Would you like a massage? Fes: June 3 and 4

Wednesday morning, I woke up early and just spent a while chatting with Yassine until everyone else woke up. Eventually Sandra (Farid's flatmate) invited me to run to the market to get some food for breakfast while Farid made some more fresh mint tea. It was so quiet and calm there in the morning while everyone was still cleaning out their shops. The only downside was that I almost slipped in a puddles about a half dozen times.

Well, Megan and I took a fancy, air-conditioned, fast train to Fes, and arrived around 3pm. We wandered around for a while, asking for directions, and finally found our hotel. We explored to find some lunch, and then decided we'd ask about finding the old Medina since we were definitely living in the new part of town. The concierge told us it would all be closed, but I wanted to adventure out there anyways. As it turned out, it was nowhere near closed. After walking down probably a good mile of boulevard with a fountain every 10 feet, we could hear the Medina. We wandered around inside for quite a while trying not to get lost or harassed too much and found ice cream and other snacks for dinner for anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar each. Saweet. :) Megan's family requested that she bring back some Saffron, so we asked about it and were led into this labrynth of spices behind a shop front. Really, it was just walls and walls of spices piled up to the ceiling. We wandered a bit more and found a beautiful door in the Medina. I decided to take a picture. Bad idea. As it turns out, it was the royal palace and the police came over and scolded me and made me erase it. Oops. Anyway, it was getting late, so we headed back to the hotel.

In the morning of the 4th, Megan and I decided we would be brave and to to a Hamam. Since the people here usually have only cold water to shower with, they go to this spa kind of thing once a week or so. We did not know what we were getting ourselves into. The guy at the counter told us it was one euro to enter and 4 euro for a massage: would we like a massage? We said sure, paid, and walked into the women's side of the Hamam. You go all the way back to a steam room for a while and then they bring out tons of pails of steaming hot water in the second room where you can scrub up. We looked like idiots wandering around since we had no idea what was going on, but it was interesting anyways. Then came the surprise "massage". An old Moroccan woman comes up with like a loofah mit and scrubs the hell out of you. It was not what we expected, far from relaxing, and hilarious to laugh about afterwards... once we had our silky soft skin. Ayayya.

Finally, we realized we were running a bit low on cash if we were going to take a taxi in the morning, but luckily, we found a sandwich shop selling what seemed like falafel sandwiches for 4 Dirham... which is equal to about 50 cents in the US. Thank you Morocco! Tonight, I think the plan is maybe to relax by the pool for a bit, head up to the old Medina to check out the music festival, and call it a night so we can catch a taxi to the airport early in the morning. Ahh, c'est la vie!

UPDATE: So we did end up going to the Medina and since it is really our first city in Morocco without male escorts, there were some positive and negative aspects. For the negative, there were a tremendous amount of stares and catcalls in every language you could imagine. For the positive, I was out of money so one of the vendors called me over and just gave me a pair of traditional slippers for visiting Morocco. I guess I can't complain too much! :)