Morocco Day 2 part 1
Woke up in our beautiful Riad Fes Baraka and went to breakfast. We walked right outside our room sat down and within minutes our coffee and breakfast was there. Every morning was the same, delicious Moroccon flat bread (msemen), honey, fresh butter, strawberry and apricot jam, an egg and a little regular bread. All of this was served on a gorgeous tile table in a little corner of the courtyard.
Our guide for the day came a picked us up at the Riad and we were off to explore the city. I don’t usually hire guides when I go to new cities, I usually have a plan as to what to see and do, but everything I had read about Fez said how confusing the streets were (correctly), I thought it would be a time saver as we had a limited amount of days. This was a huge time saver, our guide was born and raised in Fez and was able to cut through all of the little alleyways to get us around. He was a little light on the informational side of things but for $40 a day it was worth it for the time savings alone.
We jumped in the car and he started giving direction to head to first stop. The Dar al-Makhzen or Royal Palace of Fes. We parked the car and walked around the Palace gates, its not open to the public but just seeing these massive gates was very impressive. The doors are actually bronze that is polished to look like gold.
The details on all of the mosaic work is just incredible, the doors are huge and just thinking about the amount of time that goes into making this is mind blowing.
After getting some pics we walked around the corner and started to go through the old Jewish Quarter. The buildings were different here than the rest of Fes as you could see most of the old buildings had second story balconies.
The Jewish Quarter also had these really narrow alleyways even for Fes which was just all these narrow passages. The guide told us that there are not alot of Jewish people left in Fes, most emigrated to Israel after it’s creation. There were only about a thousand left that still lived in the old quarter.
I could not resist taking this quick shot of some of the new residents in the Jewish quarter. They just set up and built wherever they felt like it.
From here, we jumped back in the car and drove put to the Borj Nord that overlooks the whole city. We didn’t go into war museum at the top, just took a few snaps of us overlooking the whole city.
The next part of the tour was a little bit of a sales call situation. The guide said we were going to see a factory in Fes where pottery was made by hand. When he said that I had a suspicion of what was about to come. It was very interesting to see all the pottery being made, but there was definitely a hard sell at the end of the whole tour. The guide started talking about how they use only black clay to create the best pottery in Fez, and then showed us how the worker was using his leg to spin the pottery wheel to shape all the pots. It was impressive to see how this guy was doing everything by eye and not measuring anything. He created that Tanjin pot right in front of us in just a couple minutes, both pot and lid fit perfectly and was completely by sight.
The next guy was just flattening out the clay and then cutting them to size, that way the can glaze them and then break them into smaller pieces for all the mosaics they do.
The silver smiths next were very interesting, the would take the silver wire lay it out so it would be flat or braid it together to make stands. Then they would heat these iron bars and use them to heat the silver into the pot as a design with silver. It was cool to see how fast these guys were able to attach the silver to the vases.
The final workers we saw were some of the people that did the hand painting of the vases. All designs were done by hand and they would work at this unbelievably fast pace. The guy in the picture was able to paint that little plate in less than 5 minutes. It was then off to show us the molds where they build the mosaics into, upside down so it all is put together. They have to build them upside down so they can lay binders and clay on the back side of the mosaic pieces. A wide shot of the whole operation and some of the finished product.
Of course, the hard sell was next… The guy started out at $200 for the vase because it had all the silver on it, but in the end I got it for $80. We laughed and chatted the whole time about it, I was trying to keep the bargaining light and fun. After being called “Part Berber” a couple times, he let me get the vase for just $80. When I went to pay the guy behind the register, he said something to my sales guy then asked me if there was anyway I could give $10 more for the vase. I had read about this tactic before and told both of them I couldn’t. I offered to buy something smaller instead and they took the $80 for the vase.
When we first got here I was annoyed that my guide dragged us to this type tourist trap/ sales trap, but looking back on it now, it was cool to see them making the ceramics and I do have some good memories about these workers building these beautiful vases.
Day 2 Part 2 will be coming soon.