Rabat

After we went to the mosque, we took a train to Rabat to have lunch at Tahar's family home. His house is located inside the medina. Rabat's medina was much cleaner and airer than Casablanca's. Tahar's house is behind what appears to be an , behind an unassuming wooden door, which belies the huge and ornate home behind it. When you walk in, there is a small hallway which opens into a giant atrium with several side seating rooms. We met members of Tahar's family, many of which spoke excellent english, which made chatting over lunch a lot easier. We were served a traditional couscous lunch, with fruit and tea following. The mint tea is delicious, but probably has more sugar in it than soda. Someone was joking about how the kids in Morocco generally stay up later than we did when we were younger, and it's because they're all hopped up on the sugar in the tea.


After lunch we walked around Rabat, through the medina and to the gardens and the Hassan II tower and Mohammed V tomb. At the gardens, Candance and I had a bit of an incident with a henna woman. She grabbed our hands and started drawing henna on them. I didn't realize what she was doing, because the henna applicator looks just like a big medical syringe. The woman demanded payment, so Candace gave her 20 dirhams. Apparently this wasn't enough, as she started following us yelling in arabic. Luckily Tahar's two nieces were there, and they spoke to the woman for us.



The Hassan II Tower and the Mohammed V Tomb are in the same are of Rabat. The Hassan Tower is the unfinished minaret of a mosque commissioned by sultan Yacoub al-Mansour in 1195. It was supposed to be the tallest minaret in the world, but construction was abandoned when the sultan died. The rest of the mosque was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. All that is left is the minaret and the columns that show how big the mosque once was.


Next to the Hassan Tower is the Tomb of Mohammed V, which was built after his death. It houses the bodies of Mohammed V and Hassan II, and is a popular visiting place for muslims and tourists alike. The tomb is "guarded" by royal guards, kind of like the British Royal guards, completely with an equally silly hat.

I have way too many pictures of Rabat, so instead here is a link to them online: http://flickr.com/photos/moroccopictures/sets/72157601708932027/

I bought a blanket in the Medina, but I forgot my wallet so I borrow money from Pr. Addison. I am now 200 dh in debt....hopefully he doesn't collect interest.

Hassan II Mosque

The Hassan II Mosque, in Casablanca, is an amazing feat of modern architecture. The mosque is partly suspended over the ocean by underwater columns, and refers to the Koran verse "The Throne of God on Water". It took 6 years to build, from 1987-1993, and took 12,500 people to build. Every square inch of the Mosque is covered in tile and carvings and designs. Everywhere you look, there are layers and layers of detail.

The Mosque is huge, and has the tallest religious minaret in the world. To get some idea of how absolutely massive the mosque is, here's a picture of Max standing in front of one of the doors of the mosque. The whole door doesn't even fit in the picture.

We took the mosque tour, and I really wish we had been there when the water was on. There's fountains all around the outside, and there are channels with clear bottoms on the floor of the mosque. Once again, in a group of tourists, we were the most conservatively dressed. I suppose it helps us to make a good impression, but I thought that the dress would have been much more conservative. After the tour, we went to look at the beach next to the mosque. I've noticed that around Morocco, they use these weird cement pylons to combat erosion. They look like piles of giant concrete jacks.

Casablanca

Getting to Casablanca was a bit of an adventure. I flew Providence-New York- Casablanca. This doesn't sound too bad until you factor in a "Heightened Security Test" (I am clearly a terrorist) , a 1.5 hour delayed flight from Providence, and then another hour spent on the runway waiting to take off. This didn't bother me that much, as I had a 8 hour layover in JFK, but I think I was the only person on the flight who wasn't going to miss a connecting flight. This lead to a very tiny airplane filled with very angry passengers. After landing in JFK, which is absolutely massive (I usually fly out of Boston, I don't think I've ever been to JFK before), I headed over to the Royal Air Maroc counter to check in. Cue a tiny bit of culture shock. All of the people waiting for the plane were practically covered head to toe, and every woman was wearing a veil. I felt a little out of sorts, so I sat in the corner on a bench for about an hour until Virginia magically showed up. Incidentally, I talked to a man waiting for the same flight as me and he was absolutely shocked that I knew where Mauritania was. Apparently no one else does?

We went through security without incident, and waited at the gate where Virginia watch CNN like the news dork that she is :). Saraan eventually showed up, and Soana appeared just as we were boarding the plane. The flight was fine, but the service was kind of surprising. I'm used to the "service-with-a-smile!" flight attendants, but the Air Maroc attendents barely even l0oked at you when the offered you a drink or food. This is apparently normal for Air Maroc, which is apparently known by Moroccans for its poor service. When you land on the runway in Casablanca, they bus you to the terminal, and half the bus of Moroccans were complaining about how bad Air Maroc typically is.

As we wee going through customs, the customs man proceeded to blatantly hit on Soana and try to get her to meet him in Casablanca. That was a little weird, and I guess our first experience with sexual harassment in Morocco. We went to the luggage return, which took around 1.5 hours. Saraan, Virginia, and Soana's luggage had already come through, and we were just waiting for my bag. I spoke to a nice Moroccan family who was also waiting for their luggage. They split their time between Morocco and the US, and they had their young Imam with them on the trip. The luggage attendants only spoke Arabic, so they asked for me if more luggage was coming. Eventually I got my bag, and we headed out into the lobby of the airport and found Tahar and Pr. Addison.

View from the hotel window

After a harrowing ride to the Hotel Excelsior, we got the keys to our surprisingly nice hotel room. From Pr. Addison's description "old and inexpensive", we were afraid it was going to be scary, but the hotel turned out to be really nice, with a huge bathroom and TV in every room.

After taking a quick shower, we headed out to get something to eat. Casablanca is a huge, busy, loud, and simultaneously beautiful and ugly city. The traffic is deadly, and the horns don't even stop at 3 in the morning. Everywhere you look, there is trash covering the ground underneath a beautifully tiled wall, huge palm trees with beggar children leaning against the trunks. The contrast is strange, and occasionally shocking.












Lunch was my first language barrier problem- the menu was entirely in French! Pr. Addison translated, and we had a nice little lunch and ice cream, which was roughly translated as "Venetian Ice". After, we went to the Medina. The medina was huge and colorful and almost too much to take in. There were stalls upon stalls of pottery, glass, clothing, jewelry and food, with tiny pathways between. The Medina is the ancient Arab area of cities in North Africa. They're filled with tiny, maze-like streets that keep cars out, and contain many of the important daily fixtures of local life: the souks, hammams, fountains, mosques and palaces. The Casablanca medina seemed less geared to tourists than I thought it was going to be, most of the shoppers were local Casablancans. Apparently some medinas' narrow streets were used to confuse and slow down invaders in past times.

Our Hotel Room

We eventually headed back to the hotel after getting dinner, and Soana and I discovered the American movie channel, filled with slightly outdated cheesy movies. The Arabic commercials are interesting, they look just like American commercials.