Nobody Told Me Fes Would Teach Me This.

Sleep-deprived, carsick, and tired to my bones—yet somehow, completely alive.

That’s how I arrived in Fes after a long, exhausting drive from Marrakech via Casablanca, during my solo trip to Morocco in 2018.

Fes felt less like a city and more like a place that had slipped out of medieval times. Its medina was a spider’s web of alleys where getting lost required no special talent. Every turn seemed to open into another mystery: stark walls, silhouetted figures, rooftops overlooking ancient neighborhoods.

But the moment I remember most vividly happened after hours, inside a small performing arts school for children within the walls of the medina.

A kind mother, though she did not speak any French (or English for that matter), arranged for her young daughter, Mariam, to perform for me. With the help of the school’s caretaker, the room became an impromptu concert hall.

And there I was — the only audience for a little girl’s piano recital in the heart of Fes.

We didn’t have a shared language. We weren’t introduced in the traditional sense, and there was no explanation for what I heard.

Yet, there was music.

Travel often gives us monuments, landscapes, photographs, and stories of distance crossed. But every now and then, it gives something more intimate: a moment of human generosity that arrives without expectation.

In that small room, amid one of the world’s most labyrinthine old cities, I was reminded that culture is not merely found in grand architecture or history books. Sometimes it appears as a child playing music whose tune the traveler can barely understand but nevertheless appreciates.