Rooftops, riads and the right way to kill a chicken, in Fez, Morocco.
This weekend made the shortlist for the best ever introduction to a new place: walking into a gorgeous Moroccan riad to find my sister, who I haven't seen since April, glowing from a 3 month adventure around Nepal and Indonesia, waiting for me with a pot of mint tea. After significant badgering of our parents, Mols came out and visited me 3 days before her new term started at LSE. What a trooper. We explored the medina, did an amazing cookery workshop and had some serious rooftop catch up sessions, and I couldn't have asked for a better weekend with my number one lady.
The medina (or 'old city') of Fez, Morocco, is said to be the best preserved in the entire Arab world. As we wound our way through its heart, the coiled streets hummed with activity. Afternoon light filtered over the high stone walls and shone a soft gold onto a labyrinth of narrow passage-ways, towering keyhole doorways and leather workshops, and the smell of dye and dust hung heavy in the air. Every corner seemed to reveal a new reward for our curiosity- we found carved doors marking the burial place of Sufi mystics, where pilgrims still came to pay tribute and pray. We saw tight circles of women holding babies aloft wrapped in white cloth, chatting rapidly in local dialect, and the late sunlight caught the swirling dust and gave them all halos; their children really looked like angels at that golden hour. Or a tiny souk where lavender, carob and orange blossom honey was piled high around a little courtyard, and we knew this place had hardly changed in the last one thousand years. The whole place felt heavy with history, and even the donkeys, the taxis of the old medina, seemed to have this air of confidence, of permanence that comes from over a millennia of plodding stoically through the same tangle of alleyways.
Our foray into Moroccan cookery began when we ducked through a nondescript doorway tucked down a side street, and entered the beautiful open courtyard of a traditional home, or 'riad'. Waiting there was our family for the night, and we exchanged smiles and hugs with four sisters and their two friends, the latter both fluent in Arabic, English and French, and who helped translate between us. We decided on our dishes and entered the street, pushing our way through the gathered throngs of the local market, headed for wooden carts laden with a rainbow of towering fruits and vegetables; giant orange squash, flowering zucchini and eggplant for our vegetable tagine, along with a mound of spices: ground ginger, pepper, saffron and turmeric. After some passionate haggling with the stall holder over an enormous pumpkin, we left with overflowing bags for a well-earned price. Our chicken cous-cous got a little more emotional, however. First lesson of the evening: please don't name your dinner as it flaps innocently around the butchers shop. Jeremiah-Flynn was tenderly marinated with the residual guilt of a recovering vegetarian, and I promise you that does nothing for the flavor of the dish.
For the next four hours the house seemed to burst with a colorful collage of vegetable peelings, simmering pots and seven women's worth of laughter. We translated jokes in a mish-mash of French, English and local dialect, at first with veritable attempts to learn each other's language, before we realized that my cave-man hand gestures and pitiful Arabic abilities were far more entertaining. Laughing (again) at my chopping skills (like a toddler maniacally mashing a banana with a knife) I finally learnt the Moroccan way of using ones thumb as a kind of chopping board: creating leverage between vegetable and knife, slicing down, then pulling away just before your appendage adds some extra meat to the pot. (A skill hard enough to grasp, and even harder to explain in writing, so please do not attempt this based on such an inadequate description).
My respect for the women around me grew as the evening progressed, especially after a particularly strenuous bread kneading session which left me ruddy-faced, slightly sweaty and marveling the deft hands of Maryam as she created perfect pillows of semolina dough on a slab of wood. We carried the loaves to the local bakery and watched them rise in a oven hewn roughly into whitewashed stone, a bundle of smoldering kindling at the back creating flickering amber light that played across our faces. The air smelled like pure comfort. Maryam pulled in a deep breath, smiled, and promised us that nothing would come close to the taste of our little loaves, fresh from the oven. Later, over a table groaning with the night's efforts, we pulled apart the still-warm packages and dunked them victoriously into our tagine; a beautiful stack of vegetables slow cooked in a traditional terra-cotta pot brimming with crushed tomato and spices that warmed your insides. Preserved lemons and green olives decorated the plates like colorful jewels. Our unfortunate chicken, Jeremiah, sat proudly aside little dishes of charred eggplant and green pepper, simmered with garlic and tomato and served with cous-cous that can only taste that marvelous when one is sitting cross legged in a Moroccan riad, smelling of garlic, with bleeding thumbs, (I never learnt), and in glorious disbelief that the magic travel trifecta had occurred: good friends, loud laughter, and good food.
We gave our weary stomachs some rest after dinner and climbed to the rooftop. The winking lights of ancient city spread out like a blanket that met the silver studded heavens. There was something about the warm air that made conversation feel easy; and so a Jew, two Muslims and I (still undecided), stood under the stars and explored our religious identities; questioning delicately, curiously, learning from each other and concluding that, under the gaze of the expansive sky, our bellies happy with home-cooked food, any differences between us really seemed so very small.
When I step off the ship, I always hope for those experiences that make you feel both at home, comfortable, but simultaneously in awe of a place and it's people. While we are sailing, the familiarity of our floating home is constantly augmented by new conversations, chance encounters where you can make a new friend in an instant, and people who continue to inspire you with their ambition and intelligence. Now, as the warm winds of the African west coast ruffle through our textbooks, there is a tangible feeling of excitement in the air. We are ready to be tested, enamored and inspired by what lays ahead of us, as we sail onwards to Ghana, and to new adventures abound.
