Fes

The medina of Fes is a bustling little world of color, sound and smell. As we stepped through the old wall which divides the old city from the new city, I was immediately swept away into a parallel universe, narrated only by my thoughts and syncopated by the sounds of a language, however beautiful, impossible for me to decipher. We walked briskly with the flow of people, through narrow streets lined with stalls selling identical silver jewelery, knock off designer clothing, bootleg dvds, drums, silk pieces of cloth, intricate dresses and tunics and the like. It all seemed so famililar, in fact. The whole city seemed something from a dream I had once; the way dreams take things from reality and spin them into alternate webs of beautiful fantasy. Its so easy to get lost here, and often I feel like I'm floating five inches behind myself enjoying what I can, even if in a dream like state.

I always said there was no place like Andalucia. But walking through those narrow streets scented with spice, rainwater and humanity, I realized that I felt like I was walking through an old familiar neighborhood in my beloved city in andalucia. And of course, however much we talked about the arabic influence on cities in southern spain, it’s true resemblence cannot be fully understood until it is seen first hand. Al-Andaluz, the last stronghold of the arab empire in europe, and the Alhambra, the red fortress, which stood majestically on the hill behind the whitewashed labyrinth neighborhood where we would sit on rooftops and watch the sunset, singing in spanish and playing guitar....

It all seemed so familiar, walking though that old neighborhood in Fes, and yet contained elements so foreign, a simultaneous struggle between comfort and discomfort that I have felt so often during this trip around the world.