Ode To F.E.Z.

The streets of Fez ran red on Sunday morning as 19 American students, who stuck out like a sore thumb, left the city. In less than three days in the city we/I managed to:

1. Give the very nice Berber woman, who, ran the riad where we stayed, was pregnant and spoke nothing but the traditional Berber language, her first drink of alcohol.

2. Get led around the Old Medina in circles for an hour by a young man who claimed he was taking us to the tannery. However he kept leading us to the middle of the medina. I guess he didn't understand, like us dumb and gullible Americans, the two important things about the tannery; it stinks, so it is located at the edge of the city, to alleviate the stench, and the fact that water is essential to the tanning process, therefore it is also located on the river.

3. Get followed by a group little urchin children with their hands out.

4. Meet two English/Pakistani fellas who were in Morocco so one of them could meet, in person, his future bride, whom he first met on the internet.

5. Have five confirmed cases of prayer time at the porcelain god.

6. Offer my Frank Zappa t-shirt, which I love very dearly, to Mohammed, the son of the Berber lady who ran the riad.

7. Find this cheap Moroccan wine called Maghribi. That came in a green plastic bottle, had a twist off cap and a plastic pull tab. Imagine the big bottles of water you can buy at the gas station, full of red wine.

8. Think we were locked out of the old medina, it looks quite different at night after several glasses of red wine.

9. Find a local bar with 13 dirham Flag Specials and 20 dirham Johnny Walkers.

10. Have every conversation with a Moroccan turn into their sales pitch for us to buy hashish.

11. Have one person in our group be told he had to get off the bus and another in our group not even get on the bus back to Ifrane.