We took off from London (Stansted airport) today and just arrived at Fes, Morocco. The weather was nice and cool, around 15 deg but swan and I felt kinda chilly still. Not sure why! On the way to the hotel, there wasn't much to see, partly cos it was already dark so we only saw a couple of run down buildings. When the driver dropped us off, I was kinda turned off by the fact that the hotel was located in a dodgy tiny alley but I didn't make a huge fuss out of it since Mk had put in alot of effort in booking a hotel and I didn't help him much with the booking of the fes hotel.. But thank goodness I was very pleasantly surprised when I entered the hotel! There was a living room area that had a mini fire place and there was also a unique scent in the riad. Our hotel was called Riad Tizwa (a riad is something like traditional moroccan quarters but ours was remodelled into a hotel). Upon arrival, we were served with nuts (which swan and elby loved) and mint tea which tasted pretty unique. I'll probably drink more mint tea during my stay here.
After checking into our rooms (which had a traditional feel to it), I was even happier to realise that we had canopy beds and there was even an iPhone speaker dock thingy! Plus free wifi! How awesome. I tried to go on skype to contact mummy later on in the night but unfortunately she wasn't on skype so I just dropped her an email.
We decided to leave the hotel to change our pounds into Moroccan dollars (dh) and get ourselves something to eat. The Riad person in charge, Riduan, graciously offered to pick us up after 15 minutes but Mk rejected his offer. We ended up walking in the wrong direction cos there were no road signs (none that we could understand anyway). Luckily, we ran into a Frenchman and his son who (although could not speak a word of English) helped us to get to the blue gate where the ATM and Cafe was. Mk was very annoyed by all the touting and tried to usher us out of the cafe. But in any case we had to leave since the ATM machine was broken and we didn't have any MAD (Moroccan dollars) on us. We walked back to the Riad to ask if Riduan could lend us some local currency but he wasn't in the Riad and there was no way we could have gotten in cos we didn't have the keys to the main door. We ended up using swan's phone to call Riduan and he came from tango class to open the doors for us. At first we asked him to take away some food for us (which Mk would actually have preferred) after his tango class cos we felt bad that we made him leave dance class suddenly but he offered to walk us to a cafe and pick us up after his class ends. This was a good move cos we ended up having some rather nice roadside cafe food. We started chattig with an English man and his Australian female friend and they recommended a few dishes for us to try. The guy was english but he has been living in France since he was 3. Come to think of it, he kinda looks like Channing Tatum (that is, if my memory serves me right). They're both currently taking time off work to travel around the world. I'm really lucky that I got to go on exchange and travel around so much. Maybe law school wasn't such a bad idea after all :D I finally got to try the couscous that Yilin raved so much about and I liked it! Although after a while I got kinda sick of it ): swan and Mk ate the local fes dish, pastilla, which had chicken and egg inside a prata like casing but surprisingly it was sweet (which the Englishman did warn us about). There was cinnamon powder on top of the pastilla which made it taste pretty unique. Elbey ate kebab which swan and Mk raved about. I thought it was nice but that the portion was way too small.
After dinner, we went back to rest and Mk and I treated our horrid bed bug bites with the skin cream that we bought from boots at the airport.