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LISBON-
MARRAKECH-
BARCELONA
2004
PORTUGAL:
Tides and Tiles
MOROCCO:
Into Interzone
Medina Medina O Let Me Sleep
Like Prozac in the Desert
The Chicken Thieves
1001 Guides through Fès
Chilling in Chaouen
SPAIN:
Ruining of the Bulls
MOROCCO
(video)
color, 4'22"
June/July 04
View/Download:
Quicktime-
240x180, 8.8 MB
[ PHOTO ARCHIVE ]
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Fès / Morocco
04 - 07 July 2004
Bab Bou Jeloud - Blue Gate. Fès.
The next morning I take the 09:30 train from Marrakech to Fès. The train passes through Casablanca, Rabat, Meknes, then finally pulls into Fès a few minutes late, sometime around 5 p.m. I'm excited to be in Fès, feeling like this is really the place I've been waiting for. This, I am hoping will be the Morocco that I've always wanted to see. So many stories I have read or heard about Fès. How it is a magical and mythical and insane place.
Somehow in my mind I was expecting it to be like Varanasi, in India, another ancient city, clusters of crumbling structures and interconnected with a myriad of narrow passage ways. Ancient and infinitely curious. A maze, a living labyrinth of humanity. And Fès proves to indeed be all of these things. But I could not have properly estimated just how insane and aggressive this place could be.
Into the Labyrinth. Fès.
Upon arriving at the Bab Bou Jeloud, the gateway forking into the entrails of Fès' medina, the touts swarm like hawks to the red petit-taxis fresh arrivals from the train. It takes effort to reassert independence, stability, and get to the hotel without unwanted company. Within an hour of getting here, into the medina, I'm already witnessing my first altercation between several angry characters outside the hotel. There in the entry way, the broad opening square to the maze, the motley street crew gather themselves. The oldest is at most 18, however the average age is more likely 13 or 14.
These street punks are ever so anxious to whisk you away for an unofficial guide through the medina. They chain-smoke cheap cigarettes plied from the foreigners, eternally eyeing up the square, waiting for new prey. One such hawk is relatively cleanly dressed, and his shirt even tucked into a pair of unwrinkled pants that fit. His slick black hair sweeps behind his ears and falls to his shoulders, cascading over the turned collar of a blue plaid button-up short sleeve shirt. His eyes hide behind dark sunglasses. A cigarette hangs cockeyed from his dry, parted lips, revealing a set of teeth cleaner and whiter than I expect.
He hits me up for the usual- a medina tour. "Maybe tomorrow?" he asks, but I insist against it. Besides, there is something about him that makes me not able to trust him. I can't place it. Then he asks me about my tattoos, asks to lift my sleeves so he can see the blue-black pictures there. With a sly smile he tells me how he's got something under his sleeves, too. He pauses to take a drag from his cigarette, pulls it from his lips, then rolls up his left shirt sleeve to reveal sets of thoroughly unsettling raised scars, lines of mutilation that extend from the nub of his young elbow clear up to his shoulder. Seeing them it is impossible not to think of him or some friend of his with a knife, drunk, and slicing deep horrible, masochistic lines into his flesh. The faintest scarring of blurred, home-made needle and ink tattooing, some sort of Arabic script, crowns the collection of ugly, three-dimensional scars. I feel uneasy. That he makes a correlation between what he has done to his body and me to mine is such an unpleasant thought to me.
Texture, Colour, Volume. medina. Fès.
Assault on all Senses. medina. Fès.
Almost as good as my half-goat photo from China. Fès.
Nearly an hour later I am walking back through the heart of the sweltering medina when the intense reality of Fès rushes to me all at once. I am walking the winding section of the main passage, a slight uphill, perhaps a few hundred meters from the gate into the medina. Light and sound come from every direction: electric bulbs or cooking fires burning in the stalls and storefronts; speech, sizzling, sorting, shoving, singing, and shouting assaulting my overloaded ears. The afternoon sun pierces through the cross-hatch wooden roofing, beams of bright light patterned on the walls, on the stones.
My pace slows, I am trying to take it all in. I peer into the displays, see unidentifiable morsels or mounds of presumably edible substances. Shopkeepers wave and wiggle dirty fingers to try to direct my attention to their repetitive wares. A section of the wall is lined with about three dozen assorted bird cages housing frightened little birds, their peeps washed away in the relentless current of sound. At the foot of a table, a box of small kittens meowing, further up, a tub of fish, then wooden crates with disoriented chickens, and burlap sacks of pigeons pushing around, next a lone goat tethered to a rusty doorknob.
