Day 1, cont.: Rabat

After visiting the Hassan II Mosque, we drove about an hour north to Rabat. With around 1 million people, it's considerably smaller than Casablanca. And being the nation's capital, the city has a certain bureaucratic feel to broad swaths of its newer streets and architecture.



Here was our introduction to something we'd see across Morocco: Ville nouvelle versus medina. Or, more simply, new city versus old city. Each town's original core - the medina - is like a city unto itself, often nestled behind the walls that centuries ago offered protection. Crossing those walls, we learned, was like stepping into a different world.


The streets inside the old cities are narrower, more congested, but not with cars. Instead, people are everywhere on foot and on bike. Horses, donkeys and people haul all sizes of two-wheeled carts. Everything seems to be in a constant state of motion. There's no block-by-block grid. And the buildings, if not actually tying on to the ones adjacent to it, look as though they could slouch against one another for support if too exhausted to stand fully erect after centuries of use.




Although nondescript from the street, the buildings were generally astonishing on the interior, as we observed at our lunch stop, the Center for Cross-Cultural Learning. Our guide compared it, in a sense, to the princple of the veil many Arab women wear. The outside world sees little of the wonders within.


After filling our stomachs and resting a bit, we heard a presentation on Islam that gave us a good base of knowledge for the rest of the trip. We were fading fast after so much travel and so little sleep. So soon the group headed to the first hotel, got cleaned up for dinner and got to sleep.