Comfort and discomfort
May 12 - 14, Ian
I have been meaning to write about the food here
but I'm still waiting to have the defining meals. My hopes may have been set by
our trip to Marrakech a few years ago, when we went to a restaurant called
Yacout where we had one of my favourite meals ever. So far there has been
nothing like that here, though we haven't been to an equivalent restaurant yet;
but, God willing, or insha'
llah, as they say here frequently - we
will.
For our breakfasts Hafid comes round every day with a selection of breads and fixes up juice and coffee. The breads are very good and can be picked up at little stalls all over the medina for a few pence. Our favourite is malawee, which is flat and quite oily, a little like a paratha only yellowy and more sweet. We roll up little strips of it coated with honey, jam or soft cheese. There is also a bread called hash, which isn't what it sounds like - it's a grainy bread, almost like couscous in the texture of the grain. The juice is squeezed each day (by Hafid) from oranges, which is how it comes in most places where we have orange juice. And there is another bread that only I like that is almost nutty with a larger grained texture, which Hafid says is very healthy. So that's breakfast for us, and, according to Hafid (and the evidence of the stalls), for most people round about.
We have been having light lunches and larger dinners, which we usually cook ourselves. (Actually by "we cook" I really mean "Paula cooks" - I do keep offering but we've got into a routine...) We buy bread, water, veg and fruit that you can peel from the medina; everything else we get from a large French supermarket in the ville nouvelle. The reason we like the supermarket is partly the greater choice and the availability of alcohol but more the hygiene. In the medina the meat in particular is only for the locals and the brave. The presentation is culturally unfamiliar: there are goats heads everywhere, large organically-shaped blocks of untreated fat, plenty of offal, including what I believe to be animal stomachs, and live pigeons, chickens and rabbits bundled into crates or stuffed on shelves. There are as many flies as you would imagine and a bravura disregard for cleanliness. Spilt bin bags line the streets, where they are ravaged by the huge population of cats, and water courses along between the rubbish and the front of the stalls. I say that we don't eat the meat from the medina but this is, of course, only true when we cook for ourselves.
Coming from England, where these days it's even illegal for butchers to use wooden wheelbarrows, you have to be a little concerned. Most of us are holding up well, but I do have a subliminal sense that my body is dealing with things. Heidi, though, has been quite ill a couple of times, and on Friday Zoe and I had to go on our own to the American Language Centre for our lesson (we decided to have three a week at the Dar and one at the centre, and this was the first of the latter). We had lunch afterwards down the road at a pavement cafe (not at the nearby MacDonalds, which opened last year on a site that had for hundreds of years previously been a popular beauty spot in open parkland).
While we were in the ville nouvelle I also managed to pick up my second UK paper of the past month and a half (a Guardian weekly). I wont comment any further on the disgraceful way that our democratically re-elected leader mis-represented legal advice on the Iraq war to cabinet and the country, nor on the menacing, power-crazed way that his Chancellor, mindful, no doubt, of the fate of Michael Heseltine after the fall of the Thatcher, raced to display loyalty in front of every camera whose attention he could attract. I found an interesting juxtaposition to all of this in the section of The Scramble For Africa that I read that day. At the end of the nineteenth century a war hero of the time, General Gordan, had gone to Khartoum to relieve the garrison there and bring the troops home. However, before he could do so he came under siege from a rising Islamic leader and his forces. The Prime Minister, Gladstone, dithered and was too late sending in the troops that could have relieved him. After several months of siege Khartoum fell, and Gordon, who walked out nobly to certain death as the invaders broke through, was speared through the chest and decapitated. For reasons that I wont elaborate here this was a national humiliation at the time. If this happened now our leaders would be leaping in front of the cameras with scripts drafted and reviewed word by word, frown by frown, by an army of advisors and focus groups. In 1885 things were different: Gladstone was holed up in a northern country estate and, with the story running in the press, couldn't be contacted. Even when the furious Queen Victoria telegraphed him it took a while for her message to reach him because his butler wasn't instructed to disturb him before noon. There should be a point between the extremes of then and now...
