I have left Casablanca...The place isn't bad--in fact it's quite cool, but also one of the most European of Moroccan cities, as it was largely constructed while under French rule...So basically much of the place looks like a dirty Southern European city (ie Genoa) with very few Euros and a whole lot of Arabs...
I was planning to head directly to Fez, but I took the advice of the owner of the hotel in Casablanca and stopped along the way in his hometown of Meknes.
The train ride was pleasant, only about three hours long, through beautiful countryside (grapes, oranges, grain) and small villages. I rode in the car with about three old women, some kids, and a couple with a three month and ten day old baby named Hamza (isn't that also the name of an Arabic letter?)
The husband was a cop, and we spent a great deal of time talking along the way...Strange that I had to come all the way to Morocco to find out that not all cops are assholes...In fact, here they have been some of the nicest people that I've had the pleasure to meet.
Meknes is a crazy place, and for the first time in a long time I'm feeling totally culture shocked...I am mentally in that interesting, intellectually stimulating, exciting, and sort of scary zone in which I don't really know what's going on...It is literally dizzying to walk through the medina and the markets within--I feel like young Indiana Jones (Indy to friends) or something...Carts fly by me loaded with fruits, meat, nuts, sawdust and people. Old men sit in tents selling freshly crushed salt, the raw rocks before them. People yell and sing and hawk wares of all types. Old women haggle, shopkeeps sell 20 different kinds of dates that pretty much all look the same to me. A butcher sells camel meat, and his advertisement is a severed camel head.
It's really almost too much to take in all at once (or all at twice or thrice for that matter). I reckon that I'll stay here tomorrow as well to get a better feel for the place, or perhaps I'll take a day trip to Volubulis (Roman ruins) --
A couple more things:
What I've had to eat so far:
Kefta (spiced lamb meat patties)
Tagine (Moroccan stew)
Fried fish
Gallons of Green Tee
Lakes of Coffee
French Bread
Only rude thing to happen to me: (besides the hostel business)
Today a boy burped in my face, sort of. He was about 13 and may have just been joking around, or perhaps it was just good timing on his part. Either way, I laughed. It was funny, and the burp was full and well-developed:
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