See what I did there? It's a pun. Ha. Ha.
I promised pictures, and I'm sorry for how long this page probably took to load as a direct result of said pictures. Nevertheless, people have been asking, so I blame my dear readers.
We'll get to the whole Sensitive Nose thing in a minute. First some more interesting "cultural" things.
Q-Tips.
You know those handy little cotton swabs on sticks you can use to clean your ears and hard-to-reach places in water bottles? Yeah, well, for furriners like me, they're apparently devilishly hard to find in Morocco. I never realized quite how many things I used those for until I couldn't find any. Since I packed really light for this trip, I didn't bring a giant box with me. Somehow I thought they'd be easy to find. WRONG.
Maybe I was just looking in the wrong places. I don't know. Anyway, the point is, I finally found Q-Tip-type swabby things at the Moroccan equivalent of Wal-Mart (Marjane). Incidentally, they don't sell hydrogen peroxide or even rubbing alcohol there. You have to go to a pharmacy for such items. I found this out after having a conversation with four different staff people in a weird mix of French, Arabic, English, and Charades. It took about ten minutes before anybody understood what anyone else was saying. During that time, I realized that 1) my French is incredibly limited and 2) somehow it's still more functional than my Arabic, which theoretically should be a lot better than my French. C'est la vie.
Anyway, the Marjane was, for a monochronic person, pretty much a dream come true. People stood in lines! It was wonderful. I was also able to pick up a real towel, which is nice because I've been using a little backpacking towel for the past two weeks. It worked, but that was it. Ford Prefect would be proud, I think.
Now. Pictures! And Fez! And Smelly Things!
I thought I would share my hand soap with everyone. It's not technically hand soap--I don't know if the picture is sharp enough, but the writing at the bottom (yes, that's a tin) says it's "the transparent whitening facial bar." It's transparent, all right, but I have my doubts about the whitening bit. My hands aren't appreciably whiter than they were two weeks ago. Then again, I'm just pretty white all over, so I suppose I can't make much of a comparison.
This is the main gate that leads into Fez's old medina, which is set apart from the rest of the city because it's completely walled and some of the buildings are, I'm told, in the region of a thousand years old. This entire gate was painted by hand.
Closer view of the gate, in which the intricacy of the painting is (hopefully) more visible.
Inside one of the old houses in the medina. Again, everything was hand painted. Behind me, and therefore out of view, is a fountain, which kept this main area cool. These houses are typically two or more stories with the pictured large, atrium-like main room in the middle onto which all the smaller rooms on the edges open.
Most of the streets in the old medina look like this. Obviously there's no way a car will fit in there, so most transporting of goods and people is done with mules, donkeys, handcarts, and--very rarely--motorcycles or motor scooters. The medina is on quite a hill and the cobblestones can be pretty slippery, so motorcycles don't necessarily do too well. It's hard to take a run at a hill when people, cats, and donkeys are in the way.
And here's the reason for the title of this post. This, my friends, is the world-famous Fez tannery. At first glance it looks pretty benign and actually pretty cool, but not at first whiff. There are no harsh chemicals, just the all-natural tanning process, so that's interesting. Boy, do those all-natural methods stink, though.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF AN UNHOLY STENCH. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
Imagine if a bunch of birds, a few rodents, possibly an omnivore or two, and some donkeys all decided to poo in the same place, stir it up, and let it sit in the desert sun for a few days, sprinkled daily and liberally with the urine of those animals. That's about how this place smells. It's not nearly as pungent as, say, a four-days-dead roadkill skunk, but it's still pretty nasty. Since I happen to have been blessed with a super-sniffer (thanks, Mom), the reek was all the more special for me.
The real insidiousness of this bifurcated-tail-and-pitchfork-worthy stench doesn't actually reveal itself until several hours after the fact, at which point it's too late to do anything about it and everything smells like the tannery since it's been burned into the nose. Not even the sprigs of mint the tannery workers give you will help with that. No matter what you do, that smell will stay in the nose for a very long time, and it's really not a lot of fun to brush one's teeth with that hanging out in one's sinuses. I advise holding the breath. Or you could just be smart, unlike me, and smell on the mint the entire time instead of trying to be tough and just ignoring it. REALLY bad plan, okay?
Since I went to Paris before I came here, I'll add pics of that, too, but not yet. This post is quite long enough as it is.
Also, the background photo for this blog is the view from my dorm window just after sunset.
Later, gators.
I promised pictures, and I'm sorry for how long this page probably took to load as a direct result of said pictures. Nevertheless, people have been asking, so I blame my dear readers.
We'll get to the whole Sensitive Nose thing in a minute. First some more interesting "cultural" things.
Q-Tips.
