Fes

We were picked up by our driver at 9am and headed toward Fes. Lots of farmland and agriculture along the way. All areas of Morocco have thousands of cats, dogs and donkeys. 🐈 🐕 🫏
Fes was mind blowing. It has a massive Medina filled with streets (alleyways) that people live in, and a rabbit warren of shops and stalls, old and new. There were some streets that were lined both sides with just jewellery shops (mainly gold).
The Medina consists of 9,400 alleyways!!! Some are so narrow your shoulders almost touch each side as you walk through. It’s like another world in there. 🤯
We went to a pottery shop that also does mosaics. WOW!! The entire handmade process left us speechless. First they use the clay to make each design, then kiln dry it. Individual people hand paint every single piece. They are so perfectly done, it’s hard to believe they were done by hand. Then for the mosaics, each tiny piece is drawn and cut out of larger pieces with such detail and accuracy, using just a tiny hand tool (there’s a short video). When they decide on a pattern, they meticulously lay each tiny piece, face down on the ground in the desired shape (see photo of a round table top). We’ll never look at mosaic the same way again. 😱 From there we visited a tannery. This too was a painstakingly long, arduous process. We were shown how they prepared the leather, how they colour the hides (goat). Apparently cow hide isn’t used here because it too heavy and not waterproof. Goat hide is much lighter, softer, and completely waterproof!! They add 5kg of pigeon poop (yes you read that right) to each pond every day (high in ammonia) to kill any bacteria on the leather. They climb into each pond for 4-5 hours a day and stomp around in there like grape crushing, to stir it up and keep the colours even for 2 weeks. Then they pull it out and wash it and dry it. When our tour was finished we had free time to wander through the Medina. We didn’t venture far as we were terrified of getting lost in there. Which would be VERY easy to do. We had the most incredible, mind blowing day today. One we’ll remember for years to come.Read more