Reading this week:

• Living’s the Strange Thing by Carmen Martín Gaite, translated by Anne McLean
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

Having rested well in the riad, it was time for our first full day in Fez. Fez is a phenomenal city because of, among its other charms, all the artisans that live and work there. Derek Guy at Put This On talks about the whole like, tailoring interconnected universe, where there is a whole ecosystem of people who specialize in different crafts that all operate in the background of any particular piece of clothing you wear. He worries about this system dying because people just aren’t buying the kinds of quality clothes that they used to. But man, it is alive and well in Fez. Everywhere you turn in the city, in storefronts and in little workshops down side alleys, there are artisans working on something or another, scraping leather or weaving cloth or sewing together shoes or chipping tiles or hammering metal. So of course we had to go see them. To do that we went on a Fez Artisans Tour that I can highly recommend (TripAdvisor here). When you arrange the tour they ask you the sort of stuff you’d like to see, and day-of meet you where you’re staying to take you around the city. After a little low-down in the comfort of our riad we were off!

One of the other notable things about Fez is that it is a car-free city (though occasionally you get some people on motorcycles), and so one of the first things our guide discussed was the logistics of the place. We had set off on our tour around 10am, when the city was still waking up, and thus we were treated to the wonderous sight of a garbage donkey. That is, there was a man going around picking up the garbage, and he was putting it into bags that were being carried by a donkey. A garbage donkey! It was great. As we wandered around we saw a good number of very well-behaved donkeys and mules so that was very cool.

The first artisan we visited was Said Akessbi, apparently the last person to make damascene in Fez. He may very well be the last ever, because, as he told us, he has only daughters and no sons. And all his daughters are in school, too. This was a little bit of a theme on our tour and was conveyed with some sense of sadness. Said was at least a third-generation damascener, having learned from his father and grandfather to take over the family business. To step back a couple seconds, damascening is the art of inlaying one metal on top of another to create patterns or pictures. We were told that he used to inlay gold into the steel objects, but that got too pricey so now he focuses on silver. He was working on a piece when we arrived (I assume he is always working on a piece). He scored the metal to help the silver stick, and then takes silver wire and hammers it into place. There is also a finishing and polishing process and creates just absolutely beautiful stuff, all in this tiny little alcove of a workshop. I bought a plate and my super amazing wife got some earrings and then we popped along to the next artisan.

The most famous sights in Fez are the leather tanneries. They are in the far end of the medina, tucked through doorways along a street of shops selling, of course, leather goods. As you enter they hand you a complimentary sprig of mint to try to cover up the smell. That smell is of rotting flesh and pigeon poop. The pigeon poop is used as an ammonia source to clean off the hides. I made good use of the mint sprig though my super amazing wife said it “wasn’t that bad.” The tannery is quite the sight indeed. The central feature are the tanning vats, but our guide told us the whole system is a co-op, instead of one specific company. A family might own a couple vats in which they process their own leather. Around the vats were arrayed other leather-related workshops and tanning steps. The whole thing was so very old-school. Besides the electric motor running the gigantic washing machine, you could have been transported there at any point from the centuries and not noticed. All of the work was done by hand, down to the man we spotted in an alcove scraping leather using a gigantic knife he pushed with his chest and sharpened every few cuts. Although most of the leather is tanned in the vats, to achieve a yellow color they use turmeric (they used to use saffron but that’s too pricey now), and this is done by spreading the turmeric mixture over the leather by hand. The yellow leather is used for slippers, and every day there is apparently a 1-hour auction where the slipper makers buy the leather they need. They later auction of the slippers they make as well.

