A common practice in speaking or writing about Fes is to accord chronological distinctions to its geographical ones. This description, for example, comes from Lonely Planet: "Traveling from the ville nouvelle to Fes el-Bali [the medina] is like literally stepping back in time." Or, several pages prior: "... for all the romance of medina life to visitors, many residents have been happy to sell up to foreigners to swap their sometimes medieval living conditions for a modern apartment in the ville nouvelle." In short: medina - medieval; ville nouvelle - modern.Thinking this way is unfair. First, both the medina and the ville nouvelle exist now, in the twenty-first century. As evocative as it may be to depict the former as "medieval," to do so ignores the complex and dynamic history of that place over the last several centuries; worse, it runs the risk of rendering the inhabitants of the medina into one-dimensional play-actors in some kind of grand Medieval Fair.
The medieval/modern divide also does damage to the ville nouvelle and its populace, and this is a second problem with it. Here, what often ends up happening is that people portray the newer part of town as less "authentic" than the old. It's not seen to represent the "real" Morocco. Hate to break it to you, folks (including the Moroccan university student talking up the medina to me the other day!), but there's no such thing as an authentic or real Morocco; there's only Morocco, as it exists now, and the ville nouvelle is just as much a part of that as the medina. Furthermore, as another Fulbrighter pointed out, excluding residents of the ville nouvelle from some supposed Moroccan "essence," discounting their lifestyles as somehow less valid than those of their neighbors -- not okay.
In sum, everywhere and everyone in Fes is fully twenty-first century and fully Moroccan.
My (over?) cerebralizing about where to live, then, was not grounded in a desire for the most "authentic" experience but rather in a recognition that the medina is unique. It would have been a challenging, new environment in which to conduct my daily life, whereas the ville nouvelle has a more familiar feel to it.
The familiarity makes sense, given that this southern-most area of town was built less than a century ago, in 1912, by the administrators of the then newly established French Protectorate. Its streets are wide and made of concrete, laid out in some kind of map-able order. Buildings tend to be better-insulated; houses have outward-facing windows and less in the way of narrow, windy-crookedy,
ceramic-tiled stairways.Certainly, though, this is no American city. Open-air cafés abound, populated almost entirely by men. Small stands of hot food -- chicken, kebabs, cow's head, greasy rice or vermicilli, soup, etc. -- crowd together on particular blocks, jockeying for the attention of passers-by. The flow of traffic is sufficiently free-form and aggressive to strike fear into the heart of the bravest of pedestrians. I've long since said my sayonaras to the Vermont-ian "on foot? onward!" attitude; truly, truly, these drivers are stopping for no one.
And I should point out that here, too, in the ville nouvelle, my foreign-ness and woman-ness commonly elicit stares and comments. The frequency of them is nothing like in the medina or Fes-Jdid, but without a doubt this attention is simply going to be a part of my day-to-day existence in Morocco.
As for the question of finding a place to live, it turned out to be surprisingly straightforward. Cath, another Fulbrighter with whom I've hit it off in a big way, and I obtained a list of available apartments from ALIF, where we're studying, and began making phone calls. (That is, she -- the French speaker -- started making phone calls... but more on language later.)
We ended up looking at four different options. Our requirements were two bedrooms, full furnishings, good natural light and a location within walking distance of ALIF. Two apartments were too far away, one was too big, and we had waffle-ly feelings about the fourth: beautiful though it was, we were concerned that it being situated just around the block from ALIF would put us too deep within the neighborhood ex-pat bubble.
In the end, however, we opted to see the location merely as a positive thing -- really, who can complain about the ability to walk out your front door at 7:57 and still be on time for your 8:00 class? -- and took it.
The apartment is beautiful. Owned by a Moroccan currently living in France, it contains not just two bedrooms but also two bathrooms, two spacious, Moroccan-style salons (salient feature: couches on every wall), two balconies and a kitchen. Our stove and hot water run on gas tanks under the sink that we turn on and off as needed. There's no oven, unfortunately, and less storage space than we're accustomed to. But we have pots and pans! And a washing machine! And a cute, circular, ceramic-ed kitchen table and neon-colored deck chairs for the balcony! Are we content? Yes, very.
And now that I'm physically settled, I feel that much more prepared to mentally root myself here for the coming months, to pinpoint my goals for this period, figure out how I'm going to accomplish them and to just establish a daily and weekly routine. This post, then, finds me in a good place, both in terms of residence and spirit.
Cath and I enjoying the larger of the two salons and a little afternoon sun
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