Last day in Casablanca

Monday 25 June 2007 0 °F

Hello all,

We're hanging out in the internet cafe again (in case you're in Casablanca, it's Apollo Cafe and they have great banana juice); we come here enough to email that they know us and shake our hands. Sadly it's probably our last visit, as we leave for Bamako, Mali tonight. The flight is at 11pm, so we will start working our way toward the airport via taxi and train at about 6 or 7. The flight will get into Bamako at 2:30am or so, and Dr. Bagayoko (most often Dr. B) of Medicine for Mali will pick us up then and take us to our host, Fanta's, house. She gets a lot of visitors from the US, as her husband was in Nebraska at a university for awhile. Mariel has been working on learning Bambara, the local language in Nana Kenieba, and Ben's French is getting quite good (Mariel's is slowly coming along). Our stay here in Casablanca has been great. We've tried lots of interesting foods and drinks (with no negative repercussions) and seen some interesting sights.

The Hassan II Mosque, 2nd biggest mosque in the world! It holds something like 105,000 people. This place is gigantic and very pretty.

Here's the stairway inside our pretty cheap hotel. There is pretty tilework like this everywhere, so that's one stereotype about Morocco proving to be true. One that isn't is the wearing of full body covers by women. Some wear headscarves and long robes, but it seems like most women our age stick to jeans and tops like Mariel wears. Al-Jazeera is on in about every coffee shop, though. That may have been expected.