Caption: A silk dyer wrings out thread in the Fez Medina
Set out at about 10am for our Medina tour. Stopped to look out over the city before we ventured down into the twisted corridors of the market. A visual onslaught: pottery stalls; natural hair shampoo and henna; food stalls with piles of nougat, toffee, sesame crunch, peanut crunch. Pigged out on a sweet lunch.
In the silk-dying street, men wearing stained leather aprons dunked huge hanks of white thread in barrels of colour, then wrung them out. Walked down long alleys where woodcarvers were making furniture and guns. We admired beautiful kilims (flat, tapestry-woven carpets) priced (pre bargaining) at US$550 in the prescribed carpet shop.
And then we came to the renowned and much-photographed tannery in the centre of the market. Many of the dye pits were empty and there was very little activity, but it still assaulted my senses, with pits of pink skin-treatment liquids, inches deep layers of stripped skins, and nose-wrinkling smells. Would love to see it full of people and colour.
As I navigated my way out of the medina one of the local lads accompanying us fondled my breast and without thinking I lashed out hard at his nearest body part - unfortunately his bum. He just laughed, as did his mates. Wish I’d been able to wipe that smile off his face with a nose blow or knee to his groin! Hand ringing with the force of hitting him, I ranted and raged, further infuriated when our official guide rushed us through vibrant and interesting market areas we'd wanted to photograph and brough us to souvenir shops filled with naff trinkets.
The group arranged to go out for a six-course meal with entertainment, subsidised by the truck food kitty, so back at camp Nikki, Vicki, Adri and I went to the local hammam (bathhouse). Unlike the Turkish baths I’ve visited, this steamy bathhouse was humming with women and children scrubbing each other with loofah brushes, washing and combing black hair and rinsing themselves with black rubber buckets of hot and cold water; there were women or all shapes and sizes and girls from tiny tots to maybe 12 years old. It was a hive of activity and chat with new arrivals somehow finding space in crowded rooms. Our room was swelteringly hot; I sat and doused myself with water before women scraped my body clean of dirt and dead skin cells the loafer mitts. Their attention was not as thorough or as focussed as I've had in Turkish baths but I still felt wonderfully shell-shocked when I emerged: exhausted and glowingly clean.
And then the women who had been so relaxed in their nakedness in front of other women layered on clothing in the dressing room ready for the men outside. I wonder if just being a westerner makes us fair game for local men, or whetherr they would leave us alone if we covered up like their women.
We set off as a group for the restaurant, which had round tables and poofs to sit on. Initially we had three tables but then we were squeezed onto two to eat delicious but small portions of tomato and noodle soup, sausages, another meat dish. There was a single bowl of beef with prunes and vegetables with cracked wheat to share between eight. I could have eaten the lot and we ended up scrounging scraps from the other table. The sixth course was grapes. Then Vicki massacred her birthday cake in front of us; everyone laughing at her disgust at getting “old” - 26 years!
Bob's description of the first belly dancer as a human a blancmange was sadly accurate; and we were less than impressed. Sadly, I couldn't stop comparing her to the extraordinary dancer I saw in Galata Tower in Istanbul with her sensuous arms. The second dancer had the facial expressions of a brick; we enjoyed her performance more but she didn't interact at all with her audience. She was visually shocked when a Frenchmen from another table hoisted her onto his shoulders and carted her around the restaurant!
Walked home and sat around the fire before sleeping on the truck.
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