Casa Gone Wild!

Ahhhh...Casablanca. Where else can you see the third biggest mosque in the world and a man being given oral sex in a public park all in one day?

Just kidding. Wait, no I am not.

I went this morning to visit the Mosque of Hassan II, a brilliant, large, beautiful structure built over the sea here in Casablanca. As my Lonely Planet Guide has told me, the mosque was built with special public taxes, and the slums previously on the land were emptied and demolished (and no help was given to the non-relocated inhabitants).



All that questionable past notwithstanding, it truly is an incredible structure, and it's huge, beautiful interior truly radiates a certain peace.

The cedar ceiling, which weighs something like 300 tons, is retractable like a sunroof. The doors are made of cedar and titanium. The chandeliers are Morano glass from Venice, but nearly every other material used in the Mosque's construction was found within Morocco. Part of the building is built right on the water, and the entire exterior is constructed with Moroccan marble. Truly, it is quite a sight.



The tour, unfortunately, costs 100 Dirham, or about 10 euros, making this the costliest event of my trip (if I do not count that one night I went out to a bar in Marrakech with the Argentines, but let's not talk about that...)

On the way out of the mosque, I made a new friend, Jigar, who is originally from India but now lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He is only in Casablanca for the day, as he has a 19 hour layover, and so we decided to spend the day checking out Casa together.

After walking around like idiots looking for a part of town that turned out to be outside of town, we walked back and strolled through the souqs and the city center. This really is a much nicer city than I had previously thought, and I really enjoyed the markets and the winding medina streets.

We ended up walking a bit further downtown and decided to head toward the Parc de la Ligue Arabe, billed as the biggest park in Casablanca (which is not really saying all that much), which is where we stumbled upon the interesting public display of affection mentioned above.

We walked rather quickly through the rest of the park.

Tomorrow I head to Spain, and I think that I might actually make it to Cadiz tomorrow night...

Bye for now.