pretty little artsy details

it's so hot. did i say that already? well. we found quite a spot here, in fez at a cyber place that is relatively air conditioned and there's even! a ! keyboard! that ! has! the! letters! in the! right places!!!!! makes it much easier to write. fez is lovely. i like it a lot. i like it better than merrakesh in some ways; we are staying in the old city and it really feels different from anything. sometimes there are little tiny/narrow passages and when a horse or donkey comes by, we are smushing ourselves against the walls and still get brushed. a lot of the walkways are really narrow. and lots of cobblestoney narrow little walkways and it's really a maze. such a maze. it makes no sense and we are often getting lost and we think we know where we are and no, we don't. we ask many people many questions and they usually have different answers. anyway. so i like fez because it's very different, and it's all one color basically. merrakesh was also a tan/orange/earthy color, and fez is a sandy color. all the buildings. all of it. also i like fez because we're not seeing tons of tourists. not a lot of tourists. AND fez is great because we are staying in a hotel with a pool!!!! and air conditioning. it's lovely. really really lovely.

so i want to write a few things. about artsy little pretty details, and about what we did today. and maybe about the train yesterday and what we did yesterday. can't upload or download or whatever pictures right now but maybe i will later to illustrate my point about the artsy pretty little details.

so. america is very plain. plain jane and boring, really. here, everything is pretty. the sidewalks are pretty. the railings on all the windows are pretty. there are mosaics on basically all the walls. and they are pretty and intricate and detailed. and geometric. everything is geometric. there are so many arsty patterns everywhere. like in our hotel there is a fountain which is a cool geometric shape, and totally mosaicked. pattern upon pattern, and then the ground around it is also mosaicked and patterned. and then there are railings around that courtyard, and they are kind of intricate patterns, and the stairs to our room are mosaicked and match my table outside on the porch which is made of mosaic stones and i got it at peir 1 or someplace but apparently it's moroccan because we are seeing identical tables and things all over morocco. today we went to a place where they make the mosaics and pottery also and we saw how they put together all the little pieces to make a mosaic. really lovely and cool.



what else. we went to a synagogue this morning and that was really cool. we saw the mikveh and even the torah which shouldn't have been visible, i feel, but it was. it's a sephardi temple so it's a different model than most (ashkenazi temples). yesterday we walked aorund for hours and hours and hours. two hours or more after we left the hotel, looking for dinner, we sat down for dinner. it was really close to the hotel but we got superflouously lost and saw the whole old town many times over before we got there.

then we were so hot and thirsty we had to buy a melon and ask to borrow a shopkeepers knife and cut it open but not open enough so we got melon goo on our faces, arms and hands. but boy was it yummie.

okay more later

yona