Morocco: Rabat, Rabat, Morocco

My original travel journals were split across August Phoenix Hats and a few other websites. February 2021 marked the 12th anniversary of the beginning of my travels. To keep myself sane during the pandemic lockdown, I started reissuing my journals as Director’s Cuts, with the complete text as well as larger and additional photos.

My travels have taken me through Italy, Turkey and Spain. In 2017 I hit the top of my bucket list with a belated birthday gift to myself - a trip to Morocco. Today I am introduced to Moroccan hospitality in the first riad of this trip.

We depart Casablanca, with it’s Alhambra-styled Municipal Building of carved plasterwork and arches, and the Hassan II Mosque, and the souk where I acquired new clothes in an old style. We drive through a farmer’s market and shop from our car for bananas, apples and round loaves of Moroccan bread that would sustain us on the road. Morocco is an agricultural center of the Maghreb, and every crop grows here except for pistachios. Doug points out fields of sugarcane, we saw stalks of the stuff in the souks, where it is ground up and sold as a beverage.

Unlike Casablanca, where I only saw a couple of minarets, here they dot the landscape with regularity. They are always square (which I would learn is a regional style) and always have a finial at the top, called a jamour, typically with 3 spheres which symbolize the sun, moon and stars. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).