Fez: The good, the bad, and the mentally unstable.

Fez. We've spent a week here, and this is the only time I've had to write about it so I can't include that much detail about what we've done. Here are the important things:

The Medina

We are staying in the old part of town here. It was founded in the year 789. I haven't performed a carbon analysis, but using my analytical skills I estimate that the bathroom in the house where I'm staying was built a year or two after that.

Fez is home to al-Karaouine, the oldest continually-functioning university in the world. It was built in 859, and it's the most renowned and prestigious university in Africa.  From the outside, it looks really beautiful. But women are still not allowed to study there. Natch.

I'm writing a 15-page research paper about the ideological, legal, and cultural ways that Islam oppresses women, and I am having nooo trouble finding material. I know that in some ways Islam promotes equality, but in other ways it really sucks. This makes me a little bit grouchy.

The Tannery.

The medina here is "believed to be the world's largest contiguous car-free urban area." (wikipedia). It's even bigger and even more beautiful than the medina in Marrakech was. For one thing, the buildings are white and yellow (not pinkish gray), and they look really beautiful contrasting with the blue sky--it's been cloudless and hot every day here. It also feels a lot more real. There are tons and tons of shops, but the shops selling touristy things  and the shops selling everyday essentials are all squished together. Fez has the oldest and largest authentic tannery in Northern Africa. There, they make all sorts of leather products out of cow, goat, and camel. We went and checked it out and it was realllly cool. My god did it smell bad though. When we went in, they gave us each a sprig of mint to smell while we walked around. This helped a lot, but it made me feel very snobby.

"Ohh, yes, dahhling, simply smashing chamois camel leather, excellent graining, smells like putrid hickory, mmm splendid yes."

I really like the medina here, and the medina seems to really like us. Everywhere we go, men make us offers, either shouted or whispered, ranging from marriage proposals ("Hello princesss. Berber husband? How many camels for you?") to offers for a proverbial roll in the donkey hay. Hashak. I spent the first couple of days here being perpetually creeped out, but I've gotten used to it. My friend Jessie came up with a really genius strategy for deflecting the creepers: Everything they say to you in English, you respond to. Within a sentence or two, their vocabulary has been exhausted, and then they will usually leave you alone after that. Brilliant.

So we've been exploring the medina, we saw the tannery, did a couple tours, saw a really cool artisan pottery place, and went on a day trip to Meknes. Every now and then the medina gets overwhelming, so we hop in a cab to the new city, which is a lot more civilized. We usually ask the driver to drop us off at McDonalds ("If you would be so kind, sir, to deliver us to our place of refuge; our culinary embassy; our sacred place of cultural and spiritual repose.") Hey, they have really good icecream, and there are great internet cafes right down the street.

All in all, Fez has been interesting, educational, and enjoyable.... except for....


Shmeagle.


The home that Jess v.2 and I are staying in could not be more different from the family we stayed with in Marrakech. There are two distinct and significant aspects of it that make me hiiiiighly uncomfortable, so I'll address them individually.

1. Concerns regarding hygiene, plumbing, and irrigation.

As I mentioned before, we are staying in the olllld part of a town that was built in 789. The house is ancient. Jess and I are staying in a separate-but-still-kind-of-attached apartment that was described to us as "being renovated" a.k.a. abandoned.

The bathroom smells like gamy, fetid fetus. In an interesting architectural twist, there is a pane-less window between my bedroom and the bathroom. So sometimes I can wake up and smell the boweljuice.

How do I know that the apartment is abandoned and not just being renovated / between occupants? Because about five minutes after we'd arrived, Jess v.2 took a healllthy shit, after which we discovered that the toilet was not connected to any running water supply. Katie and I literally had to use our latent plumber skills, take the top of the toilet off, and fiddle with some nuts and bolts and screws, to get the thing to flush in any meaningful way. You learn something every day.

We have no shower. Instead, there is a closet under the stairs (love me an HP reference) with a squat toilet in it. You derobe, stand above the flush toilet in naught but your sandals (lest you should stand where some ancient inhabitant may have relieved himself), and our host mom brings us big steaming buckets of water, which we pour on ourselves, soap up, and rinse. Voila! Clean- or something like it.

2. Concerns regarding Shmeagle

The first evening we were there was the wurstle. This lady who was in charge of organizing our homestays personally delivered Jess v.2 and I to where we would be staying. We met the mom, 14-year-old Mohammed, 11-year-old Najia and 5-year-old Tisam, but we were not introduced to the dad--even though he was sitting right in the enormous open-air living room ("riad") while we walked through it. Nor were we introduced to the palid, silent man sitting with him.

Later that night...

Turns out the dad is quite the religious man. He cornered Jess and I and started yelling in colloquial Moroccan Arabic about Allah-knows-what, but I kept hearing the word "Quran"over and over. His voice is raspy and scary, and when we don't understand what he's saying (aka 100% of the time), he just says it louder and louder, over and over. Charming!

Also, the pale man we saw (who I had assumed was a visiting friend or relative) is the live-in uncle, Shmeagle! Here's a fun quiz:

1) Is Shmeagle:

a) mentally retarded
b) crazy
c) a deformed and maniacal hobbit, or
d) all of the above

2) At any given time, is Shmeagle most likely to be:

a) half concealed in a dark corner, staring at Jess v.2 and I
b) lurking in the dark hallway between their apartment and ours
c) staring at us while picking at his feet / shuffling idly through a deck of cards.
d) all of the above


Pat on the back if you picked 1.d and 2.d!

sometimes he stands on the other side of one of the (inexplicable) interior windows and watches us eat.

No further comments, except that I am realllllllllllly excited to be home. I like Fez, my tolerance for all things creepy and bizarre has gone wayyy up, but I'm ready to sleep in my own bed (where there is no window into the bathroom), shower without wearing shoes, and to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner without feeling a pair of eyes on me, and the whisper of,  "My preciousssss."










Disclaimer for those who may be concerned regarding Jess v.2's and my safety: the door to our apartment deadbolts.