The next things we looked at were what my super amazing wife was most excited for: textiles! Earlier we had actually poked into a store where a man on a loom was making cloth; he showed us some looming. My super amazing wife was impressed by a rope system he had to shoot the shuttle back and forth. We inspected some of his beautiful cloth and learned about agave silk, which I hadn’t known was a thing (I thought they had been talking about rayon when they said “vegetable silk”). Also I don’t have a great place to mention this but as we were walking through the city we saw some other cool sights, such as a store selling songbirds (which seemed popular in Fez), and most amusingly a chicken stand with a bunch of live chickens out front along with two cats very intently watching the chickens. But that journey brought us to Abdelkader Ouazzani, the last man in the city doing brocade. Alas, this poor man also had no sons, but he did have at least one apprentice. The fabric was so beautiful and vastly outside our price range. To make it, the master sat at the head of the loom doing the shuttle work and working the pedals. Meanwhile, the apprentice controlled the patterns (I think). There was an elaborate system of strings he pulled, which in turn would tug on a series of overhead cords. These cords controlled the particular loom arms (probably not the right term) which came up as the shuttle went through, weaving the threads in a particular way. I could see behind the apprentice whole different sets of strings, which must have been the different “programs” for the different versions of the brocade. You can see why someone got around to inventing punch cards eventually for the whole thing. His fabrics are very popular for wedding dresses, though not really very many people buy their wedding dress, instead renting them because it would be so very very expensive to actually own one of these outfits outright. I was very jealous and wish I could man.

The tour was not over at that point and sorry to fake you out on like a Part II of something that is already Part VI, but to be continued!

Our time in Tangier had drawn to a close and we were off to the second-to-last city on this trip: Fez! To get there we again took the train, though this one was not high-speed. The title is “slow speed” but that’s just to contrast with my other blog post, it was really a regular-speed train, I don’t want to demean the trains in Morocco. They also have high speed trains! But we didn’t take those ones.

To take the train we of course had to first get to the train station. The hotel was nice enough to arrange for us a taxi. I asked the front desk lady how much we should pay and she told me 60-70 (this is in Moroccan dirhams). When we arrived at the station he asked for 100, which I gave him because I didn’t feel like arguing and also he tried to give us a little tour of Tangier on the way (he didn’t go out of the way) and also also I was feeling guilty about if I had been tipping properly in Tangier so I was fine with giving him 100. In my notes I wrote that the train station was “beautiful,” though really I just meant like, it resembled a modern shopping mall. Still, nice!

Safely at the station we settled into our train. Since I’m American and my best frame of reference for trains is Harry Potter, it was a Harry Potter-style train. In that, there were different compartments with six seats each and no place to put our luggage. We had big ole’ suitcases for all the souvenirs so this put us in a bind and we spent the train journey with our suitcases between our news. The other people in the compartment didn’t seem to mind, I guess this is pretty standard. Later on a Harry Potter-style snack cart also came wheeling by, though I didn’t get anything.

I spent the train ride admiring the view. Most of the land between Tangier and Fez (we took a dog-legged route) was farmland. I was surprised by that. I know I had this same revelation when we were arriving in Tangier, but I guess I was still expecting desert. Though in Fez you look out over the landscape, and like, yeah, that’s what I expected. Maybe it’s just the particular face of the hills you see from the rooftops in Fez but they are brown and gorgeous and resemble the American southwest (especially the sky at sunset, the blue and pinks and oranges running together in bands across the sky as the sun goes down on the opposite horizon, just peering over the medina roofs and the hills and, man, this is why all those painters came to Morocco) and like that was what I was expecting.

But on the way to Fez it was farmland. There were a couple of men fishing in the little river that went under the train tracks, and lots of sheep and cows and sheep mixed in with cows. I saw people herding sheep over the rolling green hills and we drove by mudflats I didn’t understand, like maybe they were fish ponds or salt ponds or rice paddies? Seeing them I realized we were still near the ocean on the other side of the train and I could see if I looked over, but just barely in the distance. We also saw a lot of donkeys and multiple people actually riding along on donkeys which was fun to see. As we got farther south the land started to remind me of Florida with orange groves and palms and pine trees and the roads cutting through it. Also a good chunk of the land I think they were growing sugarcane but I couldn’t really be sure.

Eventually the land flattened out (though with hills in the distance) and I saw “ACAB” graffiti, which, solidarity, exciting. There were olive trees as well here and I looked it up on the map so I know south of Sidi Kacem we started to get back into hills. The houses seemed nice and we passed through clusters of towns with little train stations with tiled exteriors and one house I saw had a big solar setup on top despite being wired into power lines.

