One of the highlights of your trip to Morocco is to spent some days in Fez , the country’s cultural capital. Inside the walls of the medina, the ancient and unbeliveably vibrant traditional city, 150,000 people maintain a way of life that is, in many ways, much like it was hundreds of years ago. A lot of times that I have been there I was wondering , how I might find my way out of the medina’s intricate labyrinth of narrow, brimming pedestrian streets if i want to venture inside on my own, without a guide and the answer came straight away from my moroccan friend “Leave a trail of breadcrumbs!” he answered helpfully. If we had indeed needed them, breadcrumbs would have been easy to find; the medina abounds with several hundred bakeries whose wood-fired ovens collectively produce tens of thousands of khobz — the ubiquitous, flattish Moroccan loaves — every day. The breadcrumb trail. Along with the fountain, the hammam ,the mosque, and the Koranic school — is one of the five traditional elements of each of the medina’s hundreds of neighborhoods. The cool thing about these bakeries is that, in addition to baking their own khobz, they bake the loaves of the neighborhood women who prepare the dough in their own homes. I saw many women wearing a jalaba (the hooded robe that is the everyday garb of most women and many men), carrying their unbaked bread on a cloth-covered wooden tray to the bakery, where they would pick up the baked loaves later in the day.
