Its a tough job but someones got to test these terraces out for comfort, thanks Fred and cheers Gary for the photo, now everyone can see what a lazy git I am. Well at my age (have a guess) I think I deserve it!!
A DMcKinlay shot from the Menzeh bedroom framing my Ali Baba magic lamp, unfortunately Genie-less.
An interesting day yesterday as I had a visitor from our neighbours Meknes in town, who after following my blog observations about the nouvelle cafes in town decided to come check it out for himself.
Lionel is a Frenchman teaching English at a school in Meknes and living with his girlfriend and young children in a large Medina house that he is in the process of renovating. Comparing notes on the different cities it quickly became apparent there is a huge gulf in the way things operate. Here in Fes we have more malems than we can shake a stick at, whereas in Meknes there is a dirth of skilled tradesmen apparently with only one zelliger of note for instance an old 70 year old Meknessi who the renovators share!!
According to Lionel there are approximately only 4-6 Europeans who have bought and restored a property (surely not) and when sourcing materials sometimes a trip to Fes is necessary to pick up plaster or zellige materials. He was suitably impressed with the bilde in the buildings here in Fes as this is not the case in Meknes whereas he says prices tend to be higher per sq m even so.
As he was only here for the day I tried to pack in as much as possible and will hopefully get a reciprocal time when I visit him. We took off for the ceramic factories to negotiate a good deal for his zellige with wildly fluctuating prices but after some astonishment at an initial quote of 800 dh a sq m we found a small independent at a more reasonable 300 dh, it pays to shop around as we all know.
From here we went to my new fave venue So Sweet cafe for savoury crepes, back to the Mernissi house to chill before a cool vodka and tonic with Sesarina at the effortlessly cool Riad Fes. To finish off Lionels day with a flourish off we went to the equally effortlessly cool Kiotori for sushi (3rd time in a week) where we joined Mr David Amster and Miss Karina Deubner of Ghengis fame for some wasabi mouthburn antics, yum.
Nice to meet a fellow European with a completely different take on living in Morocco and look forward to getting under the skin of Meknes and checking out the stylish Art Deco inflenced new town amongst other things.
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