Eventually we arrived at the train station and a man gave us advice on how to avoid getting scammed on taxis and when buying things in the market. We thought he was going to scam us but he was in fact just nice. We exited the train station and found the guy the hotel sent to pick us up. He drove us to the nearest door of the medina and then handed us off to a luggage cart guy. Since there are no cars in the medina there are men with carts who haul stuff around, and besides not having to carry our own bags hiring the guy came with two advantages. One, we had no idea how to get to our hotel and two, and this is the real nice one, no one bothered us. Like everyone knew we already had a guy so we were just on our way.

The walk from medina entrance to our hotel, the Riad Laaroussa, was surprisingly long. We turned into a kinda grimy looking passageway off the main thoroughfare and through the door which opened up into a stunning courtyard. There wee tall orange trees and so many tiles and lovely fountains. Later we discovered they had not one but two tortoises. The front desk was expecting us and sent us up for mint tea on the roof as they shuttled our luggage up into the room. Tea finished, we were shown the room, which had a lot of character because the house itself is 300 years old but recently renovated. Unpacked, we could finally relax from the journey, and spent some more time one the roof reading and enjoying a fantastic dinner. While my super amazing wife took a call I ducked out to find an ATM. As I was exiting the Riad a guy with a small stand outside the door found out my name and tried to convince me to buy something. When we were there he posted up right outside the Riad (“we are neighbors,” he said), and so was our constant greeter during our entire time in Fez. Eventually I had almost decided to buy something from him but when I had reached that conclusion he was for once not sitting there. And so that was our introduction to Fez!

Reading this week:

• Captives and Voyagers by Alexander X. Byrd

As I teased in my last entry my super amazing wife had signed us up for a cooking class while we were in Tangier. This was with Blue Door Cuisine and was a lot of fun! As part of the cooking class you can go on a market tour, which we opted to do. We met up with our guide Lena in the Grand Socco (we were easy to spot) and she took us off around the market. We went to spice shops and vegetable stands and a meat place and she pointed out all the traditional stuff they cook with as she bantered with the shop keepers. She also took us by the communal ovens which were neat. Back in the day it was a hassle to have your own oven so for bread baking they had these big communal ovens where you could bring your stuff to be baked. Communal ovens are going out of fashion these days but not entirely; they are fired with orange and olive woods which provide a special flavor you just don’t get at home. After the market tour it was off to the cooking class itself.

The class took place in the proprietor’s house, though the first floor is laid out for cooking classes with different work stations. In addition to Lena we met her two accomplices. First they walked us through making the bread to go with dinner, specifically khobz. It’s not a flatbread but it is a pretty flat bread. After we prepared the dough they were whisked off to the communal ovens to get that authentic flavor.

Then it was on to the main course, of course literally. The point of the class was to learn how to cook with the tagine, which is that ceramic oven thingy you see all over Tangier. We spent the rest of the trip trying to find one we liked to buy but never really did. Plus that is a lot of luggage space to commit to. A lot of the cooking was handed to us, i.e. we mostly just sliced and arrange vegetables and didn’t even have to clean the fish, but that of course was to make it more fun. They taught us how to arrange the vegetables in the bottom of the tagine so the meat doesn’t stick, and then we mixed together the marinade for the fish itself. We slathered the fish up with the sauce and arranged it just so and proudly stood by our creations which were then cooked over the stove as the tagine worked as an oven.

A note on our teachers there. They were phenomenal. Like Lena there not only teaches at blue Door, but also teaches English, is getting her Masters’, and takes care of her dad and brother. Women! They work too much and are underappreciated. But what I did especially appreciate is that when you are taking a class from homemakers they give you the real down-to-earth tips, like “a metal sponge is best for cleaning tagines” and the non-stick veggies tip above. The women also kept hinting to me that a man doing the cooking is very appreciated and I should remember to do it sometimes at home. I’ll try!

As we waited for our dinner creations to cook we had a lesson on tea. We had been enjoying mint tea our entire time in Tangier, including even at Café Baba, but here is where we really learned about it. Turns out there are a lot more spices in it than we thought. Well sometimes. Normally it’s just tea and mint but for special occasions there are like ten spices including cinnamon and cloves and all sorts of stuff. The women described their heirloom tea sets at home and how it really connected them with their families and were a tad disappointed at how little sugar we asked to get added. And then you boil it all together in the pot for a while instead of just like pouring already boiling water over the spices? That’s an important technique I wouldn’t have guessed. When it was ready we drank tea for a while and admired the items in the little shop they have (we got a beautiful embroidered, um, I guess like a pad for the teapot and a oven mitt except not a mitt thing so you can pick up your metal teapot without it burning your hand, beautiful at any rate, and also we got some tea). And then eventually it was time for dinner!

