Return to Casablanca

Just to give everyone a sense of our activities over the past two days, on Thursday we were up bright and early to board the small bus back to Casablanca. Though we were in the bus by 8:30, we didn't roll back into the Ramada Almohades until 4:30. The drive was mostly uneventful, driving through kilometer upon kilometer of brown and dusty fields that look like they were blanketed with a layer of canteloupe-sized rocks. One version of the story is that this is partly how Morocco got its name (Mo' Rocks), but I am not convinced. Throughout all the fields are groups of goats, sheep, and their attendant humans and the landscape is broken by hundreds of walls built from piles of the rocks. It is amazing that so many rocks can go into all the walls and yet the number of rocks left behind is still astronomical. I am not sure what the goats and sheep are eating, unless they are licking the salt off the rocks. There really is nothing out there.

Out of the blue we pulled up beside what looked like white-washed concrete shed. I saw the blind-folded camel first. It was in the shed tethered to grinding stones and was walking circles around the giant concrete pestle. Then I noticed the olives in a huge pile outside. This man and his family buy the olives (all colors) from local growers when the government determines that they are ready for sale. He and his camel grind them up, then the mash is placed in a series of bamboo baskets and pressed with a huge slab of metal. The resulting oil is filtered, residue is allowed to settle, and then sold to passersby, restaurants, and wholesalers alike.
Lunch was in a picturesque cafe overlooking El Jedida, then another 4 hours of driving through similar brown landscapes until Casablanca.

I was feeling claustrophobic, so I conned Mom into taking a taxi back to the Corniche with me once we got back to Casablanca. 5:00 pm is clearly the time for PT for health-conscious Moroccans as the pavement overlooking the Atlantic was full with people of all ages out for a run. How they do it without eating all day is beyond me. I was amazed when we turned a corner off the Corniche to an area of the coast that actually had a beach. Goal and boundary lines had been drawn in the sand and literally hundreds of young men were out playing a final match. We grabbed our taxi home before the streets cleared out at 6:30 when people went to break the fast and had our own dinner in the hotel at 7:30.

After dinner, I asked Aziz to take my mother and I to the Hassan II mosque to see the nightly prayers. I have a very limited understanding of Islam, but Aziz explained that the Quran is 62 chapters and every night during Ramadan the imams read two chapters so that they finish by the end of Ramadan. The plaza outside the mosque was teeming with people of all ages. While the adults were either milling about in conversation or standing/kneeling in prayer, the children were running around and generally enjoying the very festive and communal feeling of Ramadan. We will be sharing a meal at an imam's home later on in the trip, so I sure I will learn more about the faith then.

Our last activity of the night (while everyone else was surely asleep), was to join Aziz up in the Moroccan-styled restaurant of the Almohades hotel where there was a four-piece band. Musicians playing oud, violin, keyboard, and doumbek performed both traditional Berber songs as well as Om Koulthum songs including 'Lissa Fakher' and another Egyptian traditional song 'Khalouny shufek'. Aziz hopped up at some point to take both the oud for a few songs and the doumbek for another few before passing the drum on to me (a disaster). Clearly I need a few more lessons with Omid or Karim. We packed it up around 10:30 in order to rest before meeting the rest of the OAT group tomorrow morning.