I skipped some time in between those last two posts, some important time, but just coming back from Moulay Idriss I had the beauty of the place stuck firmly in my mind. In the meantime I have come to love Fes, while my birds are still my best fassi friends, I am now getting out a little further along the animal kingdom and making friends with the neighborhood donkeys and street cats, one step closer to the humans who feed them.

I am continuously learning new things about fes, my area of town, my apartment and myself. In the past few weeks I have realized that I can pretty easily navigate any place on this half of the Ville Nouvelle, this side of Rue Mohammed Cinq. I have found a few great bakeries, a few new good places for food; specifically the only good cheeseburger outside of the United States. I can also make my way around the old medina, find the track, or a good place for tea. I have realized that my street is not as dead as it may seem originally, you just have to hit it at the right times. I have found the two best local soccer pitches, both are sidewalks that are a little wider than your average, maybe 30 feet instead of 15, one, the smaller, and less exposed is designated for the youngest kids, from about 6-11 the other is for the bigger ones, about 12-16. After 16 Fassi boys don’t play, they instead buy eurotrash clothes, fake diesel jeans are the most popular of this subdivision of the Fassi clothing market, chase girls or get jobs, at least the guys in this neighborhood. My apartment amuses me everyday. I have learned to open the main gate one-handed, and do it mindlessly now, only noticing when something goes wrong. I have become a successful cook. I can do wonders with some rice and vegetables or potatoes and cheese and turkey, or the best spaghetti Fes has ever tasted. I have learned when I can sit in the sun, Sundays- a little ironic I think – and when I cant; any day when they are working on the new apartment building next door, the men laugh at me and I think I make them mad as I just chill on the terrace reading or studying or watching the kids in the street. I have learned that I like to have everything clean and organized, and I don’t like to have too much. Two bowls for two people is perfect, why would I want or need more?

Last weekend my friend Adam from Middlebury arrived, he is in Italy for the semester, and decided to take a jump south to Africa for 5 days. I felt like a real resident of Fes for the first time as I showed him around the old Madina, and knowing where I was most of the time. He didn’t like it when I followed a little kid down a dark alley, but I just think he was nervous about being there, the kid really posed no threat, the big kids, his friends who were waiting at the end of the alley, however, were a little more imposing, we walked away quickly. We visited Ifrane together on Sunday. Ifrane was beautiful and discomfiting simultaneously. It was designed as a “French Pocket” in the middle of Morocco in the 1920’s. The city has no, or little, Moroccan architecture, and feels like a European suburb or something. Big chalet type houses, all with yards, were prominent. There was a beautiful park and a pond that didn’t belong in Morocco, even the grasses and trees seemed different. The town was in the mountains so instead of semi-arid lands instead the town was surrounded by ancient cedar forest. Al-Akwayn, Morocco’s prestigious American style private university, sits on the edge of Ifrane. I thought before coming to Morocco that it would have been nice to go there, I didn’t realize that going there would mean that I wouldn’t really be going to Morocco. It just felt rich, in the way that Middlebury does sometimes when I am walking by the Middlebury Inn, a place not of or for the people but of and for those with means, the opposite of the organic and genuine impression that I would get from Moulay Idriss the following weekend.

Adam and I spent the rest of his time here in Fes, walking around the city talking about our lives and our relationships with our friends. We had some heated discussions about what it means to be a friend, and what it means to care about people. It was good to take me out of my mindset where, “what does Fes mean?” is the most important question. Instead, he has helped me see that Fes and place sometimes can’t be metaphors for the human experience and human relationships, or at least that it takes more than metaphors and attempts at understanding, he helped me remember the value of human communication I guess. He and I spent some time with my friend Farrin, we visited part of the Medina and the hill above it, through him I was able to strengthen my friendship with Farrin and Adam, because we got to do the getting to know you again, its nice to really talk to people and learn about their lives, again.

This week was also time to say goodbye to Gertrude. It was relatively uneventful, although, I think she knows how much I appreciated her. Instead of classes with her, I now have them by myself. This is good and bad. I can’t get away with the same level of daydreaming, but I am using my Arabic all the time now, and going at a better pace. I learned all about the history of Tea in morocco the other day. It is fun to have cultural exchanges with Abdelselam, I explained to him what a tea bag was, in colloquial Arabic, I didn’t know how to say processed and packaged. He told me a sort of Moroccan folk-lore story about tea. One part of Moroccan culture, maybe Arab or Islamic culture in general, I’m not sure, involves the idea of paying for the truth. When someone lies about something he must, pay for the truth; for example if you say you are going to meet someone for dinner and don’t show up, you must pay them for the truth, and take them to dinner or do something else for them. In Abdelselam’s story he sets the scene as a party with about 40 of the big people in Morocco, big people being the bigwigs political, religious and economic. At each party one person is selected to make the tea, he for that day is the karim, the wise one. The man chosen to make the mint tea at this party did a bad job, he forgot the sugar, and mint tea with no sugar is unacceptable. So, in his wisdom, he declared to the party-goers that there was one glass of tea without sugar, and that the person who got this one glass of tea would have to pay for the truth, he apparently got this authority as the tea maker. Each person at the party said, “oh my tea is delicious, perfect, wonderful,” so that they did not have to pay for the truth. The tea-maker called them out, knowing that there was not one delicious glass of tea in the room, and because he knew of their lie, each of them had to pay for their truth. Thus, forty of the most important people in Morocco had to reward the one man because of their lies. After telling the story Abdelselam asked, “did you understand?” I said that I did and he replied, “oh wow, I felt like I was just talking.” That felt as good as understanding the story.