Casablanca is a large industrial and port city. It is fairly spread out next to the Atlantic. This was the city we landed in coming from NYC. When the plane touched down everyone cheered. Overall our experience showed that Fes was the city that most characterized Moroccan culture for us. Casablanca was more cosmopolitan. Moroccans seem to speak a bunch of languages - I would say the top 5 are Arabic, Berber, French, Italian and Spanish. It is a country that was colonized by French, Italians and Spanish. The Berbers are native to the area. They also have Bedouins in the desert. They have a macaque monkey that's called a Barbary ape. It's not an ape, but... Yeah. So this group is the namesake of the Barbary pirates.

We had a surprisingly difficult time getting around Casablanca. It became a bit of a concern because our AirBnB was not in the tourist district. We tried different techniques including calling out directions in French, taking a picture of the street sign of our destination, taking pictures of nearby features, showing the taxi a map on the phone. Nothing seemed to work particularly well.

We arrived in early morning. To our surprise Adil showed up from Fes. The host at our AirBnB was also named Adil. In our communications we got the two Adils confused and the one from Fes picked us up. It was awkward. We didn't even understand it for a while. So he took us to our Casablanca AirBnB and the other Adil met us there to let us in. We were hungry by the time we got to the AirBnB. Adil took us to a nearby restaurant that served us omelettes. We had omelettes, coffee and orange juice. The restaurant was around the corner from our AirBnB. We ate breakfast, bid Adil adieu and climbed many stairs up to our "riad". The host called this a riad; but it was not the real riad we experienced in Fes. We had the top floor, maybe 5 floors total in the building. The top floor stairway had a security gate. They provided a key to the gate to enter. In the apartment there was a squat toilet and western toilet. They had beautiful balconies with a view of the city. We could see the port and the big cargo ships off the coast. The space was very large and comfortable. The living room furniture seemed to be typical Arab style furniture which doesn't have much padding. The walls and floor were a material like marble. After checking out the apartment and having breakfast we were exhausted. We slept most of the day. We woke up late in the day.

We woke up hungry with no one to help us. Since we were not at a hotel we didn't have a concierge or other service provider that could help find a restaurant. We flagged down a taxi on the main street next to our apartment. We had found a restaurant online that we wanted to visit. We were able to get the cab driver to find that restaurant. It was closed. He had a recommendation for another place to eat. We accepted his recommendation and he took us to Ricks Cafe of movie fame. Ricks cafe is very posh. They have jazz in the evening. The food was excellent.

The first things I noticed upon arrival in Morocco. We had difficulty getting places. We would hunt down a taxi and we weren't able to tell him where to go. I ended up trying taking pictures of the street sign in Arabic so that he could see it himself. That didn't seem to make a difference. Floors were slick marble in the places we stayed and visited. We felt like outsiders who stood out. It was not like Europe for me. Matt was told he fit right in. Karen also felt a little out of place. There were camps of subsaharan African immigrants who were essentially homeless. Karen made people think of them. The climate was somewhat desert like with lots of palm trees.