Just had a lovely, chilled 2 days recharging my batteries in Fez before heading back to Tangier today. Back to trains and real life, I really could do with a bit longer....................
I've loved Fez, ambling round the medina. My way of dealing with it is to walk very slowly, never panic and keep the compass handy. If I find what I am looking for it may turn out to be what I want. Or not. And it may be open. Or not. I may feel welcome. Or not. And I'll see things I wasn't looking for and miss things I was. I'll rub shoulders with every imaginable sort of person, donkey and mule and see buildings shored up with wood to stop them falling down and unbelievably gorgeous things in shops and loads of absolute tat.
I'll peep inside the most lovely, tranquil, cool, spaceous buildings which just exude peace and beauty. I'll finger the most wonderful, centuries old, enormous, intricately carved wooden doors and walk on exquisite mosaic floors, and pause awhile in a square or courtyard filled with trees and sunshine and chattering birds. And I'll watch the people who live with such beauty and who make these things - and I watch them greet each other with such warmth and affection and kisses, grasping arms, shoulders, faces - especially the children.
And they accept us infidels invading their lives, poking and prying with our questions and cameras and our brazen ways as they have always accepted travellers, because we replace the old trading caravans that all paused here on their long journeys. There are plenty of old caravanserais in Fez - reminding me of reading Kim.
I visited a cafe run by an english bloke whose (perfectly normal in england) energy and drive came as a minor culture shock. The place was full of very white travellers looking completely zonked out in the delightful, tasteful morrocan-but-european ambience. BUT he had that most wanted thing - a book exchange! Hooray! I have exchanged the disappointing Paul Bowles for Elizabeth Gaskell - double hooray! I've read Tolstoy twice and am extremely pleased I dont have to resort to reading PB twice!!
And supper on a rooftop terrace gazing across Fez in the starlight, spread out below, surrounded by mountains, the only sounds the human voices and occasional footsteps floating up, just as it would have been 3 or 4 or many more hundred years ago.
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