Casablanca, Casanegra

This past week has been filled with adventures of various kinds, from food to visiting the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe.  The former is always an adventure, and sometimes taken at one's leisure.  Today, after running along the Bou RegReg river boardwalk area, I decided to stop at one of the many hanouts (little grocery stalls) in the Medina along my way back home.  Fortunately, the one I picked sold fresh squeezed orange juice, a real treat in the muggy heat of the morning.  Ever since my Arabic professor told my class about this grain flavored yogurt, I had been wondering what it tastes like, so I decided to grab a little breakfast.  One of my first nights in my homestay, Mami gave me pistachio yogurt, so I had already conquered that flavor and now it was time for something new.  You'd think that yogurt with flakes of grain in it would not sound appetizing, but it was actually quite spectacular.  It reminded me of the taste of granola and yogurt, minus the crunch.  So if you ever see "cereales" flavored yogurt anywhere, take a step out of the American flavor box and go for it!

Many of my posts lately have dealt with food, and for good reason.  A lot of Moroccan social interaction involves food.  Throughout the day there are not just three designated eating times, but four; breakfast, lunch, what I call teatime, and dinner.  Why the teatime you ask?  Because Moroccans generally don't eat dinner till between 9 and midnight, and so need something to tide themselves over till the later dinner time.  And a very important component to the teatime and to breakfast is, naturally, the tea.  Moroccan mint tea is unlike most teas I have seen prepared--granted my only tea experiences have been in bags and some loose leaf tea that you can get in the States, but bear with me.  Moroccan mint tea is made by putting a little bit of green tea, some fresh mint, Sheba (something that my Arabic professor said made you "feel warm" in the winter time), and a block (or 3) of pressed sugar in your teapot, then add the boiling water and boil it just a little more.  The end result is what I consider a spectacular concoction of mint and sugar that makes me anxiously await teatime every day.

But food isn't the only thing on my mind, I also get to travel!  Yesterday, I spent the day in Casablanca and got my first taste of what most Americans consider summer, but to Moroccans is still early spring.  Personally, I'm siding with the American viewpoint on this one not only because I am American, but also because it was the first time this year that I officially got a bit burnt.  It was such a nice day that I wanted to spend it all outside, but that ended up wreaking a bit of havoc on my poor skin.  However, meshi mushkin (it's nothing), as Moroccans say.  In Casablanca, I got to see the third largest mosque in the Muslim world, Hassan II Mosque.  Just to give you a sense of how large this building is: it can fit 25,000 worshipers inside at one time.  It was truly spectacular not only because of its size but also because roughly a third of it was built on the ocean.  It was commissioned by King Hassan II in the late 80s and early 90s to be what it is and to use mostly materials found in Morocco.  Every little detail was ornately decorated in a carefully planned pattern, even down to the ablution room that had carved fountains in the shape of flowers.  Most of the marble used came from the middle of the country, with a small minority coming from Italy, and we're talking 9 hectares (22 acres) of marble.  Truly spectacular in every sense.  Next I naturally moved on to the beach!  I did set foot in the Atlantic, though it was truly just a foot because while the air was quite warm, the water was absolutely frigid.  There were so many men and boys playing soccer on the beach that it was a little hard to actually get to the water.  They had built their "fields" back to back so that one group used the same goal as the other, so it was sometimes difficult to see what was going on in any game and navigate safely.  After spending a couple hours at the beach pondering the meaning of life and trying to figure out what was going on in the game in front of me, I proceeded onward to the Medina.  I feel like it's impossible to truly get a sense of any Moroccan city without visiting its Medina.  The Casablanca Medina was very complicated, this coming from the person who has learned to navigate the streets of Rabat's Medina.  What makes Casablanca's Medina so disorienting is that the streets don't go the direction you think they do.  If you want to end up in some general direction and don't know what street to take, you can generally find your way anyway in Rabat, but in Casablanca, I definitely had some trouble.  By the time I had sufficiently walked around the Medina, it was already pretty late so I decided to catch the train back to Rabat, which only took about an hour.  My sister, Amal, doesn't like Casablanca as much, so she always refers to it as Casanegra, but I didn't have a bad experience in the commercial center of Morocco.

Casablanca is not my only excursion, as SIT calls it, this week.  Tomorrow I board a bus that will whisk me away to the Southern and Eastern parts of the country.  It's to the Middle Atlas Mountains and then the desert for me!  This time next week I will have ridden a camel.  To me, that's the most exciting, so I'll keep you posted on how that goes.