My Blog Thing

 So, I’ve just got back from a week in Fez in Northern Morocco and it was grand! 

Now, I could go on about the architecture, the weather, the food etc, but I won’t – I just want to mention one thing:

 One night we were eating at a outside restaurant just inside the main gate of the Fez Medina.  For those who have ever been to Fez, you go through the Bab Jeloud, and take the right hand fork (the least dark alley) and it’s there on the outside corner.

It was run by a very cheerful bloke who spoke no English and little bits of French, but it didn’t seem to matter and the food was cracking and really cheap…..but what was more was what was going on around us.

Sitting next to me was a bloke smoking and sipping a mint tea, which isn’t unusual.  What was unusual were the numbers of blokes sitting down next to him, having a quiet chat, handing over cash to him, then leaving.  After a while we realised that he had a massive crate of lager under the table, and the blokes were buying cans of lager off him and scurrying away to wherever to drink it.  This is in Fez, the home of Moroccan Islamic Orthodoxy where alcohol is very strictly the preserve of the rich tourist in the swanky hotels and looked down upon massively.   We seemed to have sat ourselves in an unofficial pub 

He kept this up all night, god only knows how much beer he had under the table but he kept on giving it out and must have made a fortune. 

On the table across from us was the guy who owned the restaurant and his mates.  They were drinking wat looked like Coke, but then we noticed that every now and again they were filling up there galsses with something, then hiding it in a tajine (conical casserole dish type thing)….it took us a while to realise they were drinking vodka and coke, and a lot of it.  The funniest part was that the bottle was taller than the lid of the Tajine, and so the lid was finely balanced on top and nearly fell off a few times.  Obviously there is only one god, and Allah is his prophet, and god is everywhere, except just there, under the tajine.

The guys were getting proper steamed, and the owner was getting a little unsteady and kept barging into people and sitting down too hard on his chair so it tipped dangerously.

At the end of the meal I paid, and I told him (honestly) that I thought his food was the best I had ever tasted in Morocco.  Not that this was what I said, itwas more a mime of me going all over Morocco and eating, and being in a state of near euphoria when I tasted his food.  It took him a while to get it, but when he did he shouted out lots of stuff in Arabic and grabbed hold of me and starting kissing me (in the European way……but not French…if you know what I mean).  He then hugged me really hard and kept touching my face, by which time my British sense of personal space flared up and I beat a hasty retreat…….but it was nice, and better than in England when they probably spit in your coffee when you tell them everything’s fine.

Great Country…………….the craziness of Africa with the coffee of France……there isn’t many better combinations