Fez, 17 June 2024

Okay, remember yesterday how I said today would be Eid al Adha? It was. Out in the medina (meaning: old city, of which Fez’s is the oldest in Morocco, first built in the 8th century). There’s apparently a newer medina in another part of Fez (it was two settlements originally that merged together over time), which was built way more recently, and by recently I mean in the 12th century.

During Eid observers will slaughter the sheep they had been bringing to the city all week, to commemorate a biblical event, and so today there were a bunch of kids with fresh sheep skins discarded in the street (they’ll get sold to the tannery, which you’ll get to see below) grilling the heads and feet of the sheep, to get the hooves and horns off in good shape.

I’ll digress for a moment here to remind the reader that I eat meat and I’m not particularly squeamish about knowing how that works, but it’s still a little overwhelming at times to see so much.

On the other hand, the medina was actually pretty empty today. Almost everyone was at home, inside, preparing for the feasts tonight. Like I said yesterday: imagine visiting a city the day of a huge festival where everyone in the city was spending the day with their families. It’s precisely like that. The streets, usually quite bustling, are now pretty quiet and empty. Almost everything is closed- even the hotel where we were staying didn’t have lunch; we had to go somewhere else to a much fancier hotel (which was pretty much empty, it was just us and the staff- I tipped pretty well, since I felt like they had a lot of people there for just us).

Walking tour was pretty cool, and we finally got to meet the other folks on our trip with us. It’s a small group (through Thread Caravan); including another master ceramicist from Oaxaca (Macrina Martinez (insta)) - she’s worked with Thread Caravan trips in the past with people visiting Oaxaca, so she’s here to have a vacation and also do cultural / ceramic exchange with Mama Aicha, the ceramicist we’re here to learn from. It is all quite humbling- I’m a hobbyist and here I am with professional artists. Open mind- I’m going to be learning a ton, and it’s not my job to impress anyone else on the trip.

Insert long digression on the nature of impostor syndrome and other random stuff I’m always kind of wrestling with here. Or not; I’ll leave it uninserted, and you all can think about the other times you’ve been around impressive people and thought of yourself as Not Enough. Or maybe that’s just a me thing. Regardless, the rest of the travel crew is super-cool and interesting and I’m looking forward to learning handbuilding techniques and hearing stories of interesting lives.

Going on a walking tour with a guide means you get into places that might otherwise be closed (or not) but we visited the tannery on that walkabout; the festival meant it wasn’t too busy. The smell is mostly from pigeon poo, of which ammonia is the key part, although it really wasn’t that bad. They gave us little sprigs of mint to hold and breathe in to as we climbed the stairs higher into the tannery, which was nice either way. The rest of the rooms were devoted to showing off the leather goods made here.

In the end, we didn’t buy anything from the tannery, or from the weaver shop, where I learned about Cactus Silk. Not actually silk, but it’s a (probably cellulose) fiber from an African Agave plant (so not cactus either, but you try saying succulent silk or whatever); it’s super shiny and got a great lustre when woven. We might come back on the return leg of our trip (after the pottery lessons) and get a tablecloth. There was some really great weaving on display there. I’ll need to get over my aversion to bartering, I guess.

Someday when I’m not tired from a long day, I’ll reflect on my aversion to bartering in these kinds of situations. I mean: I can afford to waste money on all kinds of random crap. I’ve done so. I’m a tourist from America, and thus sort of complicit in global capitalist hegemony? So I feel kind of weird bartering- if I can afford to pay full price, maybe I should just pay what they ask? But who knows. Like I said at the start of this paragraph, this is a thing that may require more reflection. I’ll put it in the queue right after the digression into impostor syndrome and feeling like the things I’m good at are boring since I’m good at them and the things other people are good at are inherently interesting (also on our trip is a professional photographer).

Remember when I showed the Nejjarine fountain yesterday? Turns out “Nejjarine” means woodworker. The fountain, square, souk (marketplace), and the museum behind this door are all named for that. This is the woodworker’s quarter. It was mostly closed, since Eid, but here’s a cool reason to have a tour guide once in a while - you learn stuff. I remember noticing all the woodworkers nearby when we were wandering around yesterday, so now I know something I didn’t know before. I normally don’t like tour guides, it’s the old demand avoidance kicking in - I could be super interested in something, but if someone else wants to tell me, I need to struggle to want to listen. I’m not saying this is good, it’s just how my brain works, and here’s an example of the cool things that can happen when I … you know, shove all my normal brain stuff into the corner and try to go along with the crowd. The trick is knowing when my weird brain is hindering me and when it’s just different.

Anywho, that’s enough reflection for the night. Next couple of days will have spotty network, so I’ll queue up the posts and lump them all down at the end of the week.

Oh yeah: another thing I learned, this building used to be a caravanserei, and the big door was there so the camels and horses could get in. They’d hang out on the bottom floor and the merchants on the upper floors. Later, when the French colonized Morocco, it was a prison where they put Nationalists who were guilty of fighting for the freedom of their country from a colonizing power. But yeah, getting late - we’ll ruminate on colonization and decolonization sometime in the future.