Sacred Music

The theme of this year's Annual Festival of Sacred Music is the enlightenment that comes at the start of a journey, although it has been expressed that the theme was written in Arabic, and doesn't quite translate to French. They did the best they could with it, and what they ended up saying in French is something that doesn't quite translate into English. So we've done the best we can, and come up with "the enlightenment that comes at the start of a journey."

This theme resonated throughout the city Friday evening, with the opening ceremony of this 10 day festival being the start of an exotic journey for so many visitors to the city. As for me, for once I felt like a side-character in the book of the journey; a helpful guide the protagonist chats with by the side of the road. So many people from every Arab nation, and all over Europe have flooded into Fes. They find it all novel and exotic, and it was so recently that I saw it with the same eyes. Now, my strangeness is dwarfed by having SO MANY new people here, for their week or two weeks. For me, Fes stretches back throughout the last year, and forward through the next. Though still not much time, somehow it's no longer the novelty or the strangeness that jumps out at me, but the familiarity. Fes is comfortable. This week, it dawned on me that all the cultural and linguistic difficulties that I once encountered don't register as 'difficulties' anymore - they, too, are comfortable. Fes has taken me in.