no counterspace

I really do love Fes. I know the old medina has an artificial antique patina to encourage tourism, but I enjoy it. I love that it’s not just one street, but a whole town’s worth of the city that is completely pedestrianized. There may be some hills, but I don’t have to walk up them quickly. Since the last time I was here, electric scooters have invaded, but there are still not that many.

Also it’s a city of cats. There are so many cats here, and I have yet to see anyone trying to push them away. People put out food and water and sometimes even cushions for them. It’s up there with Istanbul and Beirut in the great cities for cats, and that makes me feel more warmly toward the place.

Apparently if it’s just one house built around a courtyard, it’s a Dar, but if it’s multiple families it would have been called a Riad. The breakfast at Dar Hayati is a lovely cultural sampler. The trio of mini tajines is for condiments and has two kinds of jam and some honey. There’s also a double bowled ceramic with olives and soft cheese, but you can lift out the olive bowl and have another bowl below it for your olive pits. The fruit in season right now seems to be grapes. The market carts also have some kind of berry, but I haven’t had small change at the right time to stop and buy those. What else? There’s a fried egg and a whole sampler of many kinds of bread. Two flat fried laminated breads – one just bread and the other with scallions and maybe a red/orange spice. Then there were semolina? griddle cakes, a chocolate croissant, and a white bread that wasn’t too crusty.

The place I’m staying is just a short walk from one of the main streets of the old medina, Rue Tala’a Kebira. And it’s right about in the middle. Yesterday I explored toward the right, so today I went left. Most of the streets are pretty narrow, but here are a few spots where things opened up around trees and was particularly sunny.

Last time I was here, there was a custom made shoe place in the eastern side where the walkways have wooden ceilings, but I couldn’t find it this time. And none of the premade show merchants accosted me to show they were willing to try to find something for my wide feet.

But I did find a weaver. He was pleased when I knew cactus silk was sabra. This store had woven works in camel, wool, and cotton fiber as well, so I suspect the loom was just for decoration.

About this time, I was looking for a spot to sit down and drink some fortifying tea. And I spotted this bright place down a corridor, and it ended up being an interesting establishment called Chemmaine Mall.

As best I understand this riad complex (3 adjoining courtyards?) is owned by the restaurant that has seating on all three levels from ground to terrace, and then they also lease shop/studio space to local craft people. When I was ready to leave, I was led around by my arm to visit the shops in the main courtyard and over to the area with the women’s crafts. In the “women’s” area there was a guy making musical instruments, a guy who did his very best to sell me perfume and argan oil, and another guy who was selling in a shop for a woman who designed exquisite couture dresses. Neither the guy selling nor the guy leading me around had any doubt that I could wear these dresses (of which there was only one of each model and they each had a story, another symbolic or an origin story).

No sooner had I escaped then I carelessly got lured into a rug shop

I did not take any pictures of the rugs I was being down because I didn’t want to encourage them or show enthusiasm. But I was talked into a very pretty rug that goes with none of my existing interior decorating. But it was an exquisite design that was woven so that both front and back looked equally finished, supposedly with all natural dyes that would also be colorfast with hand washing at home (both claims have a little side eye from me). And I thought I’d done a pretty good job negotiating the price down, but he was so pleased that he skipped over to the neighboring store to buy me a bottle of water. Ah well.

Woke up, checked out of the cute AirBnb, and went to find breakfast.

Cafe Belsot was just a block away from the Metro stop in the direction I hadn’t been yet. I got a ham and cheese turnover and three vegetable empanadillas (the other 2 I didn’t have them heat up and tucked them in my bag for later. And that fancy beverage is just a chai latte. The two women working there were delightful.

And then I spent way more time in the Madrid airport (maybe just one extra hour, but also maybe an eternity) than planned. It turned out that our boarding was delayed because their mobility support took forever to show up to help a passenger from the previous flight deplane.

I always forget to take the Flying While Fat selfie. RyanAir did need a seatbelt extender but the armrest went down and there was minimal touch with the (luckily skinny) person in the middle seat. It was only an hour flight, so I can’t really judge the other amenities. I slept throught pretty much the entire flight

And then my Airbnb in Fes sent a driver to pick me up at the airport. I was worried I’d be delayed in passport control because I’d lost the Morocco ID number that was in the passport that was stolen a few years ago, but they just looked it up and found it in their computer. Honestly getting that thought out of my brain was one of the main reasons I decided to go to Morocco on my first trip since then.

And then my host came out to meet me and walk me to Dar Hayati where I’m staying. I checked in, drank some tea, and then went back out to look for food and an ATM. Not in that order. There are only like three ATMs in this part of the city, so I went to the Blue Gate one, and then let myself be chatted into a restaurant near there. I went for a place with street level outdoor dining and refused their kind offer to climb up 8 million stairs for the panoramic view.

One of the hazards of picking a place by whether it has a chatty guy is that you then end up having to chat with him.  And he decided that he would very much like to marry me or at least take me dancing or to a mixed hamam. But he at least he took my refusals with good grace and it was all fairly fun flirting.

