From the terrace we could see all over the old city. Even though we were a stone's throw from the mosque we never heard it in the early hours of the morning. In this photo we are just behind the pink roofed building.
Fes has the world's largest urban car free area and it was so pleasant after Marrakech where you had to avoid motorbikes in the narrow lanes. There were two main pedestrian streets where we could navigate our way to and from our dar to the restaurants, main gate, and markets. There are about 365 mosques in the Medina and we were near the oldest university in the world. There are more than 14,000 dwellings jammed into the old town. The houses have flat rooves and many people escape the heat of the night and sleep on the flat roof. This also means that they chat late into the night and can be heard by all their neighbours. On the rooves we could see men in their underwear washing their bodies during the day. There are still many hammans or bath houses where people go to sweat up, scrub up, and wash up. Families take pottery urns, filled with food, to the hamman fire keeper who puts them in the embers to stew slowly.
It was a lot calmer than Marrakech and there were very few tourists in the Medina. We were joined by Chris and Sam from the US for a couple of nights. Sam is a Peace Corp volunteer working in small business enterprises. We went with them to the new part of the city, Ville Nouveau, where they showed us places to get not only a reasonably cheap beer, but also free tapas to accompany it. It was also here that we saw our first Mc Donald's restaurant since the start of our African trip. There were also the other pizza and fried chicken fast food places too.
The new town had wide boulevards and was built by the French as an administrative area. The fountains were working and in the day the children were swimming in them to keep cool. At night the wide parks in the middle of the streets were busy with families eating ice creams, playing, and spending time in the coolness of the trees. In the open paved squares boys were practising their jumps and turns on their inline skates. Compared with other places we have recently visited, the street lights and traffic lights all work.
Our dar had kept as much of the original mosaic tiles as they could and the very narrow steep stairs were an example of this.
The main lounge area was not as brightly painted as the one we stayed at in Marrakesh. Most of the houses in the Medina have electricity but ours was one of three in the neigbourhood to have running water. In the day we could see people filling containers at the fountains to get household water. It is becoming more and more popular for foreigners to buy properties in the old town and renovate them and we read a book by Suzanna Clarke, a NZer living in Australia, who wrote about her experiences- A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco.
John was particularly interested in the hand made plaster work on the ceilings and around the windows. He could see the holes left by the compasses that measured the circles and curves in the designs. They love geometrical shapes.
We went to the working Islamic school that can be visited by non-Muslims and many of the craftsmen that worked on the Alhambra in Spain settled in Fes. The cedar ceilings are an intricate example of Moorish art, laceria: carpentry of knots. Across from the Medersa Bou Inania is the partly renovated water clock. It has thirteen windows and once had brass bowls into which a weight was dropped every hour when the windows were opened.
We could see the tanneries from our dar and luckily the wind didn't blow from that direction as it is really smelly. Pigeon and goat droppings are still used in the tanning process. The street stalls are full of brightly coloured and embroidered slippers made from the animal hides from the tannery. Yellow is the most popular colour for the pointed slippers the locals like to wear.
We walked to the palace gardens one day but they were closed for renovations. John was taking some photos of the palace gates when two men cooling in the shade of a tree leapt up to stop him. It seems you cannot take photos of anything with the Moroccan flag on it but we have never read this any where nor seen any signs prohibiting photos. From here we walked to the Jewish Quarter. Some of the houses here had wooden balconies built into the side of the houses and overlooking the narrow streets. This is a noticeable difference from a Muslim house as they do not want their women folk seen by anyone outside the family. Many of the Jewish families have now emigrated to the US, France or Israel while others now live in Casablanca.