By the afternoon Heidi had recovered and we went into the medina to see some sights and buy shoes as souvenirs for Paula and the girls. One of the highlights of the medina is the mausoleum to Moulay Idress, around which Fes was built. At the end of the month I'll probably post a few more high-resolution snaps and you can see a picture of someone inside the mausoleum scowling at me as I take a photo of the stunning zellij behind him. For now, here's a snap of one of the bars that run across all of the passageways (usually packed with people) leading to the mausoleum:
These bars prevent donkeys and horses from approaching the holy site. They also marked the boundary within which Jews, Christians and other infidels were not allowed; these days the policy is relaxed and we can walk right up to the threshold of the mausoleum's doors.
Shoes negotiated for and bought, we picked up a plate of nougat and, at Paula's initiative, accepted the invitation of a guy at the nougat stall to look round the premises behind. This was a maze of narrow passageways, irregular stairs and small workshops at which people were making candles, shoes and who knows whatever else. True to his word, our man Omar showed us that he had a variety of goods for sale (silver plates, Berber hendiras, ceramics and just about all of the other staples of the medina) without pushing us to buy. His line was that he would offer "democratic prices" on anything that we see later that we like, and we should return to him when we know what we want. Apart from its intrinsic interest, this strengthened our suspicion that only a minority of the buildings behind the walls of the medina are as well finished as our Dar - for sure, the palaces and some of the public buildings are amazing, and there are surely other well maintained or restored homes, but the glimpses that you see inside the majority of open doors suggest that most are much poorer. The nougat, by the way, was good.
Yesterday we picked up a hire car and drove to Casablanca for the weekend. Driving here is something else. There were bikes, donkeys and even one guy in a wheelchair in the middle of two and three lane highways. People walk across the motorway and drivers just have a "point and go" mentality unlike anywhere I've ever been (totally more random than Italy say). Where there are three lane roads, lines of six form, and at turnings the traffic almost becomes fluid as cars pour across haphazardly. And guess what: they crash and we've seen it. On the other hand the traffic police, who are everywhere in the towns, seem nice. The guy who pulled me over for speeding on the motorway couldn't have been more pleasant. Once he saw from my licence that I was a tourist there was no question of him fining me; it was almost embarrassing. (I blame the car - the one we had in southern Africa emitted a load Pavlovian buzz as you breached a speed limit, whereas our Peugeout 406, which has parts falling off all over it, just purrs comfortably on.)
We're now in Casa staying at the Sheraton. I'll write more later about Casa, when we've seen some of it. We're most looking forward to the mosque, which is the third largest in the world and one of the few that, as an infidel, you can go inside. Since you can't opt out of the calls to prayer throughout the day and night it's good to be able to at least see where the prayer action takes place. The Sheraton is a Sheraton, but, like MacDonald's, the fact that you know what you're going to get doesn't necessarily make it better. We booked in here because we wanted a decent room, a pool and reliable internet access. The room is fine but doesn't match it's description of "double twin". In England we would call the beds of this size "singles" and in North America I'm not sure that they even have a word for them. The pool is the big disappointment: this morning, contrary to what they told us when we asked yesterday, they had emptied it for maintenance, so our morning is a bit of a write-off. So I've hammered their internet service, pumping over 100 Mb of data (photo album 60+, girls' newsletters 20+ etc) through the ethernet line yesterday - on the GPRS service I've been using recently this could cost £7.50 per Mb, so it's a useful facility. Generally, the costs in the hotel seem absurd. On the way here we stopped in Rabat, the capital, for lunch where our 5 meals (there was a reason) and 4 drinks all together cost £6. In contrast, the three drinks we had in the Sheraton bar when we arrived cost over £10.
Returning to the topics with which I began, we dined last night at a Lonely Planet-recommended seafood restaurant on the harbour. The port area itself is evocative, with men sitting around repairing their nets and wheeling barrow-loads of fish in ice around. But the smell is really strong, beyond the point where it could boost your appetite. The restaurant was busy and had a great atmosphere; but, despite being right on the port, the seafood just wasn't that fresh or great.
