Day 24: October 24

To see the tanneries, you need to climb up to the roof of one of the nearby houses, which now house shops selling leather goods. As you approach the tanneries, the shopkeepers call you up to their roofs. We keep walking and walking, and when there are almost no tourists left, we finally agree to an invitation at one little shop. We immediately warn them that we do not intend to buy anything, and pay 20 dirhams for entry to the roof. We are each given a bunch of mint so we won’t throw up from the stench coming from the tanneries.

Everyone wrote about the stench. There is an unpleasant smell, but I wouldn’t say it’s that unbearable; at least we tolerated it just fine. Even though we stood on the roof for a long, long time, watching the process. Toward the end they started to chase us away because a large group of Chinese tourists had just arrived. Before that, we were standing on the roof all by ourselves, and we had a very good view of the dye works. I was so pleased!

In the shop where we were on the rooftop, there was a huge selection of bags, and they all seemed pretty good, but I didn’t feel like buying any of them. Then we accidentally went into a small shop across the street, and I immediately liked one bag, so we bought it. This time they only knocked the price down by half :) I really wanted to pick out a bag for Volchiy too, but men’s bags are somehow not very well represented here. So we didn’t find anything all day…

There are a lot of people in the medina — tourists, locals, donkeys — all mixed together. Almost every house is a souvenir shop. We make our way through slowly, but surprisingly we like it here. No one is really bothering us, the sellers aren’t pushy, and there are no fake guides in sight yet.

We enter one of the madrasas, a Muslim educational institution. It is a three-story building, with a courtyard and fountain in the center, and many small rooms opening off it. There are many tourists here, but overall the impression of the madrasa is rather mediocre.

Along one of the main streets, we reach the blue gates — the main entrance to the medina. We are very tired and want to sit somewhere and rest. There are almost no restaurants inside the medina; there are many at the entrance near the blue gates, but the touts there are pushy.

We leave the medina and sit down on the terrace at the nearest restaurant, phew. No one bothers us here, it’s comfortable to sit, and we can watch the locals and tourists trudging toward the medina.

We order two Moroccan soups — harira — and two teas. We eat all this with semolina flatbreads, harcha, bought along the way. The tea is brought in tall faceted glasses with lots of mint, which is very pleasing. And the soup turned out to be one of the best we ate in Morocco. We had a good rest, and now we can keep going — toward home, and the road there is not close, all the way through the medina in the opposite direction.

The medina in Fez is a fascinating adventure. A kaleidoscope of colors, sounds, smells, people, houses, doors. I liked it here much more than I thought I would. But by the end I really wanted to return to the hotel to process the flood of emotions in a peaceful setting. There are so many emotions here — admiration, joy, amazement.