One Way Ticket

The biggest industrial port city in Morocco is Casablanca. The tour guide book did not give many reasons to visit. There were two reasons for our visit. First, it is a hub for air transportation further east, so we decided to end our time in Morocco there. The second reason was that one of Chuck’s favorite movies is Casablanca. In the city Casablanca there is a touristy Rick‘s Café, which somewhat captures the sense of time and place that is offered in the film Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains and Ingrid Bergman‘s ghosts somehow lurk in Rick‘s Café. So Louise and I had lunch there. The piano remained silent so we had to hum ” as time goes by”.

After dinner, we explored Rick‘s Café upstairs searching for the ghosts. What we found was a continually playing large screen video of the movie Casablanca. As we approached the screen, it was at the time in the movie where Ingrid Bergman says to Sam, “play it Sam, play As Time Goes By.”

The tour guide book that we used for Morocco did say that in Casablanca, which means the house that is white, there is a lot of French colonial and art nouveau architecture built in the 1930s which is just phenomenal. We found that to be very true. The architecture was truly magnificent and gave us a sense of nostalgia for what the atmosphere of this French part of Morocco was like. The hotel we stayed in was called the Majestic and it was a bit worn, but it still had the charm and captivated us in a way that was very pleasing.