A Carpet Ride Down Memory Lane

Today's post will be a flashback to our carpet hunting experience in Morocco. Why, you ask? Because our carpets arrived on Monday! So let's backtrack to our visit to Coin Berbere in the medina of Fes. The shop comes highly recommended on TripAdvisor.

This is the outside of the shop (Photo credit: here)

They also own the shop across the street which has a massive second floor. We browsed around a bit up there and Abdoul came to assist us. It was positively overwhelming. We were given some mint tea and then he just went to town. He kept laying carpet after killim after embroidery out on the floor and I was just in awe. Eventually, he suggested that he go back through everything he had laid out and Dan and I could say yes or no to whether we liked it. He said he would use our responses to narrow down the style that we liked and then we could see some more. The walls are just lined with massive stacks of folded carpets:

Photo credit: here

Eventually we got it narrowed down to two. Dan and Abdoul negotiated the total, including shipping to Ghana. We paid and filled out the necessary paperwork for the shipping and left praying that it all turned out okay. It was 05Apr (actually Easter Sunday), and he said 2-4 weeks to ship. Also, one of our rugs required a repair as one of the corners was missing a chunk and some of the edging fringe. He said he would take care of it and we again prayed that it looked okay when we received it.

Last Thursday, Dan received notification from DHL that a package had arrived at Ghana customs and was in the process of being cleared. As you probably recall, from previous posts, visiting customs is no walk in the park. We also weren't sure of the value that Abdoul had put on the package so we were worried about the amount of customs fees. In reality, the amount was so reasonable that Dan was worried he'd have a hard time justifying the value of such a sizable package.

On Monday, Dan put on his "prepared to sweat at customs" outfit and went off to work. Imagine his surprise when he arrived to his desk to find this neatly folded parcel:

Wait, so he doesn't have to go to customs, be heckled, sweat his butt off, and pay an arbitrary fee? They are just... here? No fuss? Well alright then! He brought them home that evening and I unpacked and vacuumed the heck out of them. The one with the repair was so well done we actually had to dig through our photos to figure out what corner was repaired. You can't even tell. So here are our Berber carpets from Morocco. 

The orange one is under our dining table, and the red one is in the guest room. Should you ever be in Fes and in the market for a new carpet, go see our man, Abdoul!