Here's to looking at you, kid./ Apparently, I'm kind of a bad ass.

I’m not sure where one could possibly begin when describing Casa. Despite the best intentions of Hollywood, Casablanca is a seedy, dirty, and kind of scary place. All of Morocco is usually filled with stylish buildings and brilliant colors, but Casa looks like the dirtier part of any European city. Not to say that the entire trip was reasonable, but I don’t think that anything could be much more…eventful (with all the bad connotations) than Casa.

But let’s start at the beginning shall we…

I left for Casablanca on Thursday afternoon. We took the train out of Rabat-Agdal and got in at Casa-Port about an hour later. Due to some timing mishaps, we got into Casa right as iftar was about to happen so all the taxi drivers had gone home to break their fast. We (Emma, Maggee, Xotchill, Kristina, and I) hung out at the train station with some blind, deformed kittens for a while before a grand taxi pulled up. (In Morocco, there are two types of taxis: grande and petite. Grande taxis can fit more people and are willing to take longer trips). We all piled in to the taxi and asked them to take us to our youth hostel. Little did we know that the hostel just happened to be a two-minute drive away. For that ridiculously short drive, he charged us 50 dirham (about 7 dollars) which is about 2 days worth of taxis to and from school (a 10-12 minute drive).

We got into the hostel and got our room. Thankfully, they had rooms with five beds. The place was surprisingly clean, but pretty empty (it was a Thursday night). The owner seemed confused when we asked about a key to lock up our stuff, but we did get it eventually. We went out for dinner that night, but we couldn’t find the place that we were looking for in our guidebook. Instead, we ate at some really nice hotel restaurant with fairly awful food. It’s nice, however, that we can eat in one of the nicer restaurants in town for about the same price as a full meal at Chilis.

The next morning, we turned out to be a bit confused about the hostel breakfast and managed to miss it by about 20 minutes. We had planned on using that day as a Hasan Mosque/ beach day, but the weather left something to be desired so we decided to spend the day shopping and seeing the other sites. So, we left in search of breakfast in the downtown area. After a good half hour of searching, we gave up and went to McDonalds. Shockingly enough, Ronald McDonald is the only guy in Casa who seems to realize that tourists do eat during Ramadan.

The rest of the day and the next day can be summed up in two columns. The good/fun stuff and the sketchy/scary/bad stuff. I’ll start with the bad and make my way towards the good.

THE BAD:

This is a memory that I will never ever ever forget and I still haven’t fully pieced together my thought process for when it happened. I just know that I am immensely lucky and I will never be so careless (and American again). So, we’re sitting in some empty (ish) park eating the pastries that we had bought for lunch. We’re all tired and kind of frustrated with the lack of things to do in Casa when some guy comes up behinds us, says “Bonjour Madimoiselle”, grabs my purse, and bolts.

No. I’m not kidding. I’m also kind of proud of my reaction. I just took off after that fucker and chased him across the park. At some point, I decided my shoes were annoying and kicked them off and then about 2 seconds later, I realized that there was about 20 other men chasing down this guy to get my purse back. I didn’t really think about what was happening until I had run down the block and was at the corner, about to run across the street, and somebody handed me my purse back. I remember yelling at him in French and running. I think it was mostly adrenaline because I have no recollection of what was running through my head when this was happening. I was out of breath, shoeless, and on a street corner in Casablanca, but I had my purse. The other girls come up to me as I’m checking to make sure everything was still there (it was) and trying to ensure the crazy big crowd of Moroccan men surrounding me that everything was there. Apparently, they caught the guy and held him until I gave my word that everything was there.

We hung out for a few more minutes while some other really nice Moroccan men get me my shoes and then we decide to get out of that sketch-tastic neighborhood.

2. One of our big plans for the day was to go to the Jewish museum in Casablanca. It’s their only museum and is supposed to be awesome…it also apparently doesn’t exist. Or is invisible to the naked eye. We took a cab 15 minutes outside of the city to find it and the best the driver could offer us was some big church (although he insisted that was it). Oh, Morocco.

3. The last one wasn’t all that bad, just weird and made me dislike Casa even more. Maggee, Kristina, and I were on our way to dinner at this restaurant that was frequented by the guy who wrote “Le Petit Prince”. We’re walking down one of the main drags of downtown Casa (and outside the always-open McDonalds) when a mob of about 40 guys in their late teens/early twenties come running down the road and yelling. We back up against the wall and just stare at the mob as they turn down a street and go towards a storefront. They didn’t seem particularly angry or vicious, it was just weird and a very odd ending to our day.

4. Restaurants sucks at being open during the day during Ramadan. That’s it.


THE GOOD:

We found this random cathedral that was in our guide book. Inside was fairly vacant (they used it for Catholic exhibitions), but the guide was kind enough to let us go up the tower. The tower was absolutely covered in pigeon shit, but we made our way up to the top and the view was AMAZING. You could see Casa in all directions and out to the ocean. The wind was blowing and it felt like we were literally on top of the road. Since it’s Morocco, and not the US, there are none of those safety guardrails and we were up there by ourselves. It was so peaceful to be above the city and to have nobody bothering you. You just can’t plan things like that.
On Casa Day 2, we went to the Hassan II Mosque. This mosque is the third largest in the world and the biggest one that non-Muslims are allowed to enter. It is absolutely amazing and stunning. The minaret (the tallest in the world) is tiled and marble and beautiful and the outside of the mosque is covered in tons of tiled fountains and ceramics. The mosque is right on the ocean and you can see the waves crashing into the shore from the courtyard.

It gets better on the inside. The main hall is filled with elaborate wood work, more tiles, marble floors, and a retractable ceiling. It has got to be the best place to pray EVER. The floors are heated during the winter and they have artfully hidden speakers in the eves. It was just gorgeous. They also showed us the room where people can go to wash. It has all these round little toadstools of water with these columns that are made to stop the humidity from running all the metal in that room. There was also a stunning hamman (bath-house) in the mosque, but it has never been used.

We also had this kick ass tour guide who gave our tour in English and Dutch and was just hilarious. She was amazingly frank and knew her facts backwards and forwards.

The beach was also fairly nice. The actual beach is a little dangerous because the waves are huge, but there are beach clubs with filtered water where you can rent “relax” (chairs) and miss out on a lot of the really shady people that you can find at the, I dunno, Rabat/Kasbah beach.

I have this fabulous (sense the sarcasm) sunburn line across my stomach, chest, and back, but I think it’s already faded. The red is mostly gone and it hardly hurts anymore. I realy should just be smarter than that.

And that, my friends, is Casablanca. It was quite a formative experience and I now feel like I can deal with anything while travelling in Morocco. We came back a day early and I spent today being as chill as possible. I read all morning and went to the grocery store and cyber café this afternoon. Gabby’s (one of the volunteers that I live with) got her wallet taken out of her bag in the souk right outside our house though. So, if I hadn’t just returned from the life-alternating experience of Casa, I would probably be freaking out about that slightly. I think I’ve just learned that you always have to be more on guard during the weekend. Every bad thing that has happened to someone so far has happened on a weekend. There’s really no protection for anyone who looks like a tourist then, it’s almost engrained into the lower-class mentality that tourists (i.e. white people) are just easy targets.

This is a really long entry to read so I doubt anyone has actually read the whole thing. Mazel tov if you did though, that takes some real dedication (and you must like me at least a little bit).

Jen