Life in Fès: A Walk in the Atlas

I'm ashamed of this, but I posted this on my French blog more than one month ago; and I'm even more ashamed to say that I considered not translating it, just posting the pictures (lazy me). But finally, I don't know how (I'm so tired of the computer because I've been working on it 10 hours a day - new, exciting job!), I managed to do it. So here you are.

Sometimes, I'd rather be somewhere else; go far away, see new places, speak other languages.

For me, right now, this isn't possible. Too much work.

And when I leave Fez, it's to go to Casablanca or Rabat - not the best places to relax.

So, I just take a walk in the Atlas, a neighborhood in Fez, in the Ville Nouvelle. It costs nothing, and it's just a few minutes from my apartment.

It's one of my favorite places in Fez. It's popular, lively, and colorful - and it's the place to go for food, with a lot of small restaurants, and all kinds of stores.






On the next photo, you can see buckets of khlie, dried beef, preserved in fat. It's delicious, and quite expensive.

(it's often hard to take pictures in the street in Morocco. You need to ask people for their permission - well, I guess you don't need to, but it's more polite. Most people agree, but sometimes not, like this guy who was selling vegetables. He got quite angry actually. But too late, I had stolen that photo).

Just by the CTM (the national bus compagny), there is an old man who sells used books. I sometimes buy European magazines from him, for 5 dirhams.

Nominated !

Hi everybody,

I know, I haven't been around much lately.

Because I found a new, very exciting job. But very different from what I'm used to do.

I'll be back very, very soon.

Oh, and by the way, I've been nominated by Morocco Blogs in the category "Best personal blogs". Please vote for me! (I'm on the right sidebar). Merci beaucoup!

Update: Thanks too my dear readers, I'm now first in my category! Keep voting !

Joyeux Noël

Merry Christmas ! Here in Fez nobody seems to know that it's today.

(and the new year was last week... confusing.)



Christmas rabbit with glasses and dog pretending to be a reindeer found on Fill(es) with color.

No rain in Ouled Mgatel, and a promise

Time passes very slowly in Morocco, december is almost here, and the sun still shines in Ouled Mgatel, and it still hasn't rained.




That's a big relief for us, -we had plenty of time to fix the house - but a bad sign for all our neighbors.

Last year, at this time, we were in the mud and the rain, and we were living in a crappy hotel in Fez.

Now we have a comfortable life here in our apartment in Fez, but we still don't go very often to our mudbrick house (even though we just spent a week-end there with French friends who live in a yurt in France and who thought that our house was a palace).

We'll be back.



(and this is, hopefully, the last picture of our house in that shape... not proud).

The Hamadcha of Fez: Transmission of a Precious Heritage

They are between ten and sixteen years-old.
They live in Fez.
Their grand-fathers, and their great-grand-fathers before them were Hamadcha, Moroccan sufis.
Their fathers too.

But their parents never encouraged them to take this road. That is, to become Hamadchas. Because it doesn't pay well, because it's not prestigious.

It was without counting on the passion of one man, Abderrahim Amrani Marrakchi, and on the energy of those kids.


So, are you wearing your djellaba and your babouches? Yes? Let's enter this mysterious house in the medina of Fez.




And let's get carried away by the music of the Hamadcha. (by the way, I hope you like to dance)













(in case you don't know, Fred has been working with the brotherhood for several years. If you want to know more about it, go on his website).

Back to Ouled Mgatel, and a Goodbye

After a busy month in Fez, we finally came back to Ouled Mgatel.

Where we saw that it hadn't rained that much there - when there had been floods again in other areas of Morocco -, and that everything is fine in our house, for the moment anyway. Heavy rains will be back in a month or two, which give us the time to do the work the house needs.



And we said goodbye to our cat Mioche. He had survived two food poisonings, a fall from the window of our appartement in Fez, and an attack by our neighbors' dog.
But he didn't survive to the negligence of a vet, and died very stupidly.



We buried him under an olive tree.

But our day couldn't end on this sad note.

In our mudbrick house, Abdelali was getting ready for his wedding, that very afternoon.

And a half-hour later, we were stuck in the middle of the craziness of a Moroccan wedding of the countryside.

You'll know all about it in a couple of days...

Asleep

Oups... it seems like the blog has fallen asleep.

It's going to wake up.

Very, very soon.

France : The Story of a Small Village

I've been in France for two weeks now - exams to take at the university, why do I do that by the way? - and I have to admit I feel very far from the well, and I haven't really been thinking about my dear blog.

Well, until I took a walk in the village where my parents live.

When I was 6, my parents bought a house in a very small village, in Meuse - a French "département" where there are probably more cows than people. In Verdun, the biggest town, there are barely 20,000 inhabitants. Meuse is famous for being one of the bloodiest battlefield of WWI - and also for the madeleines, that Proust loved so much.

It's common to hear people say that those villages are dying - it's true that there are no more priests in the churches, the cafés are almost all closed, and it's impossible to buy something to eat, you have to drive until the closest supermarket, 10 kilometers from the village.

But I don't know, it's just changing maybe. Because, on the other hand, I haven't seen that many kids in the street(s) (the plural is clearly an overstatement here) for a long time, and that many old houses being renovated.

I had never thought that my village was beautiful but now that I live so far away, I begin to see its beauty - and to understand why so many Dutch people buy houses here, for their vacations.

Here's what you can find in a typical village in Meuse.


A very, very old church.




And very old houses too of course.






A bakery, that's been closed for a least 10 years - and, very sad, the baker who used to work in this one is dying.






Streets with pretentious names - the "château" in question must look more like a farm than like a castle.




And the buses, claiming to be "fast", stop here only 2 twice a day, to bring kids to the high school in the nearest town.




Of course,there are mysterious woods, which have seen many battles.



- you can still see the trenches, and the craters the bombshells have made, almost a century ago. Very impressive.

And, by the old fortified church, a soldier.



(every November 11th, which marks the end of WWI, after church, our teacher would have us recite Hugo's "Hymn to the Dead" and we would get a bag of candy afterwards).


If you're lucky, there will be a school - many have closed -, and if you're even luckier, my school. I realize now that it was a tiny school, with tiny classes, and one teacher teaching everybody.





The saint patron of the village, here Saint Etienne (Saint Stephen in English), who must feel lonely since the priest retired.



That's part of the story of my village.

And that could be the story of dozens of villages in Meuse.

- Or, how what was already very old got older, and how schools, churches and bakeries closed one after the other.
- Or, the story of villages that loved more than everything having kids riding bicycles in their streets.