Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Met up with Tinny, Jarek, and Phil unexpectedly soon. I thought their flight was arriving at 3 and that they'd be getting to Fes by train later on, but it turned out that they were expecting to arrive in Fes at 3, so we were all on the same train, them all the way from Casa, me from Meknes. I spotted them while Tinny was talking to a guide about taxis to our Riad.

Fes seems a lot easier to navigate than most of the places I've been. There are signposted walking tours, and it was pretty easy to find our Riad. And the people here are so helpful! Restaurants, hotels, shops, they want to help you find the very best and cheapest!

I think we've already been approached by more people trying to guide us to things since arriving in Fes than I was in the first two weeks of my trip. Part of it may be that we're a group, and part of it may be that we stick out more than I did alone, but I think most of it is that the density of salesmen is much higher here. We had one guy, a teenager, follow us for probably half a mile, first trying to get us to let him guide us, and then telling us to just go back to our hotel and go to sleep, since we didn't want to see any of the sights.

I have been having trouble actually eating enough meals up until now. It's really easy to accidentally miss lunch, and then have dinner too early. For example, today I arrived at the train station at about 11:30 and then wasn't on a train until 2 (I must have just missed the earlier departure, and then the train was running late), so I had a packet of Tonga (strawberry wafers) and a packet of Tango (chocolate/vanilla sandwich cookies) between breakfast at 10 and dinner at 5. But then I ate a bunch of snacks from stalls: a donut served on a string (because it's too hot to handle, fresh out of the oil), a couple of pastries, and a second dinner at 7:30.

Between first dinner and second dinner, we wandered around, trying to get a little lost, but not too lost. I don't think we were ever very lost at all. But we did manage to find a cul-de-sac (one guy said to us "The Kasbah is like a palace: just one entrance!"). There were a bunch of kids hanging around the street, and Tinny suggested doing some acro tricks to amuse them. We did a 2 up for them, and then showed them how to do the quad stand alternating flourish. Amazingly, nobody was injured!