No, not that White House.
I’ve been out of Casablanca for almost two years.
Although I do like the city I can’t say I missed it since I don’t care much for the work here. I’m not a big fan of generalizations based on nationality (these are dumb, these are ugly, these have no sense of humor,…) but my work experience here fit nicely into generally accepted stereotypes linked to this part of the world.
Simply said, (again, based on stereotypes) every known work related clichĂ© linked to say, Swiss, is the complete opposite in Morocco. Let’s be honest, I’m the last person whose photo will be printed next to the term “hardworking” in the dictionary but local guys can drive even me crazy.
But, let’s go back to the positives. The climate is great, prices are similar to those in Zagreb (which, knowing that the local average income is roughly half as much as in Croatia, must make life pretty expensive or locals), there are tons of coffee shops (very important aspect wherever I travel), the city is modern but once you scratch the surface a bit, enough local specifics related to lifestyle, food, architecture etc. can be found to make one aware of being on another continent and in a very different culture which makes things all the more interesting.
The problem is that I already spent a lot of time here, explored the place quite a bit so now I found myself in an unusual situation:
– not having to work over the weekend
– weather is great considering it’s mid-October
– I have no idea what to do
Getting Out
Since the regular, hotel-office-hotel, rhythm really gets old after a while and considering the weather was great (which triggers “I have to go out” effect with me), I went out with a loose idea to visit a museum I saw mentioned on-line (Abderrahman Slaoui museum). It’s interesting that in such a large city there are very few museums (one of those is the only Jewish museum in Arab countries but I was not in a mood for that). They do however have third largest mosque in the world with the construction price tag of almost billion dollars attached and the shopping center of a kind not found in Croatia where instead of (or along with) Deichman or H&M, there are Prada, Cartier, Louis Vuitton and similar stores focused on not-exactly-a-general-population.
Prior to any kind of sightseeing it is mandatory to have a cup of coffee and read newspapers brought from Zagreb which I’ve done in the nearby cafe which, apart from a decent cup of coffee, offers never-ending additional entertainment. The thing is, there is a terrace along relatively quiet street, meaning it doesn’t have three lanes which intersect with few more roads, but still there is a continuous flow of cars because there are numerous shops nearby and that in turn means there is a lot of parking going on. And that’s the entertainment I’m talking about here. It seems that every single person here has at least three cars in the garage so, even though Casablanca is a modern city with wide roads, there’s never enough parking spaces available so I’ve never seen anyone giving up on parking here just because the available space is a bit narrow. The unwritten rule goes like this:
If (parking space >= car length + thickness of paper) Then Park
It doesn’t really matter if the parking procedure takes five minutes with numerous back and forth iterations as long as the job gets done. The, what I call, “human parking meters” are of utmost importance here. In case there are no real parking meters on the street, there is always a guy who collects the money while at the same time acts as a parking coordinator and kind of a walking, talking parking sensor.
Speaking of cars, I’ve never seen so many brand new Range Rovers in one place. It’s as if one is given to anyone who opens the bank account. Even more interestingly, it is usually women driving them. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but I find it impressive since I would personally think twice before navigating such hectic city traffic in such a large car.
Having regulated caffeine levels it was time for a walk. Since the museum I was headed to was quite close to the office I was walking to every day I chose a different route to break the routine and hopefully see something interesting along the way.
“Cathedral”
Although I haven’t run into anything new on my way to the museum, I did stumble upon the “cathedral” I saw many months ago and thought about visiting later on but never did.
Officially, it is called CathĂ©drale SacrĂ©-Coeur but it was never really a cathedral but the regular church and even that only until 1956. Although the building looks pretty impressive it’s easy to see signs of neglect all around it. It sits on the large fenced area with a lot of greenery, surrounded by palms, but taking a closer look there is some garbage lying around and generally, the park looks unkempt. The building itself is, I believe, a concrete structure and although there are signs of lack of maintenance, it looks surprisingly good after 80 years.
The door was open so I had to take a look inside. It turned out that there is some exposition going on inside and since the entrance was free and I didn’t mind getting away from the sun for a while I spent good hour enjoying wonders of the modern art. As is often the case with the modern art, there was number of WTF things there but there was one thing based on which I was finally, without faking it, able to say – yes, I get that and I like it. I’ll let you guess what it was among the photos below.
Just as I was on my way out a man at the entrance stopped me and told me (or gesticulated it to me) that I can explore upper sections of the church – for the symbolic fee of some 2 Euros.
The first flight of stairs leads to the, for the lack of a better word, gallery on which I could imagine a choir standing and singing church songs many years ago. Although there was noone there now, it did provide a nice view of the church interior which was, while not exactly beautiful, pretty impressive both in size and the whiteness (a cynic in me could say grayness).
I went further up not particularly enjoying smell of numerous layers of pigeon shit. The spiral stairs were quite narrow between the wall and the banister. Having a banister was comforting because it provided some kind of assurance it will prevent me from falling into, no doubt even shittier, basement should the stairs crumble under my feet, but it made not touching anything (shitty) a bit challenging.
Next stop was the roof. You can easily walk on it and enjoy an impressive view of the city. What fascinated me most is the fact that the roof is, of course, concrete and there are some fairly steeply angled surfaces at the end of which there were no fences, no railings, nothing preventing you from slipping and sliding into the 10-15 meter void eventually landing head first on the pavement/grass/palm below.
In Europe and especially in US such place would be secured with barbed wire, monitored by cameras and likely have some kind of guard to make sure you don’t, either by accident or intentionally, fall.
Having fired series of panorama shots (which you will see below) and a selfie or two (which you won’t, trust me you don’t want that) I went upwards to the top. It’s a tower with the “360” balcony which provided even better views which in turn triggered another burst of panorama shots.
Museum
Overdosed on panoramas and fresh air, I started the descent down the stairs enjoying neither the panorama nor the air saturated by the dried pigeon shit dust and eventually made my way to the museum, just a short walk away.
As is often the case, the unplanned site turned out to be more interesting than the planned one. The museum was nice but unspectacular, filled with beautifully crafted artefacts and a lot of vintage posters from the first half of the 20th century (at least one of which was almost grotesquely inappropriate in today’s context).
Although I had vague intention to make use of the hotel’s rooftop pool, I didn’t happen so I spent Sunday going through series of typically activities including, coffee drinking, walking to and along the coast (where, I discovered, they’ve built a new shopping mall and beach apartments which must cost small fortune), sitting on the beach and walking barefoot on sand (may I remind you it was mid-October), followed by a quick meal and getting back to the hotel.
