It’s almost 4 am, but I really wanted to get these photos and text out.
I arrived at Casablanca airport with no problem. The train station is downstairs from the main baggage claim/terminal area. A ticket to Rabat is 65 dirhams ($7.50) for about an hour and 40 minute ride. Train was on-time and clean and easy to navigate.
I chatted up a guy on the train who was going to Oujda (way northeastern Morocco, on the Algerian border), who helped me transfer at Ain Sebaa, on the outskirts of Casablanca. There wasn’t much to see from the train as it was night when I arrived. His name, like many of his countrymen, was Mohammad.
Mohammad was getting off at Rabat too (he was transferring to a bus), and so we got off together. However, I should have been more clear that I wanted to get off at Rabat Ville (downtown) and not Rabat Agdal (further south, a few neighborhoods away). Rabat Ville is very close to where my friend Susan Peterson, who teaches at the American Language Center here in Rabat. It wasn’t that big of a deal as Susan and her husband Tounkara (he’s Guinean), came to pick me up at the other station, which was a little further away. They arrived in a cab about 10 minutes later, and we were home within 15 minutes.
I met Casey, a girl from Bozeman, Montana (of all places), who’s lived in Morocco for five years and also teaches at the ALC and lives down the street, and Adrian, a British guy who also teaches at the ALC and lives with Susan and Tounkara in a 3 bedroom apartment directly opposite from their work. We all had dinner together and hit the sack.
Today though, was my first full day here.
I don’t have time to do it justice right now (I need some sleep) but the short of it is that we went to Médina, the walled older part of the city, where there’s a big market where you can buy everything from pirated DVDs to cushions to beans to hamam (Turkish bath) soap. You also apparently can find a cybercafé with a really weird baby poster on it.
We walked around there until close to lunchtime and then went to meet Moustafa, who is a Moroccan administrator at the ALC, who lives in another part of town. This involved a bus ride with all five of us and culminated in not one, but two amazingly delicious home-cooked Moroccan dishes.
Then, we returned home and Susan cut Tounkara’s hair, and he subsequently cut mine. He also told me that in Guinea (and probably in other African countries too), haircuts are defined as imitating the style of American rappers. So you’d typically go to a barber and say: “Give me a P Diddy,” or “Give me a Tupac,” or whatever. He decided that in addition to cutting my hair, he also would shave me (I hadn’t shaved in almost six days) and would give me a P Diddy facial hair look. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it, but it surely makes for an amusing photo or two.
After haircuts, we had dinner and hung out for a bit and decided to go with Casey (Adrian stayed home) to a live music club about a five minute’s walk away.
There, we were regaled by a Congolese high-life band and danced many hours away. They played a bunch of African songs, none of which I knew (although they did place some recorded Youssou N’Dour while the band was on break) — but the definite highlights were covers of Coolio’s “Gangster’s Paradise,” followed a bit later by Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean,” Cher’s “Do you believe in love?” and Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb.”
We decided that things couldn’t get much better than a Congolese band playing “Sex Bomb” in a Moroccan club attended by us, a group of three Americans and one Guinean. It was like the setup to a really bizarre joke, except that the setup was the punchline.
So we left.
Tomorrow:
Tounkara and I will hit up the hamam (BYO soap), followed by Friday midday prayer at Rabat’s main mosque (he’s Muslim, and I play one when I’m in Morocco, apparently), followed by lunch, seeing touristy monuments and the like, a possible guest lecture by me (no idea on what) in Susan’s English class, and then possible sunset photos along the water.
