The call to prayer echoes across Fez's medina just as dawn breaks, and I'm already lost. Not the panicked kind of lost—the good kind. The kind where narrow alleyways twist like riddles, where every turn reveals another carpenter's workshop or a woman selling fresh mint by the bundle. The air smells of cedar wood, lamb tagine, and something sweet I can't quite place.
I follow my nose to a small bakery tucked between a leather tannery and a metalworker's shop. Inside, an elderly man pulls rounds of khobz from a clay oven, the bread puffing with steam. He sees me watching and gestures for me to sit. No shared language, just the universal grammar of hospitality. He tears off a piece of bread still too hot to hold, dips it in olive oil and za'atar, and hands it to me with a smile that says, this is how we start the day here.
I spend the morning watching the medina wake up. A boy no older than ten navigates a wooden cart loaded with fabric through passages barely wide enough for his shoulders. Two men argue over the price of saffron, their voices rising and falling like music. A cat stretches in a shaft of sunlight that slices through the latticed roof above.