Fes; Bab Boujloud

The difficulty about Fes el Bali, the medieval area is that it is built on two sides of a river valley and the streets run down to it very steeply. The medina is walled and there are no cars inside, it having been designed only for donkeys. There is  dual carriage way following the walls most of the way round with car parks built near the main gates. The knack is to enter at a gate high up and then follow a downhill route and then leave from a lower gate where you can get a taxi from the car park and avoid any steep ascent. The gates are old and impressive  and a tour of them by car is a recommended route for tourists.
Bab Boujoud is a modern gate built by the French during the Protectorate. It has a central arch with two smaller lateral arches and is decorated with zelij, green on the inside

 and Fassi blue on the outside.

 It is a principal entrance for tourists being on end of the Talaa Sghira or small slope and the parallel Talaa Kbira, big slope, the main routes through the medina. There are a large number of cheap restaurant just inside and around the gate.

  

Fes; Riad Jean-Claude and Ain Azliten

I'm not quite sure about this trip to Fes. We had been planning it for months but were insufficiently informed. In Taroudant it was 26C yesterday and will be that or higher all week. In Fes it is 16C. We had expected it to be slightly cooler but 10 degrees is a lot and we haven't really brought the right wardrobe. Beloved went out on the evening we arrived and realised that he was the only person wearing sandals and that his feet were cold, so yesterday was a bit of a scramble to buy socks.

The Riad is lovely, owned by a retired Frenchman from Lille, and has a lovely garden. I am particularly annoyed that his dark blue paint does not appear to have any weathering problems. The garden though could be in europe and the morning chorus feels more like Wales than Morocco as there are thrush and collared doves in with the cheepy small birds.

Jean-Claude introduced us to the excellent guide system with a book and map in english in our case pointing out various colour coded routes through Fes el Bali with indicator markers and exploratory boards. 

The system was set up in 2005 and we found it a little frustrating as a fair few of the attractions we wished to vist were closed, usually for renovation. Yesrday's count was the Water Distributor, the Mesbahiya Medersa and the Dar Ba Mohammed Chergui garden.

One of the advantages of the Riad is that it is just outside the Medina with guarded parking outside the door but is very close to the access point at Ain Azliten. The garden there is described by the guide-book as the least attractive on the root but I would describe as abandoned.

Rick's Cafe Casablanca

We are on our way to Fes but it's a two day journey and stopped at an Ibis on the outskirts near the motorway. We couldn't resist taking a taxi into town and going to Rick's Cafe for dinner. It was a 20 minute ride in and cost less than £7. Eat your heart out London. I thought  Rick's Cafe would be a mock-up of the film club , but it isn't. just a swanky Maroc 30s style restaurant with good food, overcoated doormen and a jazz band on Sunday nights. Apparently in the week it's their resident pianist but Sunday is his day off. A sophisticated change from tajine.
They do have the film running silently on a loop in the bar. It has english subtitles so you can anticipate your favourite lines. Beloved was particularly taking by the instructions for settling the bill which said that cheques should be made out to "the usual suspects".

Women

                                                                           

In 2011 I blogged on the status of women for International Women's Day. I thought I would revisit it five years on to see what has changed.

This time round this is much easier because I blog on the statistics gathered the year before. 2010 was the first year when the Human Development Index included a Gender Inequality Index and it has been updated for every year since.

The measure of gender inequality is shown as a number where 1 would be complete equality and 0 complete inequality. It is based on a number of criteria including comparisons of female/male participation in the workforce, per capita incomes, years of schooling, percentage seats in parliament held by women, etc. The UK benefits from having had a female prime minister for 9 of the last 50 years but this seems a bit unfair because whatever her assigned gender Maggie Thatcher was NOT a sister. 
In 2010 Morocco had an index of 0.5767, in 2015 it was 0.590. This appears to be an improvement but in fact it is a retrograde from the high spot of 2014 when it reached 0.5958. I haven't been able to work out why it is going backwards. Nevertheless the apparent improvement may not be very real at all because whilst in 2010 Morocco was ranked 127th in the world in 2015 it is ranked 139th. In the same period its nearest comparators Tunisia and Algeria have similarly fallen behind from 107th to 127th and 114th to 128th respectively. Meanwhile Saudi has overtaken Morocco moving from 129th with a score of 0.5713 to 134th with a score of 0.605, and this in a country where women aren't even allowed to drive!
The UK remains at 18 with a score of 0.78 and the USA has fallen from 19th to 28th with a score of 0.740. Iceland remains top with a score of 0.881.
However Morocco has made progress with maternal mortality during this period halving it from 240 to 120 per 1000 live births so there is some good news although in Algeria it is 72 and Tunisia 46 so there is some way to go still. (The UK incidence is 8, and, shamefully, the USA with the largest economy in the world is 28).

Terrace Pots

The development of the terrace was now six years ago. We had great problems getting our builder to paint the wall turquoise but that has worked out well.    We used the leftover paint to paint some pots and containers and painted some others a darker "Toureg" blue. They were the same paint just in different colours. For some reason I don't understand the turquoise has lasted well even though it is in direct sunlight. The darker blue hasn't. It is peeling off the plastic troughs and the terracotta pot is badly faded.

  
Once you start painting pots you need at least two contrasting colours. I am obviously reluctant to buy more dark blue paint and repaint as past experience is not good. Before Xmas we started using some yellow. 
Our Bird of Paradise plants are on the wrong (sun-baked) side of the terrace. We now really only use cacti and succulents on that side.  They are surviving but not thriving. 

We have decided to move them to the more shady side. This is quite complicated. We have bought new pots for them. 

We think these should be painted yellow too. They'll then have to be filled with a mixture of compost and soil and replanted. All this has to be carried up two stories of stairs. Beloved is exhausted. 

Hauling the Boat Up

We stood on the harbour wall and watched as they hoisted the fishing boats out of the water. They were actually pulled onto small rollers once the water wasn't taking the weight. 

They pulled together to a perfect unspoken rhythm. I was quite disappointed they did not seem to us the equivalent of a sea shanty to time themselves.

Essaouira Harbour Defences

Essaouira  port was built by the Portugese in the 17th century. It was part of a chain of ports down the Atlantic coast of Morocco, Asilah, El Jadida, Agadir, and as this was the time of the Sale pirates they had to be well defended. All these ports are characterised by their walls and "pepper  pot" turrets. Eventually these ports allowed Portugal to trade directly with sub-Saharan Africa circumventing the trans-Sahara caravan route and ending the Ghanaian gold trade. It also led to the "3 corner trade" shipping slaves directly to the Americas without first passing through the Mahgreb.

Essaouira is perhaps the best example. The harbour is defended by a row of islands and some of these had gun emplacements too. 

The actual harbour is ringed by an elevated rampart with gun emplacements 

and we paid our 70p and joined the large number of moroccan tourists enjoying a look round during the school holidays. 

It was easy to see approaching ships would be caught in the crossfire. 

Beloved climbed the tower from where you could see that the emplacements controlled all sea approaches.

The port walls are particularly attractive and one circular "window" had been enhanced for the benefit of tourists with two short sets of wooden steps allowing them to take the perfect picture.