Morocco – day two
Saturday 3rd June, 2006
We wake around 10.30 and head off for breakfast. Our hotel is situated in the new town or Ville Nouvelle, it looks like a normal Southern European town. There are wide roads and boulevards lined with shady trees, caf?©â€™s with wide awnings provide an excellent place to drink coffee and Moroccan mint tea. We find seats on the street outside a cafe. I have omelette and dry bread that longs for some butter – this happens every time we eat in Morocco. Alastair has a cheese and what-looks-like-pork sandwich. The orange juice is filled with delicious crunchy bits. The caf?© is exclusively filled with men, I don’t see a single woman in the many caf?©s of Fez. Again, men come round selling socks, locks, and even electronic mosquito killers.
After a quick pit stop to move our bags to a room, which they have now found, we set off for a stroll. We head in the opposite direction from breakfast down the wide boulevards and soon find ourselves lost. We ask a man in a white sentry box guarding one of the larger international hotels for directions; he puts us in the back of a delivery van that is leaving the hotel. When we are dropped off five minutes later with a point in the right direction, our driver refuses money.
We walk down a broad boulevard towards the old town. Here there are single room shops with shutters selling dried fruit, nuts and shrivelled leaves. I remark by one of shops that the leaves must be for the famous Moroccan mint tea, the proprietor hears and shouts out that they are henna leaves for dyeing hair and hands. He also sells small slabs of what looks like stone which are used for the bath – hamam.
Doorway into the old town
A little later and the heat is beginning to tell – we stop for refreshment in a small caf?© in front of a properly Moroccan gate into the old town – a â€?bab’. At last I can have a mint tea that I have been so curious about. It comes in a metal tea pot with a small glass stuffed with fresh mint leaves. The metal handle of the pot is so hot that they give you small pieces of paper to pick it up; the scalding liquid is syrupy sweet.
An Arabic coke bottle and mint tea (with paper)
The road leaves this old district and heads wends it’s way round a high wall. Eventually we find a park, outside a teenager sells orange juice from a stall. Fifty pence for a glass and we retreat into the cool of the park to watch young Moroccans stroll about under the 100 foot palm trees. The atmosphere is relaxed and informal; the orange juice is fresh, full of chunks and delicious.
City walls next to the park
After a little hassle finding the ticket office, which eventually turned out to be 10 minutes walk away, we retreat to the hotel. After an hour or so rest, we head off for some food near to the venue – a garden filled with palm trees, flowers and an Arabic eating hall. The cook, waiter and owner are struggling to keep up. After a 40 minute wait for our food I begin to panic. The owner wearing a cream jacket tells us not to worry, this is Morocco and the concert will start half an hour late anyway.
By the time we have eaten our Cous Cous and through the airport style security to get into the concert they are half way through the first concert, a woman singing Flamenco and bearing her ankles.
The main band is made up of three Iranians on drums; two Malians – a woman who is singing and a man on kora; three Moroccans – one flute, oud and vocals; and four south Indians one singing, one on violin, on drum and one on Jew’s Harp. Everyone is traditional costume, and the Malian woman has on a �gran baba’ a robe and a turban which looks like she has a pale blue seagull sitting on her head. They start with an Indian song, which the other musician add to with their own interpretations of the melody and song. Each group of musicians is given a song to start and set the tone for. It’s a good concert, despite the mix of styles the music is affecting and their attempts to play together even more so. There is an encore and the Flamenco woman comes back – everyone is given five minutes and the Spanish woman seems a bit of a show-off amongst all these more solemn and interior traditions of music.
We walk home through the night.