Casablanca trip

The CIEE students and I went on a day trip to Casablanca. Departure was from Rabat Agdal train station at 8:45am. In this blog, we will take you along the exact itinerary that we followed during the day.We first took a walk through the “Medina“, the old city of Casablanca. Today, it is a place where the locals go and buy their daily meat/veggies and other household items. There are many small streets with kids playing, people on little motorbikes, and sellers with carts of fruit or vegetables and old men sitting around. There are many shops for all sort of stuff.

Our next stop was the Hassan II Mosque. This is the largest mosque in Africa and the 10th in the world. Outside of prayer hours, visitors are allowed to go inside or to get tickets for a guided tour. We arrived around 11am at the mosque for our guided tour, it was quite impressing, and we got to see the main hall, as well as the ablution areas. It was great to see all the details of the building, especially since the materials are all local. The mosque has space for about 20.000 people inside, and another 80.000 people on the square and the roof of the mosque is designed to be openend. It really does get so crowded during Ramadan.

Located just a few kilometers south of The Hassan II Mosque, along the coast of the Atlantic, rests the largest shopping center in Africa: The Morocco Mall. This mall is an elaborated on the American-style mall with a mix of some local design and colors. The mall has largely upscale shops, such as Fendi, Dolce and Gabbana and Louis Vuitton, as well as some French shopping standards like H&M, Zara, Virgin Records, FNAC, and Galleries Lafayette, though there is a small “souk” on the upper level full of traditional Moroccan goods and meant to reflect the traditions of Moroccan shopping.

By Mohammed Zouini