Casablanca

So this weekend I traveled to Casablanca.  Yes, the “here’s lookin’ at you kid” Casablanca, which is only a one hour train ride from Rabat.  Let’s also acknowledge that this is the nicest public transportation I have ever taken. I took a picture in the station and inside the train:

I would have to say the theme of this weekend was getting lost in the most organized way possible.  What I mean by that is I rarely ended up where I wanted to go, but had some general sense of my location.  This started from the moment we got off the train and wanted to find our hotel.  As we were walking along the street we thought led to our hotel, we saw a sign for a youth hostel, which we assumed would be cheaper, and decided to take a look. Once we detoured, we immediately found our original hotel, though we would have been walking in the wrong direction for a while.  The hostel ended up being cheaper than the hotel, so we stayed there instead.  Here is the interior. 

We also tried to attend a Hip Hop music festival in Casablanca that could not possibly have actually existed.  There were posters for it posted all over Casablanca, and despite all listing the same address, the hip hop festival was just not there.  We had a taxi driver take us to the Tennis courts which were hypothetically right next to the stadium…but weren’t.  We asked a number of people for directions, but they all gave us different directions and none of them led to the festival.  So although we were nowhere near where we had wanted to be, we knew enough where we were to take the tram back to our hotel and hung out in the medina for a while. 

We had the same problem at dinner: it took us half an hour to find the restaurant even though we had our bearings.  Once we did finally find it, the ambiance was great, and so was the food. 

It was actually really nice being a little lost- not stranded or uncomfortable- just in the wrong place.  Even though I was only there a little over 24 hours, I was able to see a huge part of Casablanca just by wandering lost through the city. 

Unrelated, but Hassan II Mosque is the coolest thing I have seen here. I think visiting here was maybe the only time we knew where we were during the whole weekend and it was amazing.  I took an absurd numbers of pictures.  I felt so tiny in comparison! (I mean, I was).  So worth the three miles we walked to get there and back!