I take a morning coffee on the Plaza Utan el-Hamman, the ‘watch the world go by’ main square of the Blue pearl medina. The waiter spends more time hustling people into his café than serving them. He seems to take it as a personal insult if they don’t come inside, throwing insults after those that walk away.
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| credit photo : Pixabay |
I’m amused by a rotund Spanish man sitting with a group of friends at a table nearby. He has a fancy Canon camera, but every time he tries to take a photo of his travelling companions sat at the table the camera doesn’t work. I watch him for a while as he keeps trying with no success and complaining that his expensive camera has stopped working half way through their holiday. I finally give in and walk over to him. I suggest he tips the peak of his baseball cap back a bit and try again. He does, and voila!, the camera works again. The simple explanation is that when the automatic flash flipped open, the peak of his cap was stopping it from opening fully, therefore not completing the electronic cycle. Laughs all round and a fully functioning camera to record his holidays.
I walk into the upper levels of the medina and the higher I go the streets become less tourism orientated and more directed at village way of life. Small grocers, furniture makers, bakers and artisans fill the tiny shops. At the Librairie El Dai Ben Maymouna, piles of second-hand magazines going back decades form a low wall outside the shop. To pass the time the owner reads something from his stock, sat on a small rickety stool in the morning sunlight. In his cluttered shop, bundles of tied-up magazines share shelf space with dog-eared paperback books, and faded black and white photos pinned to the door show Chefchaouen as it was generations ago. A couple of postcard stands display out-of-date cards, some of them almost curled double by exposure to the sun.
Next door is Janine Internet, with its stock of computer necessities, and a place to send modern day versions of the postcards, the photos you took yourself a couple of hours ago with an iphone, but lacking the charm of the stock in the Librairie’s worn out display stands next door. It’s a curious contrast, the ultra-modern next to the outdated, but a commonplace sight in Morocco.
This ancient quartier is a place of corners shaded by hanging vines, a dispute as a builder blocks a shop doorway with bags of cement before he hoists them above, boys on bikes dodging the pedestrians as they scramble downhill, a father hand-in-hand with his small son entering a barber shop that has outmoded photos of models with dense lacquered hair taped to the widow.
A mini-moment of drama occurs as a man tries to raise a wire supporting a large grapevine that crosses the narrow street. The wire has settled on a telephone cable, which looks as if it is about to be torn from the wall by the weight of the grapes. He’s concentrating so much on poking with his pole that he doesn’t notice that the wire has dropped under one of the tiles on his roof. With a mighty heft he pushes the vines up over the phone cable and at the same time dislodges the tile. With a crash, the roof tile hits the ground, scattering shards into the street. He looks around bemused, realizing that he has just created himself another repair job.
The crash makes a baker jump as he steps out his shop. He’s carrying a tray of freshly-baked round loves covered in tea towel-sized cloths that he lays on the low frame of a banquette, without the mattress, waiting for the owners to collect them. At one end two metal trays of baked peppers show what someone is having for lunch. At the end of the day, when all the bread has been baked, he will slide trays of honey and orange-blossom water pastries into the oven to cook by the cooling embers of the oven fire.
