Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Day 4: walking around the medina and our first class


Last night was the best night of our trip so far. We stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning talking and getting to know each other so well. We just invited everyone up to the boys room and had great conversations.

As a result, we were all dead tired today when we had to wake up for a 9 o'clock tour of the Medina. We walked over to ALIF at 9 where we met our guide, Hakim. He is a grad student at a university in Fez and also an official tour guide for all of Morocco. He wore a jalaba (spelling?) which are like these cool wizard robes that I really want to buy. Everyone on the trip has slowly become more and more obsessed with jalabas. 

So anyways, Hakim got us all taxis and we rode over to the Medina. He walked us first to the ALIF riad in the Medina. A riad is a Morocco home with a central courtyard garden, typically featuring a fountain, with all the buildings situated around it. The ALIF riad was purchased and refurbished in the past 5 years and is gorgeous. It is a place in the medina where we can go to do work in the afternoons and hang out with our friends. It serves a social space for us without having to take a taxi all the way back to ALIF. After seeing the riad, Hakim took us to the main gates of the Medina, called the Blue Gates. The side facing outwards is blue, the color of the city of Fez whereas the side facing inwards is green, the color of Islam. Throughout the hours we walked through the Medina we only walked on two of the streets we had walked on during our previous trip there. Hakim informed us that the medina has 9,600 streets and 10,000 homes! He took us to a mosque/theological college where he talked to us about Islam, through the meat market where they sold everything from ribs to brains to testicles to camel heads, to a preschool classroom where we sat with the students and were serenaded by the 4 to 6 year olds, to the oldest religious college in the world which you cannot enter unless you can recite the entire Koran by memory, to a different tannery in the medina, to a carpet and scarf-making building where they showed us how to work looms and dressed us up in scarves, and, lastly, to our lunch spot at the Fez cafe. We probably walked somewhere between 6 and 8 kilometers today! 

The Fez cafe was an old villa owned by one of the richest families in Fez. When the French left in the 50's, many poor people moved into the recently vacated homes, which has led to the degradation of the medina over the past 50 years. The family that owned the property that the Fez Cafe is on left in the 50's and 14 families moved into the former home for the older family's concubines. The Fez Cafe bought it all out and restored it a couple years ago, replanting the garden, repainting most of the buildings, and fixing up the infrastructure. We went on a house tour which was cool because we learned all about life in a harem, which is related to the book that we are reading, Dreams of Trespass. We had a delicious lunch of chicken tagine with a variety of appetizers. 

After lunch, we barely made it back to ALIF in time for the first lecture of our Gender in the Medina class. Luckily, it was just an overview of the syllabus and it only lasted 45 minutes. I went home to take a nap, some of the girls went for a run, and other people just did some odds and ends. 

At 7:30 we went to our obligatory dinner at McDonald's. It was such a welcome break from chicken, chicken, chicken all the time. I had a big mac which was decent. They had real ketchup and real barbecue sauce too! Meredith was way too excited about the meal and already wants us to start going back for McDonald's Mondays. We were back at the hotel before Knife O'clock and are happy to finally have a break today.

The biggest highlight of our day was that everyone has decided to live in the Medina! Originally, 4 of the 10 of us had planned to live in the Ville Nouvelle part, but they have come around to the idea of life in the Medina. Learning about and seeing the ALIF riad today was definitely a swing factor for some and a reassuring item for those already medina-bound. We are excited to be living together in the medina starting next week!

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