They brought over our tagines full of food and the bread we had made and some more tea and let us chow down in a lovely little dining room. It was of course too much food and they offered to pack up our leftovers. We insisted we didn’t have a fridge (this was fish we’re talking about here) but they insisted in turn we pack it up so we wouldn’t go hungry and so we set off with our food and eventually gave the leftover fish to a cat with some kittens near our hotel. So that was a lot of fun and if you’re even in Tangier you should do it too!

The big event for our second day in Tangier was to do a cooking lesson! But that was a dinnertime thing so we spent the rest of the day doing other stuff. The first of these was visiting the Punic Necropolis. That was really cool, actually. The Punic Necropolis was of course originally full of dead Phoenicians from the 4th century BC, but according to the sign in the first century the Romans cleared out all the dead Phoenicians so they could put dead Romans there instead (tip to the wise, on Google Maps there is a site “Nécropole Punico-Romaine” but I don’t know what that is and never found it; you want the “Tombeaux Phéniciens” instead). The tombs themselves are actually a little bit underwhelming. They are at this point just sorta holes carved into the rocks which are now filled with water with some trash floating around in it; if you want to see what used to be in the tombs (I mean like, the coffins, not just dead people), they got one in the Kasbah museum we had gone to the previous day. But the site! It is amazing that this very spot has been significant to human kind for millennia, and you can see why. Those views are gorgeous. Fantastic. Phenomenal. Great place to be dead, lemme tell ya. We stood there for a while just admiring it. Besides us there were several other couples enjoying the majesty of the sea from above on that glorious February day. Definitely swing by.

From there it was onto some shopping. The funny thing that happened on the way to the forum was that as we were walking along the sidewalk this woman tossed out the dregs of her tea right into the street from her alcove office. I strode into her view at nearly the same instant and she was mortified that she almost dumped tea all over me (she looked suitably embarrassed), but I thought it was funny. Our first destination was the Librarie des Colonnes. My super amazing wife and I both really like bookshops so we of course like to visit them. The Librarie des Colonnes was really neat, a beautiful space, full of history, and with a friendly shopkeeper, but man I didn’t know what to do with those books. They focused on a brand of art and intellectualism that I just don’t have the training to deal with. Nice to hang out there though. Next we went to Les Insolites, which was slightly more our style. They even had a cookbook my super amazing wife had been contemplating. Fortuitously, they also had a short book on Moroccan handicrafts which finally let us know what we were looking at in all the shops.

I said last time that we were running out of museums, but there was another: the Musée Dar Niaba. It took a bit to find it because we blew past it on the first time around. It is a nice little space, recently renovated, and we were there for diplomatic history (the place used to be…) but they didn’t have much. What they had instead were a good number of paintings of Tangier done by foreign artists, which were interesting to see. Again they also had a lovely courtyard, and then on top of that some sections on Tangier history.

With that over we went tea set shopping. This was a fun little experience, and another instance of me contradicting myself from what I said last time. We were looking for a tea set because my super amazing wife wanted one. After wandering a bit we finally poked into a shop. The shopkeeper was of course very attentive. My super amazing wife asked about the price of a tea set and the guy said “800” which was insanely high (like $80 in USD) and as an opening gambit for the haggling to ensue she just turned him down. Except the guy seemed really thrown off? He then set about giving her a lesson in negotiating, explaining that here in Morocco we haggle and suggested she name a price. She eventually got down I think to 350MAD for the tea set which was probably too much but it was a fun haggling experience. She kept going to walk away which had him lower the offer a bit. It is a pretty nice little tea set.

