an authentic tourist experience

Fez from our Riad rooftop

We spent our New Year's in Fez. For the backpack traveler in me, I would have preferred to have found a place on couchsurfing and celebrated it with a local or an expat local, someone who at least would have had more knowledge of where to go than we did. But the newly wed in me wanted the privacy that a hotel could afford, and wanted to spend more time with my new wife rather than getting to know other strangers on some superficial level. This is primarily why we opted for staying at hotels on this trip, over couchsurfing or Airbnb - getting both privacy and convenience - and why we chose to go ahead and do the Riad's plans for New Year's.

While we were on the bus, more specifically, while we were stopped and I was using the restroom, I got a call from the hotel manager. As usual, as I jostled my phone out of my pocket, I kept imagining it falling down into the hole and having to swim after the thing. But thankfully, years of practice balancing possessions in farmyard lavatories kept the phone dry. The hotel was organizing an event for the night and wanted to know if we wanted to attend and that if we needed any help getting to the Riad. Having read extensively about the Riad la Maison Verte online, I knew they could be a bit overprotective of their guests - smart business, because you can corner them with your services and make more money with the less travel savvy guests - so I told them I'd get back to them about the dinner but wouldn't need help getting there. She was, after all, calling me while I was standing around a fly infested hole in the ground on break from a moving mass ambulance of sick and dying people. Luckily, I had left the wife back on the bus to guard our seat so we could ensure the one window of the bus would stay open and not suffocate us. There were dark forces on that bus and it took all our effort to keep that window well ajar, to be rid of those fecund spells. 

The Mrs. and half of the starter salads

We opted for the dinner. It was held in the sister Riad, the Palais de Fes dar Tazi, a massive palace overlooking the Amal Cinema square. The palace is stunning, the architecture inside is grand by no overstatement. It's worth just a walk through the Riad to imagine what a real Moroccan palace looked like - possibly better than any museum could show. A walk through can be done by visiting the restaurant up on the rooftop. The menu is a fixed price deal and it seems expensive at first, but understand that the small dinner is enough for two or three people and every dish is melting in your mouth good. Also, there's live Moroccan musicians and an amazing nighttime view of Fez. 

The said restaurant catered the event, and the food - including carrot salad with vanilla, eggplants and caviar, and the most exquisite pigeon pot pie - giving me a new respect for pigeons - was so phenomenal that we decided to go to dinner at the restaurant again the next night, passing on finding something new and different simply to relive the succulent bacchanal of awesome tastes that was happening in our mouths. 

The main feast hall cieling

Hotel events can range on the cheezy side to the ostentatious side, with every side in-between, and always a bit overpriced. Being at the Palais de Fes, it did stray on the ostentatious side. We had the option of a "private" or "public" table, and since knowing that meeting some randoms might be a bit more entertaining, we went for the public table, where we were seated with 8 other people, mostly from various parts of Spain. This meant, outside of a few courtesies, we were left mostly to ourselves, since most of the table chatter was in Spanish and the Spaniards' command of English wasn't much better than my command of Spanish.

Guys banging on drums

At the center of the hall's attention was a band playing some traditional Moroccan music, with an occasional variance in entertainment - at one point some yelling guys in white outfits banging on drums came in, waving their drums about in manners that were either traditional dances or making fun of the guests - "I get 20 dollars for waving around drums and shouting at silly white Europeans? Okay." But, you know, what might seem sometimes absurd to the local seems like an authentic cultural experience to the tourist, so fair game. There was also a belly dancer there to perform - another thing that's not overly common in the Middle East these days. I remember reading about an English woman moving to Beirut, she was looking for a job and found one teaching the lost Middle Eastern art form to the locals!

Authentic belly dancing!

The night went on mostly like that, though at one point, the girls running the hotel kept trying to pull up everyone to dance and have fun. Moroccan dancing seemed something like Turkish dancing, where they just wave their hands in the air and step back and forth, occasionally linking for a circle where you just kick in random directions like your tossing out some evil spirit at a Quaker fest. But it was fun, and the effort itself was dear, since it was clear that the girls themselves just wanted to enjoy their night while having to work. And that said, it was somewhat surprising to see in a Muslim country, girls without hijab happily leading dances with strangers. And it was somewhat a bit backwards than what I was used to, since in Georgia it's nearly always the men leading the entertainment.

The night ended with the dancing and the music, and in all, both of us were glad for the experience. It was fun, weird, and gave us a sense of "traditional Moroccan culture" enjoyed by rich Moroccans of the past. It was worth the 50 euros each, even though it didn't include wine. Scratch that, it would have been worth it if it had included wine! Sober on New Years, unheard of!