I am (so far) finding it easier to navigate Fes this time. Partly because I’ve spent ten years thinking about the layout; partly because phone map technology has improved since then; partly because traveling alone means I can’t rely on someone else navigating; and also because I can walk slower and not have to mind my fellow travelers’ fears of being accosted.

My feet were pretty worn out after the Reina Sofia, but I only have this one day for museums. So first there was a short break for a lunch.

On the corner across the street from the new wing, there’s Cafeteria Pando with outdoor seating. It seemed to be about half locals and half tourists. The dark sardines are oil preserved and the white ones are pickled in a vinegar brine. Very yummy!

But I still have two and a half more hours until the Museo Arqueológico Nacional closed, so I decided to squeeze in another museum visit.

And then even though I was on a roundabout with several buses, I wasn’t sure, even if I found one going to the Archaeological museum, how to pick ones heading in the right direction – because roundabout. And it was a short distance, but would require two transfers to get there by subway. So I took a taxi.

 Museo Arqueológico Nacional https://www.man.es/man/home.html

I was looking with a particular interest in a few research projects:

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Look at this bronze sculpture! Do these look like sleeves to you? Not from draping rectangles and no evidence of as assist from cords tying into place. I think they might be sleeves.

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And then after all that culture, I needed another snack!

A small salad, a sesame bagel with cream cheese, a Lebanese flatbread with honey and zaatar, and a juice concoction.

Magasand Cafe was one of the only reasonably priced restaurants in the neighborhood of the archaeological museum – a neighborhood also full of designer boutiques like the Loeve store, all of them way out of my tax bracket.

This cafe is mostly sandwiches and art magazines. So I ordered a salad! It was an excellent salad, filling and well balanced. I also took a chance and ordered a bagel since they dared to put it on the menu. It was not the platonic ideal of bagel, but way better than I was expecting. Better than most bagels I’ve tried to eat in Boston.

But the most intriguing thing was the Lebanese flatbread with honey and zaatar.

It might not be traditional*, but it did complement the salad very well.

*traditional with the understanding that there are many variations through time and geography, so I might also just not have encountered this tradition before. But if I understand the vibe of the cafe, it was more of a deliberately untraditional adaptation of the concept.

I promised you a picture of where I’m staying. Here’s the lovely open space in the middle of the stairs in the middle of the house. Luckily (especially for an AirBNB), it’s only up one flight of stairs.

Went to a comfy looking cafe a block away from the place I’m staying. I had a savory 4 cheese flaky pastry with pepitos on top. There was also a thin smear of pizza sauce inside that elevated the tastiness. And then the sweet pastry was a pistachio croissant. An excellent use for the pistachio butter that is now so much more available since the Dubai Chocolate debut. These should catch on more places – it was excellent. The tea was a Darjeeling.

Then it was off to the Museo Reina Sofía to catch one of the last days of their Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibit. I’d heard about his work, but I’d never seen it before

I’m going to list some relevant Youtube links because the embedding isn’t working right now and I’ll play with that later

Two museum guards interacting with a pile of silver candies

Okay, so the candy sculptures are all both untitled and have names. They are all an infinite supply that you can take from, but they also all have an ideal weight (or ideal height, or original weight). 

List of candy sculptures (here)

I’d been wondering how this would go because the last time I was in Madrid, I went to the contemporary art museum and saw their display for Steal This Book with a guard to tell you not to even think about stealing one of their many copies.

There were three of the candy installations in this exhibit. The blue ones had a room all to themselves right when you enter the gallery. It’s a beautiful room, well suited to making this feel significant. There are three kids arguing when I get in that you really can take the candy and then grabbing a fistful. A guard comes over – with another guard, and they are like, “Yes, you can take them, but please maybe just two per person.” But even better was that they then had a long conversation (of which I didn’t catch any) about the exhibit and the artist that looked very serious and a little intimidating to the kids.

The room with the liquorice candy was still pretty full and nearly square to the corners. I suspect that’s specifically because of the unpopularity of the flavor.

And then there was the silver wrapped candy that looked especially… huddled into the corner. But just as I was thinking that, two of the security guards went up to it and filled up their pockets. This was the only one I took from because I figured the guards must know which one was the tastiest. I was amused watching the curator’s video above talking about the trust between exhibit and curator, and I clearly do not trust very much at all. But especially not when his interactive sculptures are …semioticly complex.

There were also eight to eleven paper stacks (I didn’t count).

And several strings of lightbulbs in various configurations, including one square with a paired set of headphones with an mp3 player for partner dancing (tenets). And curtains of fabric (on windows) and beads (dividing rooms). The walls, and tucked into the corners of window niche, had newspaper / magazine clippings. And several other forms.

After that exhibit, I slipped into the museum’s garden in the interior courtyard and had a tuna pastry and a bottle of water.

The museum as a whole seemed like a good home for this temporary exhibit. They had works by Picasso and Dalí and Miro. But the works were incorporated into a framework that addressed the rise of cubism and surrealism as a political movement.

And just when I was tired of all of the men being men, there was this gorgeous work by Ángeles Santos and her other paintings.

And then I ended up in the 4th floor which was half feminist women and half (all? mostly?) men reckoning with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I took more pictures of the women artists because the art reckoning with HIV was harder to contextualize in a picture.