Warm & Fezzy

Wakin' up is hard to do - felt a little out of sorts this morning but a good dose of  bread, jam, mint tea and blistering heat - fixed me right up. We headed to the Mosque (Hassan II), one of the very few mosques that a non-Muslim can visit in Morroco. It's an impressive, ornate structure commissioned by the current king, with grounds that host 100,000 devotees during Ramadan. "Check YouTube" as our guide advised us. I was dressed in my most conservative outfit, head scarf in hand and pink slip off shoes to be easily whipped off at a moments notice.... needless to say I was kinda disappointed when they didn't ask me to cover my head, while girls in shorts and a dude in a wife beater showed up and toured. After hundreds of photos had been taken of the mosque, we headed to the train station, not sure if we were going to go to Fez or Meknes.Whichever train showed up first would be the winner. We got lost, again, and another nice Moroccan man walked us to the station, and we got on the first train to Fez. There were a couple of lovely ladies on the train that we spoke broken french to and they made sure that we got off at the right stop. They were really sweet. Less sweet was the almost hour and a half hour train delay which put us in Fez after dark. The general plan was to stay in the old medina, but nothing was booked. The medina (especially the Fez medina), is notorious for its hard to navigate labyrinth of alley-ways, so showing up at night was probably not the best situation for the directionally challenged. Stephen was getting pretty nervous, and I was  pretty hungry, which should also make Stephen nervous since a hungry Raakhi is an angry Raakhi (= Hangry Raakhi). We took a taxi to the first hostel name that popped into Stephen's head. Thankfully it had rooms available, they were cheap (200dh = $25 a night) and the location is a five minute walk to the medina. It was time to feed my face, so we headed to the medina, and luckily found an open restaurant. Some lamb tajine for me and harira soup for Stephen. We decided to stroll the mostly empty streets of the medina. In the span of 20 minutes, a dude tried to run us over with a scooter, we saw two cats kicked, had someone randomly say "namaste" to me (clearly because I am an Indian flower as he put it), and met a really nice fellow, Abdullah, who gave us some tips on surviving Fez, the best of which being "go home and sleep, it's not safe here at night. Come back in the day - no problem". Alright my Fessis friend, we'll take your advice. Pretty glad not to be staying right in the medina, but super excited to get lost in maze tomorrow... during the day.

For those that plan on keeping count:

Fez (hat) = 2 

Mullet = 3

Hoot (raxx)