Casablanca: Bogart and Bergman engulfed by a big bustling city

On the plane from Paris to Casablanca, I lost myself in reveries about Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. In my head, I replayed scenes from the 1942 classic and felt my stomach churning with excitement as the plain landed. However, Bogart and Bergman are the stuff of movies and big cities (like happy families) are all alike with their stupefying sameness and sprawl. Casa today is a large, recumbent city with 7 million thronging people and very little charm. My Moroccon friends had advised me to spend as little time as possible in Casa (“casa is not real morocco”) and so I decided to stay for one day and a night before moving along to the next stop on the map.

The first evening was spent strolling along the Corniche and gate-crashing a private Moroccan family party celebrating the opening of an Italian restaurant that one of the family members had financed. I drank to the health of Abbas, conversed with two old ladies who wanted to marry off their beautiful daughters (also present – they were stunning) to a suitable bachelor at the party and watched many boisterous Moroccan couples writhing awkwardly to a live band playing upbeat local pop songs.

The next day, I visited the Hassan II Mosque which is the second largest mosque in the world boasting the tallest (700 feet) minaret. As I spent my first afternoon walking through the mosque --- my hair bristled from the cool breeze of the atlantic -- I was struck by the shear size and scale of the whole affair. I learned from a devout worshiper that the building of the mosque was inspired by a line in the Quran which stated that the “throne of God must be built on water” and that the mosque’s retractable roof sent laser beams into the night sky towards Mecca! While the mosque was distinctively Moorish (and built by a Frenchman) I would later learnt that it drew strong influences from the Mezquita in Spain. French builder, Spanish design, monolithic mosque with sound and light show – my first taste of the complex and variegated nature of the largest metropolis in the Meghreb.