Right before we left for Morocco, our volunteer coordinator let us know we would have Monday off due to a national holiday. It turns out, the country would be celebrating Independence Day for Western Sahara on our first full day in the country. Though this set us back a day, in terms of getting started volunteering, it gave us an extra day to explore Morocco. Knowing this, we decided we’d take a train from Rabat to Casablanca, just one hour away, and spend the day exploring a famous Moroccan city.
Monday morning, we ate a simple Moroccan breakfast of bread and mint tea and headed to the train station. With only a short train delay, we arrived in Casablanca before noon. At this point, we had a few things in mind that we wanted to see, starting with the royal palace. We grabbed a few taxis to fit all 7 of us and the driver with the best English among the three took it upon himself to suggest that he give us a day tour of Casablanca for 20 bucks a pop. In short, we passed. Instead, we got off the at the palace and grabbed some food at a small but very nice Moroccan restaurant with all the Moroccan favorites. We found this just by a quick google maps search, but the food turned out great and a picture of Tom Cruise eating at the same location was displayed on the wall. Now he’ll surely be replaced by the seven of us.
After taking a short two-hour lunch break, we realized we’d come to the area to see the palace, so we proceeded down the street. We then asked a guard how to see more of the palace than just the outside walls, to which he told us we could not. At this point, we were running out of time in the city already, so we made our way to the famous Hassan II Mosque. After Pippen got his token “touching the top of the minaret” picture, we moved closer to Mosque and looked at how to get in. Since Jason is the only one with fluent French, he found out for us that we had about 15 minutes before the last ticket was sold to get into the mosque, when it closed at 4. Thankfully we made it because the inside was incredible. We received a tour and learned a bit about its history. One impressive fact is that this mosque is the 3rd biggest in the world, holding 25 thousand people.
Once the tour was over, we headed over to Rick’s café, famous for being depicted in the old American classic Casablanca, which none of us have seen. We arrived a bit before it opened so we explored the old Medina and came back at 6:30. This was certainly worth the trip for the great setting and food, but we’ll hopefully be sticking to cheaper, less tourist-centric places for a while. Once we were finished, we headed back to train and made it back around 11. We had a fun time in Casablanca, though we may have spent a majority of the time eating. Either way, the mosque was worth the trip in itself, just to see how beautiful it was and learn about it in a cultural and historical context.
-Zachary Cavazos
EGL Family Abroad 