Tag Archives: photograph

Fes – shops

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Of course a person could hardly stay out of the shops in the medina if she tried. (I say “she” here because Mr. I-Hate-Shopping, a.k.a. Dan, did not seem to share this problem.) Everything was interesting, desirable, and infinitely photogenic. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Herbs and essences

Spices and herbs

Olives and pickles

Chickens and eggs. (So *that’s* where all the crowing was coming from!)

Camel’s head and other meats

Hand-loomed fabrics

The loom in the back of the shop, where some of the fabrics were made

Musical instruments

Antiques and odd objects. Cat not for sale.

Yes, of course, rugs. Beautiful rugs in a beautiful space. What’s a medina without rug stores?

Fes – streets of the medina

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What gives the medina of Fes such character are its streets. They are narrow and intense. And almost completely pedestrian. There was the occasional donkey delivering goods to the shops–“medina taxis,” the natives joked.

We hardly knew whether to look at the people, or the shops, or the wares arrayed attractively in the streets, or the architectural gems that appear here and there–or just to sink into the experience, the world’s complete opposite of a sensory-deprivation chamber, and enjoy everything.

This broad square is just inside one of the gates.

 

Here we look down from above at the texture of the light, the street, the wares, and the people.

   

Maybe these few examples provide a good idea of the beauty of the busy market streets. And it turns out that the quiet side streets have their beauty, too.

 

 

Fes – Ryad Salama

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Our experience in Fes, though short, was so dense that I hardly know where to begin. Probably the easiest thing is to begin with our “home” in Fes, the peaceful Ryad Salama.

The cat is a real cat–one of Fes’s many charming feline inhabitants–and not part of the signpost.

Ryad Salama is a “ryad” or “riad” converted into a bed & breakfast, and run by the charmant Michel Trezzy. A ryad is a large structure oriented around an interior courtyard. This one offers six rooms and a suite; our room, the Amandine, had a king-size bed, a sitting area, and a private balcony overlooking the courtyard and pool area. Lovely! Here are pictures of the door to our balcony and the rug in the sitting area (made of “cactus silk, a fiber spun from a variety of agave cactus, this rug inspired us to purchase a rug made of the same fiber in the same soft colors).

 

Here are views of the courtyard and pool from our peaceful balcony.

   

I should add that the food here–both French and Moroccan menus are offered–was very good. As was the Moroccan wine.

 

Fes – view over the medina

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On our second evening in Fes, and having discovered that with the help of our map, we were capable of handling the challenge of finding our way through the medina’s maze, we made our way over to the Sofitel Palais Dar Jamai to watch the sunset from the terrace.

Of course we were not quite capable of handling the challenge of fending off friendly medina residents who wanted nothing more than to help us get wherever we were going–with stops at their father’s shop and their cousin’s restaurant along the way. So somewhere en route we picked up a boy of maybe ten years old who knew enough English to be a voluble guide to the district, but hadn’t seemed to have learned the phrase “No thanks.” He did an admirable, if slightly roundabout, job of guiding us to the hotel that we were perfectly capable of finding on our own, and we paid him 2 dirhams for the assistance. And, frankly, for the delightful company.

The view from the terrace of the hotel was expansive, as the guidebook had promised. And the patterns of the rooftops and towers of the medina were entrancing.

What we hadn’t expected was the smog. We should have, of course. Even though no cars or motorbikes are allowed in the medina, the rest of the city is busy with them, and air pollution knows no boundaries. And the smog seemed to get worse as the dusk deepened. It’s sad, really, in such a beautiful city.

 

Casablanca — the fish market

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Casablanca’s great central food market lies off the lovely Muhammed V Street. And at its very center is a fish market, with dozens of stalls selling this morning’s catch, fresh from the sea.

They were still setting up the morning we arrived. A recently cut swordfish head stood by the entry. Other fish also awaited their artful placement in the vendors’ displays.

 

And I do mean “artful placement.” The stalls that had finished setting up were beautiful.

   

Dan looked at me wistfully and said, “This fish market alone is almost enough to make me want to live in Casablanca.”

 

 

Morocco, the food

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Moroccan food is amazingly delicious. Period, end of statement. I don’t think we had one thing we didn’t like. And it’s beautifully served, too.

