Catching Up: Saturday, January 24

We left the ryad around 7:45 and headed out into the quiet streets to Jemma El Fna to catch a taxi for the quick ride to the train station. After refusing a few offers (50 dirham each! No! 40 dirham! No! 30 dirham then? No!!! How much you want?), we found a suitable ride and were off (total cost for two people: 20 dirham including a very nice tip).

Once at the station, we bought our tickets for the three and a half hour trip to Casablanca. We grabbed breakfast in the station; I had eggs and meat cooked in a tajine, almost like an omelet, with tea and fresh orange juice.

After finishing breakfast, we headed out to the platform and climbed up into the train (platforms are at grade, while the floor of the train is more than three feet in the air – there are three ladder-like steps to get on board). Nothing here is handicapped accessible, and navigating with luggage is not for the faint of heart.

Some trains are arranged with a center aisle with pairs of seats on either side, but the train we were on had a corridor along one side of the train with compartments with eight seats – sets of four facing each other. We found a compartment with two people already in it, and navigated our bags onto the overhead racks. The train filled up, and we ended up sharing the compartment with a total of seven other people for most of the trip. When one family got out, they were replaced by an even larger family, but somehow we managed to fit ten people in the compartment. Many more people stood in the corridor.

Along the trip, the train stopped in many small towns, sometimes where there really didn’t seem to be much of station at all. At one of the larger towns, many local kids selling vegetables approached the train as people got off to wander around and smoke during the 15 minute stop.

Tim had booked the hotel in Casa, conveniently located immediately off the platform of the train station. We arrived just after noon and checked into the Ibis – Casa-Voyageurs  before catching the tram, which conveniently stopped just outside the hotel and station, toward the medina of Casa.

We walked through the medina, which was much less chaotic and smaller than Marrakech’s, out toward the ocean. On the coast we went to Hassan II Mosque for a tour. Built from 1987-1993, the mosque is the third largest in the world and only smaller than the mosques of Mecca and Medina – the two holiest cities in Islam. We had a great tour by a very charismatic tour guide and finally left to find some lunch around 3:30.

On the walk to Racine, the high-end shopping area of the city, we grabbed a quick lunch of shwarma, which hit the spot. We wandered the streets of Racine and went into a mall at the Twin Center, two tall buildings in the area. We popped into a grocery store (I like seeing what grocery stores are like/prices in other countries) before finding a place to stop for afternoon tea (which you may remember isn’t really all that much tea, but rather water that might have had briefly touched tea, poured into a pot filled with fresh mint).

We continued our walk to Muhammad V Square, formed by a few government buildings, where there was a lot going on. We stopped into the Casa Port train station, which was a pretty modern building, before going to dinner at a place that had been recommended by some of Tim’s friends and some travel books.

The restaurant, La Bodega, was a Spanish tapas restaurant. We enjoyed lots of delicious food and a pitcher of sangria before heading back to the hotel to get some sleep after a lot of walking all over Casa.