You know those handy little cotton swabs on sticks you can use to clean your ears and hard-to-reach places in water bottles? Yeah, well, for furriners like me, they're apparently devilishly hard to find in Morocco. I never realized quite how many things I used those for until I couldn't find any. Since I packed really light for this trip, I didn't bring a giant box with me. Somehow I thought they'd be easy to find. WRONG.
Maybe I was just looking in the wrong places. I don't know. Anyway, the point is, I finally found Q-Tip-type swabby things at the Moroccan equivalent of Wal-Mart (Marjane). Incidentally, they don't sell hydrogen peroxide or even rubbing alcohol there. You have to go to a pharmacy for such items. I found this out after having a conversation with four different staff people in a weird mix of French, Arabic, English, and Charades. It took about ten minutes before anybody understood what anyone else was saying. During that time, I realized that 1) my French is incredibly limited and 2) somehow it's still more functional than my Arabic, which theoretically should be a lot better than my French. C'est la vie.
Anyway, the Marjane was, for a monochronic person, pretty much a dream come true. People stood in lines! It was wonderful. I was also able to pick up a real towel, which is nice because I've been using a little backpacking towel for the past two weeks. It worked, but that was it. Ford Prefect would be proud, I think.
Now. Pictures! And Fez! And Smelly Things!
I thought I would share my hand soap with everyone. It's not technically hand soap--I don't know if the picture is sharp enough, but the writing at the bottom (yes, that's a tin) says it's "the transparent whitening facial bar." It's transparent, all right, but I have my doubts about the whitening bit. My hands aren't appreciably whiter than they were two weeks ago. Then again, I'm just pretty white all over, so I suppose I can't make much of a comparison.
This is the main gate that leads into Fez's old medina, which is set apart from the rest of the city because it's completely walled and some of the buildings are, I'm told, in the region of a thousand years old. This entire gate was painted by hand.
Closer view of the gate, in which the intricacy of the painting is (hopefully) more visible.
Inside one of the old houses in the medina. Again, everything was hand painted. Behind me, and therefore out of view, is a fountain, which kept this main area cool. These houses are typically two or more stories with the pictured large, atrium-like main room in the middle onto which all the smaller rooms on the edges open.
Most of the streets in the old medina look like this. Obviously there's no way a car will fit in there, so most transporting of goods and people is done with mules, donkeys, handcarts, and--very rarely--motorcycles or motor scooters. The medina is on quite a hill and the cobblestones can be pretty slippery, so motorcycles don't necessarily do too well. It's hard to take a run at a hill when people, cats, and donkeys are in the way.
And here's the reason for the title of this post. This, my friends, is the world-famous Fez tannery. At first glance it looks pretty benign and actually pretty cool, but not at first whiff. There are no harsh chemicals, just the all-natural tanning process, so that's interesting. Boy, do those all-natural methods stink, though.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF AN UNHOLY STENCH. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
Imagine if a bunch of birds, a few rodents, possibly an omnivore or two, and some donkeys all decided to poo in the same place, stir it up, and let it sit in the desert sun for a few days, sprinkled daily and liberally with the urine of those animals. That's about how this place smells. It's not nearly as pungent as, say, a four-days-dead roadkill skunk, but it's still pretty nasty. Since I happen to have been blessed with a super-sniffer (thanks, Mom), the reek was all the more special for me.
The real insidiousness of this bifurcated-tail-and-pitchfork-worthy stench doesn't actually reveal itself until several hours after the fact, at which point it's too late to do anything about it and everything smells like the tannery since it's been burned into the nose. Not even the sprigs of mint the tannery workers give you will help with that. No matter what you do, that smell will stay in the nose for a very long time, and it's really not a lot of fun to brush one's teeth with that hanging out in one's sinuses. I advise holding the breath. Or you could just be smart, unlike me, and smell on the mint the entire time instead of trying to be tough and just ignoring it. REALLY bad plan, okay?
Since I went to Paris before I came here, I'll add pics of that, too, but not yet. This post is quite long enough as it is.
Also, the background photo for this blog is the view from my dorm window just after sunset.
Later, gators.
Dorm windows do not generally have a view like that. It would be wasted on the majority of college students who aren't you.
ReplyDeleteDo you eventually get acclimated to smells like most people do? I have a sense of smell like T-rex had arms, and I barely remember a time when it was different. Thank you for reminding me that the past is not a utopia.
I am very lucky to have the view I do. I could have been looking at construction. I'd really like to wake up to a monkey staring into my window some morning, though.
DeleteI sort of get acclimated to smells, but not really. I can always feel smells in my nose, which means I can often taste them as well. This is never good when there's road work because I can taste the asphalt. No bueno.