Fez: Launch Pad for a Moroccan Adventure!

So after mid-term exams were finally over I got the chance to head out on Vacation! Thursday morning I took the train from Bologna to Milan and then a bus from the Milan city center to the "Milan" Airport to catch my Ryanair flight (Ryanair never flies out of convenient airports, the airport was an hour outside Milan...but it was cheap!). Finally a three hour flight later I was officially on spring break in Morocco!

Arriving in Morocco!

We planned to just spend the afternoon in Fez as we had plans to meet up with other people from SAIS in Rabat the next day. So we caught a Taxi into town (after negotiating a price first...always a must in Morocco) and found a restaurant to have lunch at in the old medena (city). The place served us all sorts of different foods in three different courses, with meats, couscous (very fine rice, typical in Moroccan foods), breads, fruits, and of course tea which is essential at any time of the day for Moroccans. Throughout the trip I think I drank enough tea to last me a lifetime, especially as I am not a huge tea fan in the first place! All the food at our restaurant was amazing though and the restaurant was in a beautiful old building and a great way to start our trip.

At lunch in our first Moroccan restaurant

Fancy interior of the restaurant

After lunch we decided to explore a bit of the old medena before heading on to Rabat to meet our friends. A friend of our taxi driver explained to us that the city is very confusing and that we will get completely lost no matter what and offered to take us to a couple cool spots. We were skeptical at first, thinking he just wanted money, but he brought us through tons of different small streets (which we would become lost in), told us a lot about the city and its history, and even took us into a Riad (fancy Moroccan Hotel) that was being built. Inside the Riad we got to see the handcrafted wood decorations being made and were able to climb up to the top terrace where we had an overlook of the entire old medena, which was beautiful! Eventuallly we wandered out the city with our guide, who actually refused any money, and headed off to Rabat!

Blue Gate entrance to the old medena of Fez

In the old medena, notice the Arabic!

Handcrafting the wooden decorations

Inside the Riad

View from the top of the Riad overlooking Fez

A week later I would eventually make it back to Fez (barely) in order see some last bits of the city and catch my flight back to Italy! A more general experience that this trip provided me with was a chance to try using my Arabic (both reading and talking). After seven months of only classroom Arabic it was really refreshing to try and use it in the real world! That said, it was most definitely not all smooth sailing. Seven months of Arabic does give a base, but only a very small one. As one of my friends put it "The problem with speaking Arabic is that people speak back to you in Arabic!" essentially meaning we could put phrases together but what we heard back was much more complex and used words we were not yet familiar with, making sustained conversations difficult. It was very convenient to be traveling with friends who spoke a good amount of French as it is also basically a universal language in Morocco! Despite the toughness and challenges of trying to speak Arabic I will admit that this experience has only re-encouraged me to continue taking it and trying to improve!