Casablanca! Day 1: As Time Goes By

Casablanca – probably the one town in Morocco that you can name off the top of your head… if you knew that it was in Morocco at all.

At any rate, it was the site of our latest adventure! Last Friday after our morning of classes finished up, the 7-strong contingent of BU kids (and Juliana’s visiting friend Luzki) packed up our bags with clothes and packed up our stomachs with our families’ cous cous (I LOVE the idea of cous cous Fridays!) and we were off! We boarded the train for a brief one-hour ride through the Moroccan countryside, looking out the windows as Africa (Africa!) passed us by. We saw grasslands, we saw cows, we saw the shore, and – mostly – we saw the slums on the outskirts of both Rabat and Casa (as Moroccans like to affectionately refer to the city… although really Moroccans don’t seem to have too much affection for it – when I excitedly told my host brother where I was going for the weekend he just blankly looked at me and asked, “Why?”).

Pulling into Casa, it was apparent that this city was much more Western than the rest of Morocco. The fact that it is known by its Spanish rather than Arabic name (Dar al-Baida – both literally translate to “White House” in English) should be telling enough…. Sections of the city were dominated by high-rise buildings, more signs were in Roman script than in Rabat, and even the old medina section was more open and navigable than the narrow, maze-like streets to which we have become accustomed. And, of course, this also means that there’s a whole lot more traffic, pollution, and general dirtiness to be found in Casablanca.

Our first task was finding Hotel Central, which we had booked earlier that week for $20 per night for a couple of triples with private bathrooms, breakfast included! The directions we got from Google maps led us completely astray, but a few locals pointed us in the right direction. Expecting to find a sketchy, grungy hostel, imagine our surprise when we stumbled upon a quaint little place at the back of a beautiful little square with a few cafes and a small park (and, of course, the standard hordes of Moroccan street cats which only I among the group seem to appreciate). Inside the hotel, we were greeted by the owner, who proclaims to be insane and follows through on the promise. Loud, boisterous, and hilarious, he treats us all to a round of high-fives before giving us a few forms to fill out and giving us the keys to our rooms. The rooms themselves were awesome: painted bright orange with white sheets on the beds and blue and tan highlights from the decorations, the room was alive with color. My room had a set of doors with glass panes which opened out onto a small balcony overlooking the square in front of the building. Later that night, we would meet a nice middle-aged, blonde woman from Orange County who was relaxing on the balcony next door and was still a little perplexed by the culture here. But then, aren’t we all?

For dinner, we got dressed up and headed out to the legendary Rick’s Café of Casablanca fame. Well, ok, technically the entire movie was filmed in a Hollywood studio and in no way reflects the actual local culture of the time, but about a decade ago a nice American woman named Kathy Kriger moved to Casablanca and decided that it needed a real Rick’s. So, she bought up a building on the edge of the old medina and created it as best she could in form and atmosphere. They have a live piano player (named not Sam, but – get excited – Issam!), who played an assortment of jazz tunes, including at least 4 separate renditions of “As Time Goes By.” And if that wasn’t enough, they show the movie on a continual loop in one room upstairs. The place is actually quite swanky, and was the site of my classiest, most expensive, and potentially most delicious meal yet in Morocco. Of course, the food was pretty Western: I had a chicken pot pie dish with wine (pretty much unheard of in this Muslim country…), a garden salad, far too many rolls of bread, communal sides of cauliflower, eggplant, and cooked apples, plus a dessert of pineapple slices with ice cream over coconut pastries. So good!

Since only 3 of us had actually seen the movie, all of my Casablanca-unaware traveling mates were scared away by the price tag (my meal came out to about 170 dirhams all told, which is really only $25ish dollars, but that’s fairly hefty around here…). Instead, they all went to a Spanish tapas restaurant that we had seen in some of our earlier wanderings. We went to join them after we finished, finding them in restaurant’s basement dance club in the midst of a number of Moroccan men downstairs. Apparently the men had been seated nearby during dinner and provided them with a number of drinks and a few side dishes. Did I mention that they were all women? We joined in the dancing for a bit and even got to do some flaming shots – B-52s, apparently. Mine was not on the Moroccan men’s tab, naturally.

As the club began to calm down a bit (around 1:00 or so) we decided to leave before things got too awkward. Walking out of the restaurant, I couldn’t help but notice some employees up on the first floor dressed up and playing instruments to the patrons mid-meal – it looks like the El Sombrero mariachis are harder to escape than I thought! We managed to wind our way back through the medina streets and to the hotel for some sleep, despite some rather loud meowing outside our window….