brrr, its cold up here

up early in fez and back to the old city. fez is really amazing because as you walk through it it just seems like a crazy maze of interconnecting streets until you come upon an open door and inside these walls are these stunning mosques or elaborate riads. for breakfast amine and i had a bowl of bean soup topped with olive oil and garlic marinated in oil zith a hunk of crusty bed. we sat in a tiny room behing the storefront cook/propretor, all crowded on two sets of three cheap plastic stools on each side of a plastic table to eat on. the man next to me (only one thing on the menu here) told amine that he was 57 years old living in fez and had never seen a foreigner at this place. after breakfast we wandered the streets, visiting the leather tannery, the stables housing the old fex taxis (mules), and other assorted sights.

from there we were off south, which paradoxically made it very cold. as we entered the middle atlas mountains, apple orchards slowly gave way to evergreens, which then surrendered to enless spruce and snow covered ground. first stop was ifrane, a town in the mountains built by the french to look like a town in the alps. a very bougie place these days, ifrane is host to a very expensive college taught all in english by american teachers. a quick detour brought us to a forrest inhabited by barbary apes; a playful monkey found frollicking atop snow piles and begging for bread from stupid tourists. once we reached the middle atlas plateau, the snow gave way to cold, stony desert and the occasional berber town. eventually, the high atlas emeerge in shrouded white snowcover in contrast to the barren brown rocks in the foreground. here we spend the night; in a cold simple hotel at the foot of the atlas, waiting for day break and the comforting heat of the sahara.