Day 4 - Fes

We took this day really easy and mostly just lounged around Ali and Tasneem's apartment until the sun started to go down a bit. But, then, we ventured into the Fes Medina. In Arabic, medina just means "city," but in Morocco it also means the oldest part of the city. Fes Medina has been around since the Middle Ages, and it apparently hasn't changed that much. The streets are extremely narrow - in some places only wide enough for one person at a time, and they wind around in a sort of labyrinth that is nearly impossible to navigate. It was kind of awesome!

Obviously they can't drive cars down these narrow streets, so there were a lot of donkeys. It was set up like the Marrakech souqs in that there were just stalls and stalls of vendors, but I got the impression that the people in the stalls also actually made the merchandise since several times we passed by artisans handcrafting their wares. Also, the vendors did not harrass us. Many of them kind of shouted out to us to come look in their store, but when we said no, they left us alone.

The medina is broken up into these small public squares where the streets meet, and there is a public water fountain in nearly all of them.

In the end, we decided to go to the tanneries. However, getting there proved difficult. It's a big attraction, so a lot of people approach and offer to take you there, especially children. You can't go onto the tannery floor; you have to go up on someone's balcony and look down on it. So, we agreed to let an older lady take us up to a "terrasse" where we could look down on the tanneries. She took us to a staircase, accepted a small tip, and left. We climbed the staircase and ended up in a rug shop. The people there let us up onto their roof where they said they had a great view. They did, I guess, but not of the tanneries! Swindled! We took a bunch of pictures of Fes anyway, then wandered back downstairs only to discover that the shop owners expected payment. Ali talked them down from whatever exorbitant price they were asking to the equivalent of about $2. So, we paid two people to take us to see absolutely nothing. Ugh!

We finally made it, though, and got there around 6:30 or so. I had read in several places not to go in the afternoon because they use pigeon poo to treat the leather, and when it has been baking in the sun all day long, it STINKS. As you might imagine poo would. We braved it anyway, and it did smell pretty bad, but it was not as bad as I was expecting from reading other people's comments about it. Wussies. While we were there, they told us they also treat it with cow urine. I, of course, bought a handbag there. Who could resist that combo?

The brown ones are the poo vats. The white ones are chalk. That big wooden drum at the bottom middle of the picture is a giant laundry vat for washing the leather.

These are the skins being hung out to dry.

These are the dyes. We were there the day before they changed the colors, so it's hard to see. You can see orange in the back left and green in the front left.