Did he really say "troglodyte"?

Zoë and Sou'ad work on marinating the lamb.

This is the story of our Morocco trip, Part II.  One of the true highlights of our stay was a cooking class we took at a place called "Café Clock."  The name derives from the fact that the cafe is behind a very old building that housed a water clock.  The clock has been disassembled for analysis and repair.  Apparently, no one really understands quite how it worked.  In any case, we met our teacher, the wonderful Sou'ad at 10am for a  trip to the market to buy our ingredients, which included fresh lamb, various spices, dates, and eggplant.  Along the way she explained how the markets were organized, where and how the meat was butchered, how it was preserved without refrigeration, etc.  Then, up to the kitchen, where Sou'ad had us do the grunt work of chopping onions, peeling almonds, and crushing garlic while she told us about Moroccan cooking and the role of food in Moroccan life.  Sou'ad was open, friendly, talkative, and funny, making the whole experience great fun.  At 2:30pm, we were ready to eat.  The menu included a spicy eggplant salad, a prune and apricot lamb tagine, and almond macaroons.  A "tagine" is a very common Moroccan dish, named after the clay slow-cooker in which it is traditionally made and served.  These days, people use pressure cookers, reducing the tagine itself to the role of a serving dish, out of which the family enjoys a communal meal eaten with bread. The whole meal was delicious, thanks to Sou'ad's formidable talent as a cook.  When she offered to have us back the next day for a meal of our choosing, we jumped at the chance, and made arrangements to have "pastilla" (chicken with spices baked wrapped in filo dough and topped with powdered sugar and cinammon) and chocolate covered dates.  After wandering around in the medina for a few hours, unguided, we stuffed ourselves with Sou'ad's cooking and enjoyed her company once again.

And for Mohamed, more sugar.

Our final day in Morocco was spent on a trip to the Middle Atlas, the mountains to the south of the city.  We were greeted by our driver, who, as it turns out, spoke no English, so the day was spent listening very closely as he explained everything in slow, clear French.  I would like to thank Pasquale Hashemzadeh and the other members of the UVA French language faculty of the mid 80s for making it possible for me to understand roughly 80% of what he said.  We hit a variety of stops in the mountains, most of them local tourist attractions visited by Moroccan families, and in one case, a troop of Moroccan Boy Scouts.  The first was the village of Bhalil.  Our driver asked is if we wanted to stop there to see the . . . did he say "troglodytes"?!  I thought this was a misunderstanding on my part, perhaps an Arabic word that I was hearing all wrong.  But no, he did indeed say "troglodytes," meaning "a cave dweller."  We were met at the entrance to the town by Mr. Mohamed Chraibi, the official guide and himself a . . .  troglodyte.  Like Granada, Bhalil has a section where people long ago converted caves into homes, building structures atop of, or in front of, more or less naturally occurring caves.  Mohamed took us to his cave-home, where we sat and had mint tea, with lots of sugar.  After shoveling three heaping serving spoons of sugar into the teapot, Mohamed poured out the cups, tasted his, and said, "For Mohamed, more sugar."  He always referred to himself in the third person.  He also asked me to share his address with my friends, so that you could contact him if  you were ever in Morocco, and wanted to visit him:

Mr. Mohamed Chraibi
B.P. 42
Bhalil Par Fes
Morocco

He said he is happy to have visitors to his home, and will be glad to show you around and make you tea.  It's polite to pay him for all this, of course.

Zoë makes a monkey very happy.

The other highlight was the macaques.  We drove through the Middle Atlas, seeing the scenery, the lakes, the little towns each with its own diminutive mosque, stopping at an upscale resort town for lunch.  Eventually, we made our way to a national park where cedar trees cover the hills, and provide shelter to macaques introduced from the Middle East.  These supposedly wild macaques have been thoroughly domesticated by visitors who feed them.  Vendors sell bananas and peanuts, and the gentle macaques take them from your hand when you offer these foods to them.  They also hover around picnic blankets, hoping to get lucky.  Interestingly, they know not to beg from the food vendors themselves.  They've learned that the venders won't fork anything over, and actually watch while you buy the food from them before the start looking at you with banana-lust in their beady eyes.  Some of them are exceptionally fat.  I can't imagine any of this is at all good for the animals, but it's been going on for some time and they seem to be completely adapted to it.

Back in Fes, we took a dip in the pool at the riad (yes, fellow Fes travelers, our riad had a pool.  Just try and top that.) and enjoyed a wonderful dinner, another tagine, poolside.  The next day, it was back to Madrid, where we would finally have to face the horrifying reality of packing up our things to go back to the US for good.  Or, where we could keep denial alive by blogging about Morocco.