We're friends of Rick or We'll always have....Casablanca or My return to blogging

So.....If anyone is still reading, here is my long awaited return to blogging. Yes, it has been a couple of months since I've posted. Yes, You will probably still be bored reading this (hopefully not). Yes, a lot has happened in 2 months. No, I will not recount every excruciating detail. I will however write about my last amazing trip. I'm not sure if it's to record somewhere that it actually happened or if it's merely to brag, but here goes.

CASABLANCA, MOROCCO!!!!! That's right. AFRICA. Well technically, not everyone considers this part of Africa to be Africa. When I told all of my French friends I was going to Africa, they all got excited and asked me where. However, upon my response, I got the same disappointing response. "Maroc? C'est pas dans l'Afrique. C'est Maghreb." Mahgreb? WTF??? As I'm sure any Americain will agree, Morocco is attached to the African continent. It's in Africa. I'm guessing the Maghreb distinction is strictly French and is probably spurned from their subconscious anger of losing all of their African colonies, especially when you look at the countries that the French consider to be part of Maghreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania. All of these, with the exception of Libya, where at one point French colonies.*

So anywho...After a delightful 2 1/2 hr flight from Lyon, France to Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca, we arrived 1 min late for the train to the city center. Of course the train only runs every hour so we're stuck in the sketchiest of skecth train stations in the world. Most of it was under construction and dimly lit and there were mosquitoes everywhere, but Claire and Kristen were happy cuz they got to smoke inside. EVERYWHERE inside. We're used to the new French law forbidding smoking in public places, but that does not exist in Morocco. Restaurants, bars, shops, wherever you want, you can smoke. So after an hour of waiting for the train. We had a 40 min ride to Casablanca center in an extremely dimly lit train the windows of which were too dirty to see out of. We arrived at the train station and realized we had no clue how to get to our hotel. Luckily there were extremely pushy taxi drivers who were ready to help us. One thing you should know about taxi drivers in Morocco is that they not only work off the fare they get paid for driving you to your destination, but they also make commissions from hotels. The entire taxi ride which lasted all of 10 min consisted of our driver trying to convince us to stay in a chain hotels in the city center. He told us the hotel we had booked was not nice and was extremely dirty. We survived the cab ride and paid him his 60 dirham(aprx. $8).

Needless to say we were extremely surprised to check into our hotel and find that it was amazing. It WAS in the old part of town (the ancienne médina), which at night I'll admit gets a little creepy, but the hotel just had soo much character. All of the walls were brightly painted and had all kinds of art work hanging on them. Our room had 3 twin beds, a private bath, a TV, a view of the ocean and freshly painted orange-red walls. It was around 11pm the first night when we found somewhere to eat. We decided on the only restaurant that we found that was still open. It just happened to be a quite large seafood restaurant. We thought it was small at first, as it looked like it only had a small terrasse for seating. When we entered we were directed through a bar, a small waiting area and two dining rooms to our table in the back by what appeared to be a bunch of business men. In front of me was a French business man and his wife/girlfriend/hooker with an Arab business man. To our right, was the strangest mix of men. All of them were obviously businessmen who had just met that day. They were all very awkward around each other and kept switching between French and English. There were 8 or them in total but only about 3 were carrying on the conversation. The others either looked bored or confused. Two of these 3 were obviously French from the way they were speaking and the other was OBVIOUSLY Americain, by his very broken French, strong Americain accent and his rather large waist size. For dinner, we ordered 3 menus and split them. One was just fried seafood, but really good fried seafood: shrimp and 3 kinds of different fish, all with the heads still attached. The other was some kind of fish filet as it was called on the menu, but was more like a steak when it was delivered. After dinner, we returned to the hotel and smoked some licorice flavored hookah with the really nice guy that was working the desk. He also served us scotch and mint tea, which is REALLY popular in Morocco, the tea that is, not the whiskey.

Now it's break time. I'll finish the rest later tonight.


*so actually after a little research, i found out that Maghreb is actually the Arabic word for this region, but it is a little ironic, a little toooo ironic, don't cha think (à la morisette)