Our first night in Casablanca, which was also our first night in Morocco, we wandered the streets of the new medina after dark looking for something that might have the feel of someplace Moroccan that is yet also unpretentious and comfortable. We eliminated the idea of eating at the hotel from a menu whose prices might make some American restauranteurs gasp. Other restaurants seemed too tourist-oriented; nix on the Cafe de France right across the street from the hotel. The first floors of the street cafes and eateries were inhabited exclusively by (mostly cigarette-smoking) Moroccan men. Nix on the comfortable criterion. What we found, by chance, was Le Riad Restaurant on Mohamed El Quorri Street. It was upstairs from one of the seemingly all-male cafes. The decor was Moroccan-style and looked authentic. And it was beautiful.

  

And the menu was as attractive as the decor. We ordered a tagine of chicken with preserved lemon from the fixed-price menu. It came with a Moroccan salad of diced tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and onions with cumin and lemon juice. We also ordered a harira soup and a vegetarian couscous. This didn’t seem like much–a first course and a main dish for each of two people–and we were hungry. The food was wonderful, but we couldn’t finish it. In truth, we couldn’t finish half of it.

Dan and I were brought up to clean our plates. We don’t like to leave food uneaten that will probably have to be thrown out. It feels selfish and wasteful. At a certain level, the rest of our trip in Morocco might be looked at as a quest to figure out how to order the right amount of food.

The darned thing was, we couldn’t finish a meal even when we ordered only one meal for the two of us. It didn’t help that several Moroccan people assured us that they eat these quantities regularly. It also didn’t help that the food was invariably breathtakingly, staggeringly good.

And so, perhaps it was only appropriate that our last night in Casablanca, which was also our last night in Morocco, we returned, wiser now, to Le Riad Restaurant. We ordered one meal from the a la carte menu:

    1. a bowl of harira (7 dhs)
    2. a Moroccan salad (10 dhs)
    3. a small chicken-and-olive tagine (25 dhs)

I emphasize that it was a small tagine because a large tagine was also offered for just 10 dirhams more. With about 8.2 dirhams to the dollar, this meal cost about $5 for the two of us, plus tax and tip.

And we couldn’t finish it.

Casablanca, looking over the old medina

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We booked a luxury hotel in Casablanca (the Hyatt Regency) for our first night, using Dan’s accumulated points. Our excuse for this indulgence, besides for the fact that it was “free,” was that we were bound to be exhausted from our flights and wanted to immerse ourselves more slowly into Moroccan culture. We were given a room on the sixth floor looking out across the old medina toward the Atlantic Ocean, which could barely be made out through the haze. The view took in the famous Hassan II mosque as well as the working port.

 

Now maybe, like me, you’re focused on the main attractions–the mosque and the port–but maybe, like Dan, you’ve noticed something odd about the rooftops of the old city.

Have you ever seen such an array of satellite dishes? How are all these people in this (presumably) poor section of town getting the money for satellite dishes? Many days later we learned that there are organizations who will give satellite dishes to those too poor to buy one for themselves. As for a TV, however, the people are on their own. How many, we wonder, have them? Is that what our juvenile “guides” are saving their tips toward?

Morocco photographs

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I have been sorting through the photographs from Dan’s and my trip to Morocco last month. There are about a thousand of them, so this is big job. Now that “film” has gotten so cheap, we take so many pictures. Since it now seems evident that it will be some time before I can publish this whole trip, I thought I’d get started with a random favorite photo here or there from out of the pile.

These goats seemed happily ensconced in this argan tree. Argan trees grow only in Morocco. They produce nuts from which people make an oil that allegedly has healthful properties and seems to work well on dry skin. It is nearly as impossible to escape Morocco without a argan-oil product as it is to escape without a rug.

After we stopped and I took this photo, the shepherd–an old man with astonishingly bad teeth–appeared seemingly from nowhere and demanded ten dirhams (about $1.20). I didn’t mind paying him. The absence of goats in other nearby argan trees strongly suggested that the shepherd had put these goats there somehow. But ten dirhams seemed excessive in a country given to exaggerated bargaining. I gave him the two dirhams that were in my pocket, and he seemed well pleased. I probably overpaid.