The quest for a package sealer in the Fes Medina:

I went to Fes last weekend to run some errands that can only be run in a big city here: printing of labels for the couscous, scoping out grocery stores to see if anyone is selling hand-made couscous like ours, and finally purchasing a machine to seal the couscous packages. The printing went smoothly and came out beautifully, but finding a package sealer (which you can buy on Amazon for $30) turned into quite the quest:

1. Friday night: I asked the girls I was staying with for ideas, they asked one of their American friends who’s lived in Fes for years. She gave me directions to a hanut that sells only plastic bags.
2. Saturday, 11am: I went to the plastic bag hanut. They didn’t have anything the right size or weight. They give me directions to another plastic bag hanut around the corner.
3. 11:15am: I buy a few hundred plastic bags at the second hanut and ask them where I could find a sealer. The hanut guy sends his son with us through a maze of alleys to another plastic bag hanut.
4. 11:30am: I explain what I’m looking for to this plastic bag hanut guy, who sends his two sons out to scour the neighborhood. I sit outside the hanut and chat about the Peace Corps.
5. 12pm: The sons return and say they know a guy who has one to sell. One of them leads me through another maze of alleys to a random unmarked door that’s closed. The guy standing outside making snail soup in his cart tells me the man isn’t there and I should come back at 3pm.
6. I spend several hours wandering through the medina, getting lost, finding my way again, watching the tanners treat sheepskins, stumbling into the tourist circuit and fending off vendors who thought I was a tourist.
7. 3pm: I manage to re-locate the unmarked door of the man who supposedly has a sealing machine. The snail soup man tells me he’s still not there and I should come back at 4pm. I go back to the plastic bag hanut and explain that he’s still not open and I can’t wait around the medina all day.
8. 3:30pm: The hanut guy sends one of his sons off again, this time to locate the key to the man’s shop (or house, maybe, I’m not sure). I’m told to sit down and wait. I repeat my explanation of who I am and what I’m doing and what the Peace Corps is a few dozen times to the random people who wander past the hanut or have gathered to try to figure out what was going on.
9. 4:30pm: A random guy I’ve never seen walks out of an alley with what he says is a bag sealer. It plugs in and heats up, and was clearly constructed in someone’s garage, probably in the past hour while I waited. Not exactly the bag sealer I’d had in mind when I’d come, but I bought it. Success (only to get home and realize it's pretty finicky and over-melts half of the bags it tries to seal. Still working on that step.)