Anyhow, after a slow and disappointing morning in the hotel, we're hoping that Casa charms us over the weekend.
For our breakfasts Hafid comes round every day with a selection of breads and fixes up juice and coffee. The breads are very good and can be picked up at little stalls all over the medina for a few pence. Our favourite is malawee, which is flat and quite oily, a little like a paratha only yellowy and more sweet. We roll up little strips of it coated with honey, jam or soft cheese. There is also a bread called hash, which isn't what it sounds like - it's a grainy bread, almost like couscous in the texture of the grain. The juice is squeezed each day (by Hafid) from oranges, which is how it comes in most places where we have orange juice. And there is another bread that only I like that is almost nutty with a larger grained texture, which Hafid says is very healthy. So that's breakfast for us, and, according to Hafid (and the evidence of the stalls), for most people round about.
We have been having light lunches and larger dinners, which we usually cook ourselves. (Actually by "we cook" I really mean "Paula cooks" - I do keep offering but we've got into a routine...) We buy bread, water, veg and fruit that you can peel from the medina; everything else we get from a large French supermarket in the ville nouvelle. The reason we like the supermarket is partly the greater choice and the availability of alcohol but more the hygiene. In the medina the meat in particular is only for the locals and the brave. The presentation is culturally unfamiliar: there are goats heads everywhere, large organically-shaped blocks of untreated fat, plenty of offal, including what I believe to be animal stomachs, and live pigeons, chickens and rabbits bundled into crates or stuffed on shelves. There are as many flies as you would imagine and a bravura disregard for cleanliness. Spilt bin bags line the streets, where they are ravaged by the huge population of cats, and water courses along between the rubbish and the front of the stalls. I say that we don't eat the meat from the medina but this is, of course, only true when we cook for ourselves.
Coming from England, where these days it's even illegal for butchers to use wooden wheelbarrows, you have to be a little concerned. Most of us are holding up well, but I do have a subliminal sense that my body is dealing with things. Heidi, though, has been quite ill a couple of times, and on Friday Zoe and I had to go on our own to the American Language Centre for our lesson (we decided to have three a week at the Dar and one at the centre, and this was the first of the latter). We had lunch afterwards down the road at a pavement cafe (not at the nearby MacDonalds, which opened last year on a site that had for hundreds of years previously been a popular beauty spot in open parkland).
While we were in the ville nouvelle I also managed to pick up my second UK paper of the past month and a half (a Guardian weekly). I wont comment any further on the disgraceful way that our democratically re-elected leader mis-represented legal advice on the Iraq war to cabinet and the country, nor on the menacing, power-crazed way that his Chancellor, mindful, no doubt, of the fate of Michael Heseltine after the fall of the Thatcher, raced to display loyalty in front of every camera whose attention he could attract. I found an interesting juxtaposition to all of this in the section of The Scramble For Africa that I read that day. At the end of the nineteenth century a war hero of the time, General Gordan, had gone to Khartoum to relieve the garrison there and bring the troops home. However, before he could do so he came under siege from a rising Islamic leader and his forces. The Prime Minister, Gladstone, dithered and was too late sending in the troops that could have relieved him. After several months of siege Khartoum fell, and Gordon, who walked out nobly to certain death as the invaders broke through, was speared through the chest and decapitated. For reasons that I wont elaborate here this was a national humiliation at the time. If this happened now our leaders would be leaping in front of the cameras with scripts drafted and reviewed word by word, frown by frown, by an army of advisors and focus groups. In 1885 things were different: Gladstone was holed up in a northern country estate and, with the story running in the press, couldn't be contacted. Even when the furious Queen Victoria telegraphed him it took a while for her message to reach him because his butler wasn't instructed to disturb him before noon. There should be a point between the extremes of then and now...
