First Impressions. Not always love at first sight.

It is fascinating to trawl through the blogosphere reading the travellers tales about Morocco. So today I've collected a few snippets to share.

Doc Rampage has mixed feelings about the Medina of Fes:

One of the remarkable things about the old city, Medina, in Fez is that the buildings are so dense that you cannot see some of the impressive architecture of the city from inside the city. Ahmed showed me an Islamic school, claiming that it was the oldest still-active university in the world. From inside the city, I saw only a dirty wall and a large, time-worn door. It was dramatically unimpressive. He also showed me a famous mosque where I saw nothing but a courtyard with some nice mosaics and a pleasant fountain. I observed through a door from the street because the non-faithful were not welcome inside. Later, Ahmed took me to a high vantage point, perhaps two or three miles a way, and from there the university was an impressive tower and the mosque a beautiful domed building.

But later, the Medina begins to work its magic and in a subsequent post Doc Rampage is well on the way to getting hooked:

Ahmed took me to the Medina, an enormous and ancient walled city that still has people living in it. As I mentioned before, I wasn't all that thrilled in the beginning about visiting Spain and Morocco, but I was thrilled to see this ancient city for two reasons: first, because it was an entirely new experience. I had read descriptions of places like this, but until you see such a thing for yourself you can never really grasp what it is like. Second, I write fiction about places like that city, and the experience of actually being there will allow me to describe the place more vividly.

The streets were so narrow that one must often stand aside to let pass a heavily laden mule. We walked through deep dim canyons beneath massive yellowed walls that seemed to radiate the cold of the winter day. The streets were too narrow for any car. Even scooters could not traverse these streets because of the many stairs and steps, probably following the contours of an earth buried now for a millennium beneath the concrete. In many places the streets became caverns, roofed over by ancient builders seeking more space in the wealthy and growing city. The walls were continuous, high and massive, eighteen-inch-thick brick and mortar with an occasional block of embedded ceder for pliancy. There was no space between individual buildings; any break in the walls was another street. Old and unsafe-looking electrical cables snaked along the walls, often just above the small doorways --old for electrical work, but astonishingly young compared to the walls that they adorned.

Still, ancient as the city was, it swarmed with activity. Behind the heavy walls were shops and homes, workshops and temples, and little tea houses catering to somber rough-looking men. It was a working, breathing city, not a mere tourist setting. In consequence, the streets were overrun with men, mules and donkeys bearing burdens to such an extent that I was astonished at the energy that was spent in merely moving things from one place to another. Mules with baskets on each side on top carried food and supplies and raw materials into the maze of cobbled streets and carried out again the products of the craftsmen, many of whom worked with their hands very much as their forefathers had done a thousand years earlier. The narrower alleys could not even pass mules, and for them we had donkeys, intricately packed to make the most of their small size. Some burdens were too awkward for animals. Several times I passed a line of men carrying long boards and beams, raw material for some construction project, probably some sort of maintenance for the ancient buildings.

A common theme in many blog reports is trouble with guides. Caroline Lawrence, writing in Epistolae Flaviae seems to want to be pampered and finds Fes not up to her usual standards. Apart from thinking it okay to suggest the guide misses out on a "dog biscuit" poor Caroline also has trouble with the pointed hoods of the djellaba:

We meet our guide for the day outside the hotel. Ali is dressed in the "uniform" of Morocco, a djellaba. For some reason this hooded robe makes wearers look like evil monks. What does a peaked hood seem sinister and a rounded hood spiritual?

As Ali drives us back to the hotel mid-afternoon, I ask if he knows a place where we can hear some Moroccan music. He tells us he'll take us to a restaurant in the Kasbah where we will hear authenic Moroccan and Berber music, see belly-dancers, etc. It sounds very touristy but Ali assures us the whole evening costs 'only' 300 dhirams per person (about £25) and that the restaurant will provide a courtesy car home.

He picks us up at the hotel at 8.00 and drives to the Restaurant Palais La Medina, then leaves us. I pay him and give him a nice tip and a signed book for his kids, and later wish I hadn't. This place is a huge disappointment. Although the tiled interior is stunningly beautiful and the performers mostly good, the food is terrible and it's full of tour groups. Also it ends up costing over 1000 dhirams. We do not get a courtesy car home.

Bad Ali! No dog-biscuit!

In direct contrast is the sweetly observed writing in Thoughts on Sweetness by Jessie Speer:

The call to prayer. It’s eerie and beautiful, especially when it is called by a real live muezzin, and there are several going off at once, overlapping calls to the worshippers to take five minutes out of their busy days to bend their foreheads to the ground in worship. I remember on the first day after I arrived I was walking through the medina when the call to prayer went off. There was a nearly imperceptible split second at which everyone in this bustling, quickly moving crowd stopped. It was as though time stopped, and then it was over and people continued moving on their way.

A much bleaker posting comes from "nistix" writing in Meaning in Maddness:

We had to pass though a city called Tetouan where the bus stopped for a while. Yet again we had arrived in another seemingly soulless concrete mess in an area of pure natural beauty. From the bus the tell tell box housing thrown together with haphazard indifference emerged on the horizon. Driving into the station there is a truly mad experience. It is a dark, underground complex full of people. Some of them sit, some stand and some run around shouting, rubbish is littered all around them with abandon and the smell is nauseating, it is one of the truest representations of squalor I have ever seen.

