Fez

Today was a Fez day. It was nice to not have to pack up and move on, and to really get to spend some time exploring the city. And that's what we did, all day.

The old part of the city is called the Medina, which in Arabic just means "town," but in Morocco it indicates more; it means a walled city that pre-dates the French. The Medina in Fez is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (there are a lot of those here), and it covers an entire valley. I'll have to ask Mark again how many miles or meters of streets there are, but it's a lot. He figures we walked about five or six miles over the course of our day. The entire Medina is car free; it would simply be impossible for them to fit. Anything heavy or cumbersome gets moved by donkey. The streets are mainly shops on the lower levels with homes above them, or these stone walls with occasional heavy wooden doors that open up into these marvelous homes (in varying states of repair or disrepair, granted).

We started with a tour of the old Jewish quarter and a restored synagogue, and then went to the outskirts of town to tour the ceramic factories. The walk through includes the whole process soup to nuts: harvesting the clay, getting it ready to be worked, wedging the clay, throwing it on a kick wheel, hand-painting the design, etc. Then you go on to the mosaic section, where men and women (in separate rooms) do what appears to be back-breaking work; sitting cross-legged on the floor, chipping away at the tile to make it a certain shape to fit into some grand mosaic.

After that we moved on to the main part of the Medina. I can only hope the Sebastopol farmers market resembles this... Fruits and veggies of every kind, dried fruits, spices, butchers, fish mongers, cured meats, snacks, bread, etc. As you go through the narrow alley ways you pass every type of shop imaginable. From the practical, every day sort to the cheap Rolex repros that are made in China. But tucked back here is also industry; weavers who make thread and fabric, schools, mosques, cafes, restaurants, rug weavers and rug shops, etc.

What really knocked my socks off today was the tannery. I had never seen anything like it on any of my trips. Such physical, labor intensive work. They start by soaking the hides in pools of water and lye (I think...) which they get from pigeon droppings. They sit in this putrid pool for a week before they are removed and rinsed. (This is the process that softens the leather.) Next the hides are taken to the dye pools, where the workers pull them in one by one, swish them around to make sure they are good and covered, and then let them soak. They tramp them around with their feet and let them soak again (I don't know how many times), and then take them out one by one, refresh the dye, put them back in, and repeat the whole process. The tannery we visited was started in the 14th century and had changed little; a handful of the guys wore waders, but most wore cutoff shorts and moved around barefooted.

I'll try to post pictures later; the connection in the hotel is slow and doesn't seem to be working.

Tomorrow we head south toward Marrakesh....