my secret palace

Dear Ellie,

I go to school in a palace. You enter through a large wooden door to a small hallway smothered with checkered blue and white tiles. Sunlight guides your path, and as you turn the corner you find yourself overwhelmed by the huge space before you. In what was once an open courtyard, my friends and I drink sweet mint tea and snack on Moroccan cookies as we chat with our language partners and teachers. The skylight illuminating our meeting space is more than three stories above us, and the walls and floors are covered in stunning, perfectly symmetrical mosaics. The bright blue and fresh green tiles are accented with tiny spots of yellow, red, and white. Looking up, you see the wrought iron and stained glass windows to our classrooms, intricate carvings on the ceilings, and wispy Arabic calligraphy that flows from one wall to another.

To your left is a small library—a nook lined with bookshelves filled with stories and guides and wisdom from distinguished scholars. In front of you is the kitchen where three or four women work all day to prepare our snacks and lunch. Beginning with a salad of some sort, followed by a large, main course made with local spices and flavorings, and ending with fresh, flavorful fruit for dessert, our feast is always a traditional Moroccan meal. Immediately to your right is a tiny bathroom—also covered in mosaics—tucked under the staircase leading to our classrooms and our teachers’ offices. My classroom is on the top floor, below only the roof (where we sit under the shade of large tents during our breaks.) Every hour, I climb the windy, steep stairs to my small classroom in order to try to understand the secrets and complexities of this beautiful, yet seemingly impossible language.

But from the outside, you would never know how wonderful a place it is. It’s tucked away on a small, stone lined, crooked street in the quiet neighborhood of an old—but still bustling—city. Compared to the loud, crowded, sensory stimulating market districts of the city, my neighborhood is seemingly quite dull. There are no vegetables for sale, no sweets to taste, no meats to smell. And though I often squeeze by a donkey on my walk to class, colorful leather goods don’t pour out of the doors of shops, begging to be purchased by passers-by. But, though it’s quiet, you never know what you’ll find behind a wooden door, or down a tiny alleyway.

And all of Fez is this way. Even in the exciting parts of town it is always worth it to take a moment, slow down, and notice something you’ve never seen before. Secret palaces are around every corner, you just have to know how to look for them.

Love,

Aunt Em