Snapshot · Fes el-Bali, Morocco
Tea at the Edge of the Market
A photo journal from a seven-in-the-morning café in the Fes medina: one glass of mint tea, a doorway full of oranges, and twenty minutes of watching the day arrive.
Seven in the morning, before the guides and the shouting. The café has no name I could find — just a marble counter, a shelf of dented teapots and an owner who poured without asking what I wanted. Mint tea, very sweet, very hot.
I sat on the step by the door and let the medina wake up in front of me.
07:04
A man in a brown djellaba pushes a cart of oranges up the lane, stacking them into pyramids that look too perfect to sell from. The first customers are other stallholders.
07:11
The spice sellers roll their sacks open one by one: cumin, paprika, something green I don't have a name for. The smell reaches the café before the light does.
07:19
A schoolgirl buys a single bread round, tears it in half and gives half to her younger brother without breaking stride. Neither of them looks up.
07:26
The owner refills my glass, though I didn't ask. He says something I don't understand and laughs at the face I make, and I laugh too, and that's the whole conversation.
By half past seven the alley was full and loud, and it was time to go. I paid five dirhams and left the glass on the counter where it had been. The photographs above are the only proof I was there at all, which seems about right for a morning like that.