*** I guess I never really explained in my earlier blog posts what exactly a medina or a souk is, or what the socco was that I talked about, so anyways, a medina is the old original part of the city and still is to some extent the cultural center of the city usually with a big wall around the whole thing. It usually has two parts, the bazaar part with all the market stalls are, and then the living quarters section, which is referred to as the Kasbah which doesn’t have any markets in it at all. And a souk is just the name of a covered market, which you would find in the medina. And the socco that I mentioned is the name for the entrance to the medina I believe, if I’m right. ***
Didn’t make too much effort to get up very early, so ended up staying in bed until nearly 10 before going out for breakfast. We went to a more upscale café and had a traditional Moroccan breakfast, which included eggs, some kind of meat that was both sweet and salty at the same time, was actually pretty good, bread, tea and freshly squeezed orange juice. It was quite the good breakfast, even though it cost us more than we had been paying for breakfast over the past couple of days. Once we were done with breakfast and using the Wifi at the café, we walked into the maze of the medina and spent the next three to four hours allowing ourselves to get lost in its embrace of crooked alleys and little windings streets.
The Fes Medina is huge, with around 150,000 people living within it walls, and it definitely felt that crowded as we were walking around poking into the shops and getting shown hand-made woven blankets and jelabas which we kind said no too. We did give in to one of the many people offering tours of parts of the medina, just because we wanted to see inside some of the tannery areas. Was super cool and interesting to see how the sheep skins go from being freshly skinned pelts all they way to fine supple leather, and to see all the different steps along the way, and what they use for the different dyes and things. In the end, we had to pay too different people for their “generous” service as they called it, and left one of them in particular quite unsatisfied with what we paid him who claimed we were no better than the medina taxis, referring to the donkeys that some use to get around. I enjoyed the tour while it lasted and got quite a few pictures so I was happy. Back near the entrance to the medina we found a place to have a late lunch – at 3:30 – and had quite the filling meal of first soup, then couscous with chicken and vegetables followed by a couple cups of tea to top it off. There were a ton of restaurants in that general area, who all wanted us to come into their particular restaurant, but in the end we had to pick one and decided to go to one where we got a pretty good deal we thought. One guy who we walked away from actually fingered us as we left he was so angry at us. We wandered around a bit more when we were done our meal before finally making our way back to our hotel, where we both didn’t really want to do anything for a bit, still being full and pretty tired, so we watched the third Bourne movie on my laptop. We went out again around 8:30 or so and found a small café to sit at for a while, have some more tea and pastries and just talk for a while. We stayed until the café owner hinted that he wanted to close by starting to stack the other chairs around us, so we made our way back to our room where we watched the third Rambo movie that Stephen had never seen. Got some good Rambo action in Afghanistan in before turning in for the night, quite tired after a pretty full day.
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