By the afternoon Heidi had recovered and we went into the medina to see some sights and buy shoes as souvenirs for Paula and the girls. One of the highlights of the medina is the mausoleum to Moulay Idress, around which Fes was built. At the end of the month I'll probably post a few more high-resolution snaps and you can see a picture of someone inside the mausoleum scowling at me as I take a photo of the stunning zellij behind him. For now, here's a snap of one of the bars that run across all of the passageways (usually packed with people) leading to the mausoleum:
These bars prevent donkeys and horses from approaching the holy site. They also marked the boundary within which Jews, Christians and other infidels were not allowed; these days the policy is relaxed and we can walk right up to the threshold of the mausoleum's doors.
Shoes negotiated for and bought, we picked up a plate of nougat and, at Paula's initiative, accepted the invitation of a guy at the nougat stall to look round the premises behind. This was a maze of narrow passageways, irregular stairs and small workshops at which people were making candles, shoes and who knows whatever else. True to his word, our man Omar showed us that he had a variety of goods for sale (silver plates, Berber hendiras, ceramics and just about all of the other staples of the medina) without pushing us to buy. His line was that he would offer "democratic prices" on anything that we see later that we like, and we should return to him when we know what we want. Apart from its intrinsic interest, this strengthened our suspicion that only a minority of the buildings behind the walls of the medina are as well finished as our Dar - for sure, the palaces and some of the public buildings are amazing, and there are surely other well maintained or restored homes, but the glimpses that you see inside the majority of open doors suggest that most are much poorer. The nougat, by the way, was good.
Yesterday we picked up a hire car and drove to Casablanca for the weekend. Driving here is something else. There were bikes, donkeys and even one guy in a wheelchair in the middle of two and three lane highways. People walk across the motorway and drivers just have a "point and go" mentality unlike anywhere I've ever been (totally more random than Italy say). Where there are three lane roads, lines of six form, and at turnings the traffic almost becomes fluid as cars pour across haphazardly. And guess what: they crash and we've seen it. On the other hand the traffic police, who are everywhere in the towns, seem nice. The guy who pulled me over for speeding on the motorway couldn't have been more pleasant. Once he saw from my licence that I was a tourist there was no question of him fining me; it was almost embarrassing. (I blame the car - the one we had in southern Africa emitted a load Pavlovian buzz as you breached a speed limit, whereas our Peugeout 406, which has parts falling off all over it, just purrs comfortably on.)
We're now in Casa staying at the Sheraton. I'll write more later about Casa, when we've seen some of it. We're most looking forward to the mosque, which is the third largest in the world and one of the few that, as an infidel, you can go inside. Since you can't opt out of the calls to prayer throughout the day and night it's good to be able to at least see where the prayer action takes place. The Sheraton is a Sheraton, but, like MacDonald's, the fact that you know what you're going to get doesn't necessarily make it better. We booked in here because we wanted a decent room, a pool and reliable internet access. The room is fine but doesn't match it's description of "double twin". In England we would call the beds of this size "singles" and in North America I'm not sure that they even have a word for them. The pool is the big disappointment: this morning, contrary to what they told us when we asked yesterday, they had emptied it for maintenance, so our morning is a bit of a write-off. So I've hammered their internet service, pumping over 100 Mb of data (photo album 60+, girls' newsletters 20+ etc) through the ethernet line yesterday - on the GPRS service I've been using recently this could cost £7.50 per Mb, so it's a useful facility. Generally, the costs in the hotel seem absurd. On the way here we stopped in Rabat, the capital, for lunch where our 5 meals (there was a reason) and 4 drinks all together cost £6. In contrast, the three drinks we had in the Sheraton bar when we arrived cost over £10.
Returning to the topics with which I began, we dined last night at a Lonely Planet-recommended seafood restaurant on the harbour. The port area itself is evocative, with men sitting around repairing their nets and wheeling barrow-loads of fish in ice around. But the smell is really strong, beyond the point where it could boost your appetite. The restaurant was busy and had a great atmosphere; but, despite being right on the port, the seafood just wasn't that fresh or great.
Anyhow, after a slow and disappointing morning in the hotel, we're hoping that Casa charms us over the weekend.
Posted: Sat - May 14, 2005 at 06:33 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM