Casablanca and Morocco~

http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/cairo/2007/08/casablanca.html

Friends had warned that I’d find Casablanca too crowded, too industrial, too much like Cairo. Spend the most time in Marrakesh and Fez, they advised.

Well, if the rest of Morocco is even better than this dynamic port city, then it’s going to be a great first trip.

Reporting (on Guantanamo detainees, next month’s elections and Islamists in North Africa) consumes the days, leaving the evenings free for absorbing Casablanca’s ocean breeze, fresh seafood, relaxed atmosphere and mélange of cultures.

It was jarring to realize how very Francophone this country still is – so much more so than even Lebanon, where employees of the national airline unfailingly answer the phone with a cheery “Bonjour!” I spent a couple days trying to memorize phrases in the guttural Moroccan accent; a French refresher course would have served me better.

In Morocco, a half-century after independence, French lingers in restaurant menus, street signs and everyday conversation. Escargots are street food – you buy a bowl of them in a soup of mint and herbs, pluck a safety pin from an overturned lemon and skewer the snail meat. It’s summertime, which means all the Moroccan immigrants are home from the Paris suburbs, livening up the streets with European fashions and French-Arab hip-hop beats.

Amid the many vestiges of colonialism (the language, the architecture, etc.), it’s refreshing to see so many people walking around in their djellabas, the traditional Moroccan hooded gowns. In Egypt, no middle-class person would be caught dead outside his or her home in a galabiya (the Egyptian version of the djellaba). In Morocco, however, you see street kids wearing them as well as ultra-chic women who rock them with stilettos and Fendi bags.

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