails to the salon tricky.
Of course all of this is part of the fun of "experiencing history". But history can be a bitch. It turns out that central heating wasn't a thing 500 years ago. It turns out that Fes can be cold in January, damned cold! Instead of lounging in our courtyard wearing silk pajamas, Jennifer and I spent the week huddled in the bedroom under a pile of blankets. No silk pajamas either, we wore jeans and down parkas under the covers. After three nights Jennifer and I both contracted a pneumonia-like illness. Fortunately, cheap, strong antibiotics were readily available in Fes.
The Medina
The history of North Africa is the history of wave after wave of conquering civilizations:
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, and Europeans. Most of this conquering took place along the coast, leaving the mountains and the Sahara-- "Lands of the Dissidents"-- to the original Berber inhabitants.
The Arab wave began around the year 800 when Mohammed's great-grandson, Moulay Idriss, founded the city of Fes and invited Shi'ite refugees to settle there. (nb. Fes is the name of the city, "fez" is the name of a type of hat made in Fes.) When the French arrived in 1912, Fes was still a bustling medieval city, a sprawling maze of narrow roads surrounded by walls. Either the French recognized the historical importance of preserving the old city, or maybe they just didn't want to bother with it, so they built the modern city of Fes next door.
From the train station Jennifer and I took a taxi to the Blue Gate, one of the entry points to the old city. Beyond the gate the roads were too narrow for cars. Our Airbnb host arranged to have a guide meet us and lead us to our riad. As we scrambled to follow the guide through the crowded streets, I wondered if some of the beggars
GPS not working?
Jennifer standing at the Blue Gate trying to figure out how to get back to the riad. we passed might have been tourists who never found their way out. It took a few days before I was confident enough to allow myself to wander aimlessly, to follow Paul Bowles advice on Morocco to "Lose oneself in the crowd- to be pulled along by it- not knowing where to and for how long... to see beauty where it is least likely to appear". Eventually, I discovered that the city wasn't as random as I initially feared, rather it was divided into quarters that featured different souks or markets: in one quarter butchers who offered camel meat hung camel heads in front of their stalls, in another quarter tailors hunched over their sewing machines. I wandered through districts of tanners, brass workers, barbers, bakers, woodcarvers, communal ovens, and pastilla shops, where women poured a kind of crepe batter over a hot plug resembling a bald head. The pastillas will be used by their customers to make meat pies.
The narrow dusty streets were crowded with shoppers, tourists, beggars, and children, some of whom couldn't have been older than three. Added to the mixture were clucking chickens, skulking cats, braying donkeys, horses, and camels. It was chaotic, but I
Narrow roads
Not kidding! loved it. In places the second stories were only an arms width from the second stories of the buildings on the opposite side of the street, turning the street into a kind of tunnel. Of course there were plenty of real tunnels, too. And, as Bowles promised, I would suddenly find myself emerging from the chaos into an oasis of beauty and serenity provided by the courtyard of a grand mosque or an ancient caravansary.
Just beyond the city wall was the tannery, which boasted that it had operated continuously, without change, for 1000 years. At the entry a doorman handed me a sprig of mint and told me to shove it up my nose. "Gasmask," he quipped. I climbed several flights of stairs and came out on a rooftop overlooking the tannery. Before me were hundreds of pools where half-naked men stood waist-deep in dye laboring with hides ripped from cows, sheep, goats, camels, and God knows what else. Curious, I pulled the mint sprig out of my nose and immediately began gagging. Dante's description of the Fifth Circle of hell came to mind:
A dreary swampland, vaporous and malignant. I made out a swarm of spirits, savage with anger, naked, slime-besmutched.
In the evenings Jennifer and I would go to the restaurant district near
The Inferno
For 1000 years they have been tanning hides in this place in exactly the same way. the Blue Gate for dinner. As we walked past each restaurant touts thrust menus into our hands. All of the menus looked the same. The fixed price menu featured lentil soup, cucumber salad, mint tea, flatbread, and a sticky sweet lump of fried dough for dessert. The main course was a choice between tajine (a kind of stew cooked in a clay pot that resembles an inverted funnel), pastilla (a savory-sweet meat pie), and of course couscous. The price was 700 dirhams or $7. What the menus lacked in diversity, they made up for in taste. I'm surprised there isn't a Moroccan restaurant on every corner in the US.
Departure 2
A week later Jennifer and I sat at a table on the balcony of our hotel room in Casablanca. We were waiting for a taxi to the airport. Across the street the wind feathered the tops of huge waves crashing onto a rocky shore. She turned to me and said, "I want to stay in Casablanca forever." I couldn't resist. "Jennifer," I said in my most dramatic voice, "If that plane leaves the ground and you're not on it, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow,
Heavy surf
View from Casablanca hotel room balcony. but soon, and for the rest of your life."
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michael conniff
non-member comment
Morocco
Years ago I funded a professor's trip to Morocco, for her to set up a study abroad for Global Studies. Afterward she desisted because of the strain of travel and heat there. I forwarded this link to MIke Gorman, who spent a Fulbright tour in Tunis and loved N. Africa. I enjoyed and learned from this blog and always look forward to your next entry.