On Thursday, we visited El Badii Palace, which was commissioned and built in the late 16th century. We went in the morning, and it was vast and fairly empty (visiting top attractions before 11:00 am is always a good idea). Visitors are still allowed to climb on a lot of the stone ruins, which was unexpected and fun for us. I also made a pregnant cat friend. 

The palace walls are lined with massive stork nests, and we spent some time watching the big, gangly birds walk along the walls. They are very odd looking birds, and it’s especially cool to watch them take off and soar around the walls. 

Next, we had some mint tea and then went to Cyber Park, which is a large and very well-kept park near the medina walls. It had a ton of olive trees, locals studying, and cats. It was a very enjoyable experience overall.

On Thursday evening, we joined a food tour to learn more about the local food culture. We started out at one of the shops in the Jemaa el-Fnaa market. The market itself is somewhat of an assault to the senses — there are bright colors everywhere, many strong smells, stalls selling everything from goat heads to 90s TV remotes, and lots of people yelling (at each other, at tourists to buy things, at the crowd to get out of the way). The heckling at tourists has varying levels of creativity — many men just yelled at us to come look at their wares, but one yelled “I want to be on your basketball team!” at me as we walked past. 

Most of the buildings around the city are three or four stories, and when people enter them, they usually try to go up as much as possible to get a vantage point off of the street. 

This first shop had a simple menu: lamb, beans, and bread. We were warned not to fill up on the bread, which was something we struggled with for the next three hours. The lamb was cooked in a large underground oven, where the whole lambs were hung for several hours to roast. Once the roasting was complete, the lamb was served plain with sides of cumin and salt (it can’t be seasoned before cooking because the oven is too hot). They also served the lamb as tanjia, which is a stew cooked in an urn-shaped clay pot. 

One of the men in our group, who felt the need to assert himself as an adventurous eater, asked if he could eat the eyeball. Our guide obligingly brought him half a lamb’s head and taught him how to extract the eyeball, and to his credit, he did not have a strong reaction — he said it mostly tasted very intensely of lamb. I was also impressed that none of the other 8 people on the food tour freaked out.

We had a few snack stops over the next hour, including delicious filled flatbread, soup, olives, snails, and very large and delicious doughnuts that were dipped in honey. We also sat down to try some meatballs made with sardines, which are a local favorite.

Our last savory stop, when we were all feeling quite full already, was at a woman’s cooperative that made couscous. The kitchen was tucked away behind a traditional women’s market, which had closed for the day, and it was a welcome respite from the busy medina streets. Our guide talked us through the proper way to prepare couscous (it’s far more intensive than the brief steaming that we’re used to in the United States), and we enjoyed some fresh couscous with vegetables that the cooperative made. It was served with buttermilk, which was an interesting touch. If you get a chance, ask Emilie what she thought of the couscous-buttermilk experience.

We finished out the food tour at a shop that served pastries and smoothies. Smoothies aren’t traditional in Morocco, but they’ve become popular over the past couple of decades. The general method of ordering is to pick a base, either orange juice or milk, and then add a couple of fruits and nuts, if desired. We got an assortment of pastries, which was great because it allowed us to try things we probably wouldn’t have. Morocco is big into a few flavors, including rose, orange blossom, and almond. Marzipan is a very common flavor in cookies, which I’m not a big fan of, but sometimes the other elements balanced it out well for me. Some of the cookies were deep fried, which is always delicious, and honey never hurts either.

On Friday, we had to get up far too early to catch the first flight to Fes. I asked our riad to arrange a car for us at 4:00 am, and they went back and forth with us a few times to confirm that the time wasn’t getting lost in translation. I think I finally managed to convince them that I knew which time I was conveying by apologizing that they’d have to be up so early. This made them laugh.

Fes has the oldest medinas in the country, and they are surrounded by a wall and often ornate gates, or Babs. The narrow medina streets and derbs (roughly, alleys in neighborhoods) are often not on any maps, which makes it difficult to know when you’re going to hit a dead end.

Fes also quite hilly, unlike Marrakech. The difficulties of the hills ensure that there are fewer mopeds and motorcycles on the narrow interior streets, which makes the air quality much more enjoyable. We had all been struggling with breathing in the exhaust from the two-stroke engines in Marrakech. 

After dropping off our bags at the riad, we went to visit the Royal Palace. Tourists cannot actually go into the palace, but the main attraction is the incredibly ornate and massive set of gates. The gates are huge — the smallest set was probably close to 10 feet tall. It’s a quick stop, but definitely impressive.

We next walked through a large park before visiting the huge Cimetière Israélite. With the stark white tombs and deep blue painted accents, it reminded me of all the pictures I’ve seen of Santorini.

In the afternoon, we took a baking class at Cafe Clock, which has a few locations across Morocco. Our teacher, who knew French and Arabic but not much English, took us up five sets of twisting tiled stairs to the baking room, where she started teaching us how to make dough. 

Morocco has a lot of traditional breads, but the one most often served with meals is made with wheat and semolina flour and allowed one short rise, so when it’s baked it rises an inch or two. It’s then cut into quarters for serving, so it can be torn up to pick up food or used as a pocket to make a sandwich. We made this one first, then moved on to a stretchier dough that we used to make stuffed flatbread, which we filled with sauteed vegetables and baked. 

We also made several sweet cookies — fekkas, which are very similar to biscotti; ghriba, which are a kind of macaroon that tastes like a scone rolled in powdered sugar; and Moroccan snowball cookies, which are dipped in a fruit glaze and rolled in shredded coconut. Our teacher showed us how to form each one, invited us to take over, and then often fixed what we had done to make it closer to the actual thing. She was very sweet about it, though we all dissolved into giggles several times when someone thought they had been doing well and their bread had to be fixed a lot.

The fekkas and snowball cookies were baked in the small wall oven in our kitchen, but the other items were taken to the communal bread oven to bake. And thus began our completely unexpected adventure across the medina.

Because it was Friday, the holy day, the closest bread oven was closed, so we took the breads to the next oven over. I have no idea how far it was, but we carried the breads through the medina for several minutes, much to the amusement of the locals, who called out to our teacher and laughed at us in our aprons. We later decided that we were glad it was Friday, because the medina was so much less busy — on a normal day, the crowd of people trying to get through the narrower areas of the alleys can be pretty intense, and we were all trying very hard not to drop any cookies or breads on the ground.

When we arrived at the oven, our teacher explained that many people brought their breads and cookies here to bake. The oven is huge, and the men who work there are constantly putting breads in, rotating them into the cooler areas of the oven, and taking them out. They gave our teacher a time to return, and we headed back to finish up some other cookies.

Half an hour later, we ventured back across the medina to get our bread and cookies, which were impressively perfectly baked. When we got back, we did some final preparations before sitting down to our feast. Everything was really delicious, even some of the cookies that we weren’t sure we’d like. We did well, and/or we had a good teacher who fixed everything for us.