Amidst the chaos and clutter, somehow my attention drifts to the gutter, a thin canal running downhill along side the medina pathway. A slight trickle of dirty water turns into a river of vermillion red, a current of draining blood flowing past me, taking the crumbs, insects, and rubbish to an unseen endpoint.
Breaking the Code. Fès.
Lamrani Hotel Entrance. Fès.
The early morning call to prayer begins sometime around three-thirty a.m. I lay in bed in my small third floor room. I wake, but not entirely. I look around the room's dim shadows and outlines. Next to me, a pile of books on the desk. A thin brown towel drying over the back of the old wooden chair. The call to prayer continues on for several minutes. Dizzy, sleepy, I cannot remember when it started or how long it will go on. I can hear it coming now from several directions, most clearly from the mosque which I can see when I sit up and look out the window at the low city skyline. I fall back asleep, only to wake up some short dream-laden hours later when the five a.m. sun is peering in to my room.
Mornings are spent at the café on the square. There I have a basket of bread, fresh orange juice, and coffee. I sit and read, watch the people moving past. I buy a bottle of water and head off into the medina. Again, the tiresome calls of the anxious shopkeepers, the unending advances of children eager to be a guide in a medina they promise I will otherwise hopelessly lose myself within. I pause to watch families washing in the fountain before heading into the mosque for worship. I am not allowed in, but I can look in and see endless rows of carpet with patterns directing the submitting worshippers in the direction of Mecca. In the doorway, men of all ages sit or recline on benches, on the floor. They rest there in the shade, respite from the heat of the day.
Old Royal Residence. Fès.
Dye, Dye my Darling. Rooftop over the Tanneries. Fès.
On the third day I meet up with the Australians again. They have decided to hire a young man as a guide to bring us to some of the harder to find locations within the Medina. We set out and are led to some interesting locations indeed: the innards of the leatherworking tanneries, then to the roofs for a decent view of the houses and the men toiling in stinking pits of chemicals and dyes. Dozens of blue skins dry in the sun. Below us a man and small boy tireless scrub hides by yellow dye then leave them to dry on patches of straw.
We visit some interior gardens, old tiled residences, harem rooms, and also a fancy Riad, where, were I accompanied I would definitely consider an overnight stay. It is beautiful and enchanting, a real luxury accommodation that reminds me of the palace hotels in India where I also wished I had the opportunity to have stayed a night or two.
In the afternoons I often eat grilled vegetable sandwiches from a small stand near the medina's main entrance and courtyard. The man there smiles every time I pass by, and should I be even the slightest bit hungry, I'll stop and get a sandwich or some of the fried spicy potatoes from him.
Coming from the Mellah. Fès.
I spend more time exploring other parts of the city. Long walks taken slowly. Fès is a strange, magical place, but the aggression and the hyperactivity wears me thin quickly. Rarely an hour passes that I don't see some kind of argument or fight on the street. However it may be, from my imagination or not, I just don't feel very welcome either. Even my attempts at few-worded exchanges in Arabic don't raise many smiles, much to my dismay. And almost all peaceful or simple attempts at conversation seem to culminate with some point of sales.
I want to be a friend, to learn, to see, to experience. I want to offer more than just my money. I want a positive human connection, not just a cold cash transaction. There seems to be so little understanding of that, and in general I feel a regrettable distance from the people, despite all my efforts to maintain a smile, to be friendly.
I often find myself having to escape the seething crowds, the irritating stream of demands and beckoning or insults. I hide on the roof of the hotel, or disappear into a dark café and slowly drink tea, try to calm down and maintain a positive attitude and mood.
Looking for Allah in Everyone. Fès.
One Happy Little Moroccan Boy. Fès.
The Camel X-mas Oranament Seller Old Man. Fès.
However, on my second afternoon in Fès I have an experience which manages to really spin me in a negative direction: An eighteen year 'guide' approaches me, insists he wants company, wants to practice English. Fearing not much more than eventually having to tell him I don't want to buy anything and I don't really need a guide, I agree to go with him for a glass of piping hot fresh mint tea in a café of his choice. Fortunately, it's a local back-street place, our fellow tea drinkers are Berbers twice my age laying about on the floor playing cards and smoking like chimneys.