The next experience was lunch. I had suggested one place but the reviews said the wait times were long, so we went to a different place. That different place also took an hour to serve us any food (good kebabs though) and I was in the sun the whole time so I was grumpy my suggestion hadn’t been taken, BUT what it did mean is that as we were departing we ran into a tiny shop displaying the artwork of Hafida Zizi. This was really cool, so the kebabs had a silver lining. I had initially been drawn in by the pottery but she also had these paintings of Moroccan women doing traditional handicrafts. My super amazing wife was most interested in the paintings of women doing textile work. We eventually settled on a painting of a woman spinning yarn. My super amazing wife really loved it. She loved it so much that we actually went back later in the day to pick up a second painting, which means we went from admirers of Zizi’s work to collectors all in one day. They are now in pride of place in our house so that was a really really neat souvenir of Tangier.

And then, finally, we were onto cooking! But I’ll cover that next entry.

Having already learned so much about world travelers already in Tangier, we were all set to keep visiting more museums but then we got distracted by lunch. We by happenstance ran across Le Salon Bleu and decided to stop in. It was fantastic. We got seven small bowls of various things and each and every one was great, and the biggest discovery of the day was that putting cinnamon on orange slices is the way to go, dessert-wise. The café is perched up on the top of the building so you got these great views of the harbor and off in the distance Spain. There were also some funny seagulls which was cool and all, but my super amazing wife had been excited by the reviews which noted “heaps of cats.” We didn’t see any while we were there so they must have all been off doing something. In Tangier though there were certainly a whole bunch of cats, which seemed mostly well cared for and were definitely extremely cute. There was also a snake charmer outside, charming a snake, which is a thing I thought they only did in movies.

Anyways after lunch we then popped across the courtyard to our original destination, the Kasbah Museum! Even when lunch distracts us you can’t keep us away from museums for long. It is not technically the Kasbah museum (I have resisted calling this entry “Rock the Kasbah,” by the way, for your benefit), it is technically the Museum of Mediterranean Cultures, but it’s in the Kasbah so it’s the Kasbah museum. It’s a cute little museum at that. It proceeds lightly through the many many cultures that have called Tangier home, with a few interesting artifacts. Since it is built into the Sultan of Morocco’s old palace, it continues the theme we had been seeing of beautiful ceilings and peaceful courtyards. And there is a big ole’ Roman mural to boot with a boat in it. So that is neat.

Speaking of courtyards, this is where we first noticed Morocco’s fondness for tortoises. In one of the several courtyards of the Kasbah museum I noticed there was a tortoise wandering around, and then noticed there were a bunch of tortoises wandering around, including cute little baby tortoises. We took lots and lots of pictures. Maybe in some ways not as cute as cats but much more unique. Thinking back, there had been a tortoise at the American Legation Museum too and then as we proceeded through the rest of our trip in Morocco it seemed like every courtyard had one. I guess it is just the thing to do in Morocco. Where do they come from? Hard to tell, but a nice feature and keep an eye out for it.

After the delight in meeting the tortoises, the next thing we set out to do was visit the Contemporary Art Museum that was supposed to be nearby the Kasbah Museum. Turns out it is in the same compound as the Kasbah Museum, like you didn’t have to even go outside to get to it, so we wandered on through. They had some interesting works, and a lot of works at the time by Palestinian artists. Nice stuff!

At this point, we were unfortunately running a bit low on museums we could visit in Tangier, leaving us only able to enjoy the ambiance and culture of our surroundings. This meant wandering through the medina and trying to do some light haggling as a warm-up. We are not very good at haggling, and furthermore we were a little paralyzed in our souvenir buying because we weren’t sure if there was going to be nicer stuff elsewhere in Morocco. But one place our medina wanderings did bring us to was Cafe Baba. If you’ve never heard of Cafe Baba I hadn’t either, but my super amazing wife had. It is famed as being a place that the Rolling Stones hung out. There is little my super amazing wife loves more than a good cafe, and if Cafe Baba was good enough for the Rolling Stones it was good enough for us. Or so we thought. I can see why they liked it! It was not a place for us. The tea was good and the views pretty but the best part about the table they sat us at is that the window was broken so fresh air came in to displace the cigarette smoke. So we enjoyed our tea and departed, having been a little closer to rock n’ roll history and a little happier for having subsequently gotten farther away from rock n’ roll history. And with that our first full day in Morocco largely came to a close.

