The smell hit me first—wood smoke tangled with something sweet, maybe honey or burnt sugar. I followed it down an alley in Fez so narrow my shoulders nearly brushed both walls, past doorways curtained with strings of glass beads that clicked softly in the morning breeze.
An old man sat on a wooden stool, tending a clay oven no bigger than a barrel. His hands moved with the certainty of someone who'd done this ten thousand times: shaping dough, slapping it against the oven's curved interior, peeling off golden rounds of bread. He looked up and gestured to the empty stool beside him.
I don't speak Arabic. He didn't speak English. But he broke a piece of bread still warm from the oven and handed it to me with a small dish of olive oil, green and grassy. We sat there together in comfortable silence, the morning call to prayer echoing off the medina walls, while the city slowly woke around us.