Back on the bus children trust various produce in my face. Their father kept banging on my window and pointing at them making tear gestures. Although I was hungry I was so angry at every encounter that I had had with the people here that I refused to buy anything. I realise now that they were probably really desperate and perhaps I should have helped them.
It was on leaving Tetouan that I began to liken the Moroccan people to blood sucking insects. I was aware that the thoughts entering my head were based on a limited experience of the country but making that analogy at that time was unavoidable.

The bus snaked away from the city through the mountains. We were sitting next to two Australian girls a bit older than us who had been treated to some genuinely warm hospitality. They had been eating their breakfast and got chatting to a Moroccan who took them back to his house in Tetouan for lunch with his family, a sumptuous affair! He then took them to the bus station and waited on the bus with them until it left to shield them from the hustlers. They had been in Morocco for about the same time as us and hadn’t been offered hashish once.

Arriving in Chefchaouen was a liberating experience. The sun was brilliant and was reflected of the jagged rocks of the dramatic landscape and the whitewashed houses of the town. We walked to our hotel with no hassles, just warm welcomes from the genuinely friendly locals. I was finally seeing a brilliant side to this country.

And then there is Scottish Danny. You may have read about him in our post on restaurants. He was the enlightened traveller known for his adventurous spirit - "We were only ever comfortable living the colonial lifestyle in Tangier, which consisted of eating out in plush restaurants, receiving impeccable service from deferential waiters and lying in bed watching BBC World on the widescreen television." Well it will come as no surprise that he was not exactly happy about a trip out in the Medina ending up at a carpet shop. Here he is writing in The Melancholy Death of Danny Boy:

We were taken upstairs into a beautiful leather shop and saw the Tanneries, which is a surreal formation of hand crafted limestone rock pools. There were men crawling all over them like mating seals, slipping and soaking camel, goat and sheep skins inside wide porous holes. Afterwards we were rushed through the medina at a tremendous pace and shunted into a carpet shop, where this chubby Moroccan man with a creepy American accent started interrogating us about carpets. His gurus immediately started rolling out ten foot mosaic carpets and really started pressurising us into buying them, despite the fact we had never even hinted that we wanted to buy anything, let alone, a seven hundred dollar rug.

His faced grimaced when I said I was Scottish and I was in no mood to defy any national stereotypes. When he was made aware of Judith's nationality, he suddenly became very fond of a saying he heard from one of her southern compatriots that 'an Irishman would rather part with his blood than his money'. It was fighting talk and we left pretty swiftly once I refused to buckle to his selling technique and were told to come back once we had a house. I don't know about Judith but I doubt I will be coming back to that carpet shop in the future but like Fes it was a fascinating lesson in human behaviour and one that will never be forgotten.

Mike and Michele’s Global Wanderings reports on their first trip to Fes with a typical Medina experience:

We are in Fes now and have been here for 3 days. Fes, and Morocco in general, is much different from anywhere we have been. The first day we walked around just getting used to the people and the culture. Mike and I very much stand out here. Many Moroccans wear robes and slipper type of shoes. Most of the women have headcoverings. We, on the other hand, are light skinned and wear Western style clothing. Despite our initial intimidation of the Moroccans, we have found them to be very friendly and kind people.

An interesting thing that immediately stands out here is that there are no women sitting out in front of the cafes around town. People watching is a national past time here but only the men do it. It is very strange to see cafe after cafe with the many tables outside filled with men only. We learned that it is o.k. for couples or women to go into a cafe as long as they go upstairs and/or sit in the back. The front tables outside are for the men. The other thing, as I mentioned previously, is that very few people speak English and every sign, newspaper, menu, and all other printed material, is in French and Arabic. So, we are learning both!


To end on a positive note: Howie Klein writes well and has a good eye for detail. This is not his first trip to Morocco and he makes the point that things have changed for the better. Here he is in Around the World Blog commenting on the new signposts in the Fes Medina.

There are now signs posted throughout the labyrinth that makes up the old city, marking sites and routes. I mean, it could be Rome or Dublin almost. It is no longer the forbidding, scary place it has always been reputed to be. We never even felt intimidated to not walk around late at night. We wandered around anywhere we wanted for 3 days essentially unmolested. Maybe the Fassi saw the benefits tourism have brought to Marrakech, but something-- maybe aggressive police action-- has made Fes' medina a lot more comfortable for tourists-- and a lot more profitable for bazaris. It isn't Disneyland yet and you won't see Ma and Pa Kettle ambling around alone yet, but that's probably coming soon. I definitely saw a lot more European families walking around freely.

LINKS:

Around the World Blog. Howie Klein continues to impress with his ability to get beneath the surface. Worth a read of all his posts.

Doc Rampage. A changing view of Fes

Epistolae Flaviae: Not as well written but telling about the authors prejudices.

Thoughts on Sweetness by Jessie Speer. A well observed piece

Meaning in Maddness First impressions are not always great.

Danny does not buy a carpet

Mike and Michele’s Global Wanderings

Tags: Morocco, Fès, Maghreb, news