Reading this week:

• In The Shadow of the Cotton Tree by Jack Rillie

So we were finally here: the ancient city of Tangier. I had wanted to go for a long time, because of the usual exoticism reasons. Lots of history in the place, and a lot of that history is westerners coming in and deciding they liked the decor a whole lot. We were firmly in that milieu. Plus while back in Peace Corps I had read the book Tangerine, so I was excited to be stalked by a repressed lesbian ex-lover (that is my recollection of what the book is about but now that I am reading the New Yorker review I am very suddenly worried I am wrong in a bigoted way. I enjoyed the book!).

Breakfast at the hotel was a heavenly combination of fruit and bread and fresh cheese and butter and jam and coffee and juice and fortified us to proceed to our first destination: the American Legation Museum. This is a super neat place. It is the building that housed the U.S. diplomatic mission to Morocco and was the first American public property abroad. It has lived many lives and now is a wonderful little display of American diplomacy abroad. ‘Merica!

You wander up to the place via some narrow streets in the medina (that is redundant, all the streets are narrow), ducking into the door underneath an archway. The building spans the street which is a neat little architectural feature. The first part of the museum is a timeline of the building, and it describes the mission as being a pretty sleep place from around 1820 until 1920, and oh, to be a consulate in a sleepy legation in Tangier, sounds phenomenal. As you go upstairs the next chunk is a sort of house museum, describing life in the legation through the centuries. There are stories about lions and a big collection of furniture and very easy to imagine entertaining diplomatic guests on a sinecure from the U.S. government. I am salivating. It was sleepy until about 1920 and then you know some world wars picked up, and one section of the museum is dedicated to wartime activities and especially some spying that took place out of the building, with a recreation of the secret radio room out of which intelligence was transmitted back to the U.S. authorities. Eventually the U.S. diplomatic presence shifted on down to Rabat and left the building a little listless, so the Peace Corps moved in. I did my Peace Corps training out of a mud hut, which to be clear I very much enjoyed, but I could have also enjoyed a sunny courtyard in Morocco, you know? The most fun part of this part of the history is that the volunteers turned the cistern into a disco so they could let their hair down, and they dubbed this disco the “Cistern Chapel,” which is just a real good pun man. As a good intro into some of the modern international history of Tangier, the American Legation museum is the place to go.

When we initially went to the American Legation Museum, I managed to take us straight there through the medina’s winding streets. I mean, like I was an expert. This gave me a very false sense of confidence and every time we went anywhere else I tried to recreate the feat but we wound up twisting and turning and only ever arrived at subsequent destinations through luck and providence. But that’s fine, the medina is very cool, very nice to see how people live and very interesting to check out the shops. Plus the locals are used to it, immediately warning us every time we were headed down a dead end. One guy did actually try to lead us astray I think but honestly I can’t tell.

The destination of these wanderings was to see some Ibn Battuta sights. Maybe I knew something about Ibn Battuta before going to Tangier but probably not much. But in Tangier he is a bit of a thing. It’s his home town after all, and for a long long time he was the most well-travelled person in the world. I have subsequently bought a copy of his book (and a guide to his book) and will let you know when I manage to read them, but they seem interesting. Atlas Obscura turned me onto Ibn Battuta’s tomb, so I wanted to visit. It is right in the midst of the medina and surrounded by houses. Apparently there is some controversy over whether the man is actually buried in the mausoleum but I wasn’t able to verify. They supposedly open it up occasionally, someone who lives by has the key, but it wasn’t open when I visited so I couldn’t see if it was Ibn Battuta himself in there or not. But still pretty cool and not an unbeautiful place to be laid to rest (if he is laid to rest there).

Having seen the man himself (again, potentially) it was time to learn something about him so off we went to the museum dedicated to him, the aptly named Ibn Battouta Museum. It is a fine little museum though if you were on a tight schedule it is potentially skippable. No pictures allowed inside so you’ll have to trust me. The point of the museum is to walk you through Ibn Battuta’s life and travels, and how they show the interconnectedness of both Tangier and the Muslim world circa the 14th century. There aren’t a whole lot of actual artifacts in the museum (I don’t recall any at all but the museum website says they have some stuff), but the displays are well done and in multiple languages. You see models of like the boats he would have sailed on and maps of his destinations and neat stuff like that. Then at the end there is a little gift shop, so that’s nice. And that’s about it. After the visit to the museum we were back into the medina for the next adventure.