Fes 1, Curtis 0

I was standing there utterly confounded, again. The shopowners were staring blindly and blithely by as I 360’d with a pained and plaintive face despite my best efforts to look like I knew where the hell I was in this unbelievable warren of passageways and ‘streets’. Looking up and out was pointless: there are no striking monuments or discernable physical markers. My map was useless as there are no street names. There are no wide boulevards cutting swaths through the ancient urban fabric like Paris. There are no ordering axes that tie the nodes of the city together a la Rome. There is no comfortable grid of streets that please the rational mind like New York. There is only a pathway anarchy that defies comprehension. I admit defeat. Fes wins. In all my years of self-assured travel (I can read a map, after all) I have never been so completely lost, so many times. I was warned at the hotel, in the guide books, but nothing can prepare you for these acres upon acres of impenetrable dense confusion.

It started after I arrived at the Gare de Fes in the Ville Nouvelle de Fes. At the station I scrambled for a cab- the idea of a taxi queue is alien here- clipped some Islamic mumued babooshkas and fell into the taxi for the Medina (Old City) of Fes where my hotel, the Riad Fes, is located. Well, no cars in the Medina, not when the average street is about 6 feet wide, so I had to lug my suitcase, which I affectionately have named Little Red Sarcaphogus, into the heart of the Old City. This was difficult enough, but just yards through one of the old gates I was lost. I went a bit further in and I was even more lost. Minutes later I was so turned around I began to doubt many aspects of my reality.

I finally had to break down and ask one of the annoying touts who were constantly cajoling me to lead me to the hotel. Abdullah led the way and I was there in minutes. I begrudgingly gave him 10 dirhams (about a buck and a quarter) and NO I don’t need a guide.

So after a shower at the hotel, I rushed headlong into the Medina for my obligatory scouting of a new city. And lost again. Almost instantly.

So just stop, breathe take it in.

This place assaults the senses completely- spices- fresh and dried in conical heaps, newly cured leather, sweet and savory street cart fare, perfume vendors featuring local verbena and bergamot, rank donkeys used as goods vehicles in these narrow streets and, of course, their droppings; children reciting verses in the little Qu’ranic schools, hawkers yelling out their wares, the chatter of teens being teens, the bustle of tour guides as they herd their charges, the hum of artisans as they work their tools, the burst of incongruous arab pop as cell phones discharge and not so often the arching call to prayer of the mosques’ muezzins.

So I accept defeat graciously, but choose to look at defeat as a means to see something new and rich, so unlike anything I have experienced before. A fair exchange- a momentary loss of my sense of direction for the heightened stimulation of all my other ones.