Although we are clearly tourists, we are doing our best to travel and live as Moroccans do, so we are not staying in a hotel. We have come to the small town of Sidi Harazem, about 14 km to the south east of Fès. Sidi Harazem is most well known for its thermal baths and bottled mineral water. Moroccans who want to visit Fès and need a place to stay come to Sidi Harazem to rent rooms from locals. In fact, the local people have turned this improvised hostelry into a fine art. For a very inexpensive rate, I have rented an apartment for two nights that has air conditioning, a kitchen, a living room with t.v. and bedrooms. We will have a nice, cosy base for our exploration of the area.
After a quick site-seeing tour by car of Fès we came back to Sidi Harazem and ate dinner in a café in the "quartier populaire" of the village (where the hard-working poor people live). It was such an authentic cultural experience. Surely we were the only foreigners there. Our dinner was delicious! For about $1.50 I had a bowl of harira soup (a tomato-based soup made with chick peas, lentils, vermicelli, and meat into which you squeeze a bit of lemon juice), mineral water, whole wheat homemade bread, and chebakia (a wonderful Moroccan dessert treat made from pastry dough that has been cut into 1/2" long strips that are then rolled into a bundle and fried until very brown, then drained, rolled in honey, and sprinkled with roasted sesame seeds). Here is a picture of dinner:
And here I am as happy as can be in the poor man's restaurant enjoying a fabulous meal:
It's dark because we are sitting outside, there are no public street lamps, and it's nighttime.
Here are recipes for our dinner if you would like to try to make them:
Laure-Hélène and I sat and enjoyed people-watching and living in the moment. People bustled around us, sellers were yelling out to attract customers, and we had a real sense of what it is like to live in Morocco on a summer's evening.
I can hardly wait to try the recipe for Harira!
ReplyDelete