Northward, ho!

Between Seattle and Vermont, the northern roots just wouldn’t leave me alone, so once my language grant ended in Fez at the end of February, I migrated to Tetouan – a smaller city about an hour east of Tangier, ten some kilometers from the Mediterranean and surrounded on all sides by the Rif Mountains.

Welcome to Fes. Make yourself at home. Part III: The ville nouvelle and finding an apartment

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.