Casablanca, Moracco

Casablanca is a DIRTY city and it smelled really bad. A man that we eat lunch with couldn't get off the boat here until the Moraccan government approved it because he was Israeli and had been in the Israeli military. Israel and Moracco don't like each other, so we were a little nervous because we figured they wouldn't like Americans either because we were allis with Israel. We got off the boat in morning. Right when we got off the bus that took us to town we were bombarded by people wanting us to get into their taxi. We had thought of going with another lady on the boat around the city and to another city, but the taxi driver didn’t want to go down to what we wanted to pay. So Jake and I decided to walk to the Mosque that we wanted to see, since it was fairly close and we could see it in the distance. We didn’t feel very safe at first, just because we didn’t know the language and we were in a Muslim country. We walked about a mile and found the Mosque. It was amazing. It was a huge building. We couldn’t go in because it wasn’t open, but it was pretty cool from the outside. There was also a huge plaza in front of the Mosque. When we were leaving we were trying to get a taxi to take us to the market place, but he wanted 10 Euro for the short trip. We said that we only wanted to pay 2, and he said no. We started walking away and he chased us in his car down the street and offered us 4 Euro. We said no 2, and then he said okay 2 no 3 Euro. We were kind of mad that he didn’t just accept our first offer that when he did say that he would drive us for 2 Euro, we didn’t accept. We figured we had a lot of time and we could just walk there. We walked a long way and a guy showed us a little market place and wouldn’t leave us alone. We tried to ditch him because he wanted money to show us around and we didn’t want to give him money. We thought that we had ditched him, but he then magically found us. We told him that we wanted to go around the city alone and after a long time he finally left us alone. We found a guy that spoke Spanish very well to show us to another market place that was huge and we found out that it was very close to where the bus dropped us off at. Supposedly people get lost in the market and then little kids will show you how to get out for about 50 cents. We stayed on the street and found some leather camels to buy and a magic box that has a secret way to open it. We went back to the ship to eat lunch and then we decided to go back to the market place to find a spoon for my mom. When we got there we were bombarded by people wanting us to buy stuff we didn’t want to buy. We told someone we wanted a spoon and it sounded like they didn’t know what we were talking about and they were trying to get us to buy a watch or something. All of a sudden out of no where he pulled a spoon out, but he wanted 10 Euro. We said that was too much, and we got him down to 3 Euro. It was kind of fun bargaining with the people, but we felt so pressured and bombarded by the people. After walking around the market for a while we went back to the ship. Casablanca is an interesting city.