A racist with a caffeine headache

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After a total of two months in Italy, I flew to Casablanca. As the plane was landing, I was little girl giddy, with quotes from the film scrolling through my head... "I don´t mind a parasite, I object to a cut-rate one" ...."I´m a drunkard, that makes me a citizen of the world".... and gin-joints and beautiful frienships and so on... Casablanca was obviously not destined to meet my elevated and Hollywood-driven expectations. As the guide books said, there is a reason why most travelers skip Casablanca, but I wanted to see for myself.

After arriving, I was followed for about an hour as I tried to find my hotel by an overly insistent man who had lived in Italy and only wanted to "praticare un po´di italiano." (I bought a guidebook in Italian, thinking that I might ward off unwanted attention by pretending that I didn´t speak English.) He eventually declared me racist against both Africans and Arabs when I refused to let him accompany me to my hotel. My hotel was full of Moroccan men, maybe temporary laborers. The city is modern and sprawling and are few attractions such as museums or parks, just a small souq and the recently built mosque Hassan II.

I spent the entire day walking around, taking in sights and smells, and didn´t see a single other tourist. Though I usually seek out opportunities to dig into the heart of a country, here I felt very isolated. I had a hard time conceiving of talking to the women, most of whom wouldn´t meet my eyes, and too many of the men were giving stares and low cat calls for me to feel like approaching them, even for directions. No one in the shops, stations or taxis spoke English, but they at least pretended to understand my French. This felt great after three months of utter linguistic failure in Paris. As the cafes were only occupied by men, my head was throbbing my the end of the day with a caffeine headache. I saw a couple of gin joints, but they were extremely seedy, populated principally by men, of course, and a few female prostitutes.

I visited the Hassan II mosque, which was completed just about five years ago and is the largest in the world aside from the complex at Mecca. It is a towering structure built in local stones that juts out over the sea. It was extremely peaceful and pleasant to visit, with families and couples relaxing in its spacious courtyards and children playing in the water at its base. The mosque alone warrented a stop in Casablanca, but I decided that it probably wasn´t the city in which to find my footing in Morocco, so I departed for Marrakech the next day.

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