Detailed tour of Fez

Brigitte:

Slept well, wonderful breakfast. At ten o'clock our guide arrives, Karima, she speaks excellent German, because she has been studying it for four years. A three-hour walk through the medina, through Fes el Bali (built around 900). She shows us a dilapidated palace, a weaving mill, a (the!) tannery, the part of an old mosque/university, in which in former times the students could also live free of charge, and which is also accessible to tourists, the gate to a mosque/university, only accessible for Muslims, the heating system for a hammam. Historically each quarter always has a mosque, a hammam, a madrasa, a bakery, a well. Each quarter is separated by an archway from the next. Our guide points to the women's windows and entrances to palaces, leads us to the copper market with a 900-year-old plane tree. We enter unspoiled houses and lanes, as without a guide, but basically people always want to sell us something. At the end of our tour we part off at the Blue Gate, we drink a freshly squeezed orange juice and on the way back to the hotel we buy some cheese and bread. In the lobby, the classic courtyard of a Riad, we are sitting and Wolle is working and I'm trying to write diary.

Later in the afternoon we take a walk through Fes el Jdid, the former Jewish quarter (today there are not even 100 Jews in Fes, earlier they were about 30,000 our guide told us). At the royal palace Wolle has to delete images again. Dinner at the hotel again and planning of the next two days.