The boy's name, I learn, is Mohammed, which he quickly seems to want to prove by showing me his identification. So far, he seems friendly enough and I am not bothered. But I realize quickly how I am constantly trying to change the topic of conversation, to divert him from talking about drugs. All his stories or questions end up with him trying to interest me in buying some absurd quantity of hashish from him, which I repeatedly tell him I have no intention or interest to do. He raves about the mountain village where he says he is from, where everyone just smokes Kif all day long and lives a very merry life. Do I want to go there? No, no thank you. I tell him I'm going to Chefchaouen in a few days where it promises to be tranquil enough.
It gets to the point that I tell him I need to go, but he persuades me to go with him now to a carpet shop- not just any shop- his dear Uncle's carpet shop of course! Perhaps out of curious boredom I agree to go, warning young Mohammed repeatedly that I do not want to buy a carpet, but if his Uncle really does want to have a tea and talk in German about Moroccan carpets, why the proverbial hell not?
Uncle Carpet ends up being one of the highest pressure schizophrenic salesmen I've ever met, going back and forth from mister nice and friendly guy tactic to angry rants about how his business is terrible and nobody buys anything and all tourists have money but never want to spend it. He even feigns misunderstanding at one point and beings packaging-up one carpet he has been hopelessly trying to interest me in. Utterly confused I ask him what he's doing, and then need to tell him he's most definitely misunderstood me as I never agreed to buy, let alone asked to have a carpet wrapped up for me to mail home. Shortly thereafter I literally wrench myself out of his please-don't-go grip and return to the medina paths with a now livid, bloodshot-eyed high-as-a-kite 'friend' / guide / would-be Kif dealer. Why didn't I buy anything, he cries. Now he won't get any money, and after all he is so poor, he insists.
Angry to have not sold me 5 or 10 kilograms of illegal recreational substances and angry to not get a fat commission from a massively overpriced piece of garbage rug, now young Mohammed grabs my arm and points at a small shop counter. 'You buy nothing, you give nothing, you buy pack cigarettes for me NOW!' I laugh. What? You're joking, no? 'No joking! You buy! I talk English you two hours, you buy nothing, now you buy cigarettes me!' I tell him what I think of his convoluted idea of 'friendship' and suggest we take a walk to the police if he's really got a problem.
Then he starts trying to lead me into unpopulated, dead end paths without being able to clarify where it is he wants to go. No way. I continue walking on the main street and am gradually raising my tone of voice in telling him his demands will win him nothing. He follows me around topping his impressive threats with 'here too many people, but if no people I do you something bad!' Eventually I pull out the near-empty packet of Moroccan cigarettes from my pocket, hand it to him, and tell him in Arabic to get lost. When he sees I am walking towards three uniformed police officers at the main gate, he comes to his senses as best he can despite the joint he smoked in the café and follow-up joint he smoked in the carpet shop... He quickly heads the other direction, cursing me in Arabic, already frantically pulling one of the wrinkled smokes from the half-crumpled package.
Actually, I cross paths with him the next day and he apologizes non-stop for a good few minutes and tells me 'please no trouble, you, me, no problems, no police, please, very sorry!' I shake hands with him and end up feeling much less tense myself.
One Clean Donkey. Fès.
Late in the afternoon I meet a German couple who have just arrived in Fès. They are at the same hotel. We make pleasant conversation- I enjoy getting to talk to them in German, as when abroad often several days passes between my opportunities to converse in German. We eat dinner on a roof terrace overlooking the medina. We take a late night walk through the medina just as much of it is beginning to close up. The crowds thin, items are stored, doors are closed. We walk a good long way into the medina, getting adventurous.
Eventually we manage in getting ourselves quite into the thick of it, a good ways from 'home' and decide it's time to employ one of the neighborhood kiddies. He seems to understand a little bit of French, but no English, and I explain where we need to go. His eyes light up, he heads off at a swift pace through alleys and tunnels and passages, over sleeping animals and street dwellers. After ten fast walking paced minutes things begin to look familiar again, I catch up to him, lay a hand on his shoulder, point to the gate which I can see over the crest of the buildings that lay ahead, smile and tell him Shukran- thanks!
We give him a small tip, and he trots back down the hill into the maze from which we came. I watch his shadowy figure vanish under a crumbling archway just as the late evening call to worship begins from a nearby muzzenin.
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