Casablanca Before Sunrise: An Awakening

I ended up having an unexpected adventurous awakening en route for Cameroon via Casablanca, Morocco, after having been a refugee at the Frankfurt Airport (cots and all).
Although inexpensive, Royal Air Maroc Airlines seems to be operated by ten-year-olds who don’t know what they’re doing. They have no concept of customer service (especially customers who are stranded in foreign lands), but they did arrange for me to stay in a hotel in Casablanca while stranded for two days.

After leaving San Fransisco and being stranded in Frankfurt, I made it to Casablanca around three in the morning, completely jet-lagged. I went to sleep in the hotel they selected, and didn’t wake up until six in the evening the next day. I thought it was eight in the morning. Such is international travel!

With my sense of time being completely out of whack, the next night I was unable to sleep. I watched T.V., and found an old Audrey Hepburn/Cary Grant movie. It took place in Paris. The film really played up the “exotic locale” aspect of Americans in a foreign land, so my inner sense of adventure was stirred. I wanted to have an adventure like Audrey and Cary (minus being shot at).

Life in Cameroon isn’t an adventure for me anymore. It’s life. Things that used to bring excitement, anger, passion, or drama into my life are just part of my everyday routine now. It seems that nothing can shock me. And, before my Casablanca experience, I thought my sense of wanderlust and African adventure was dead.

After Audrey and Cary enchanted me with their adventure antics, around three in the morning I decided to leave my hotel room. There were no noises on the street below, so I waited until five to venture out. I knew it may have been a dangerous thing to do, going out in the dark, but being stuck in a hotel room isn’t fun after too long.

I asked the men at the reception desk, “What’s open at this hour in Casablanca?” They told me that everything was closed and that venturing out in the dark was futile.

Desperate to get away, I left the hotel anyway and began walking the streets.
Morocco is a doorway to the African Continent, and was about to open my sense of African adventure and bring it back to life.

In Casablanca, there’s an area called the “Old Medina.” In an otherwise blah city, this area is quite interesting, with many shops containing fascinating Moroccan things to buy—lamps that look like they contain a genie, hookah pipes, and other intricate items, such as sculptures depicting camels and nomad peoples far off in the Moroccan desert.

I decided to enter the Old Medina, even though no shops were open. As I walked in, there were no sounds save a few coming from men sitting around a small shack eating some sort of brochettes. One of them shouted at me. I’m glad I do not speak Arabic, because I don’t think he was telling me how fabulous my shirt looked.

I ventured on. The streets of the Old Medina are narrow and old, with randomly assembled doors and windows, many of them colored. On any street, there are endless turn-off streets about three feet wide that seem to contain ancient mysteries.

My good sense told me to stop entering deeper and deeper into the winding streets, at risk of not finding my way out. I ignored it.

Walking these streets began to awaken my sense of adventure. It was completely dark, with the exception of randomly placed dim lights. Fortunately, the moon was full and bright, appearing frequently through moving rain clouds, providing enough light to see where I was going.

I encountered a few pedestrians along the way. As they approached, I felt nervous, because I was unarmed and moving deeper inside of the winding streets of the Old Medina. Anyone could have stabbed or robbed me without anyone knowing. I realized that I was probably being stupid, but continued on.

And then came the howling. Cats, found everywhere in Casablanca, especially in the maze of the Old Medina, were making the strangest noises I’d ever heard. I’ve heard cats make their weird mating calls before, but this was different. They were howling like wolves, some of them preparing to fight.

In the dark, the howling of the cats gave a feeling of mystery and danger. The howling was like a warning, and each shrieking sound made my heart beat faster.

I suppose I had become one of the cats—curious, wandering, and jittery, watching out for danger.

I walked past a group of men sitting inside of a two-foot alley way. It was too dark to see their faces. As I approached them, their conversation became louder and louder, until I realized they were talking to me. Most Moroccans seemed to be quite friendly, but this group was evidently not a fan of the stranger invading their labyrinth ruled by howling cats.

Exploring without a leather whip attached at my hip and an Indiana Jones hat left me somewhat disappointed. I felt so far from home, so isolated, so free.

As I walked down one particularly dark and empty street, all at once a man appeared on my right, standing in an alley. Reflexively, I let out a shout of terror. Although embarrassing, this reminded me that I didn’t feel safe but was enjoying the adrenaline rush of doing something, for lack of a better word, “Indiana-Jones-esque.”

The moon hid behind clouds, and rain began to heavily pound everything in sight. On the streets, they have covers above the windows under which people can walk without getting too wet. I darted under the coverings, jumping across instantly huge puddles, exploring at a slower pace, until the rain stopped. My shoes completely soaked, I had to pause for a moment in a dry spot. Directly across from me, I saw a soaked little black cat taking refuge in a small dry space under one of the awnings. The cat and I made eye contact a number of times, undoubtedly holding a mutual understanding of each other.

The rain turned to a drizzle, and by then, doors were opening and Casablanca was coming alive. Bread shops were opening, car horns began honking, and I passed woman after woman pounding some sort of corn flour into foot-wide cakes that looked like a giant pancake. I purchased a small one. It’s too bad that my taste buds couldn’t handle the bitter taste—I spit it out and gave the rest to one of my fellow feline wanderers.

There were now people everywhere. The women pounding their flour didn’t seem to notice me. Loitering men smoking cigarettes were more interested in making comments. I’ll never know what they were saying. I didn’t necessarily feel welcomed, but I felt alive. My sense of African adventure reawakened.

The light of day had begun to gently creep into in the winding streets. I decided to head back to my hotel. Before I left the giant walls that encircle the Old Medina, I stopped at a little store with miscellaneous items such as cookies and a few post cards. I looked over the postcards, and at my feet found a tiny little kitten, hiding safely behind a garbage bag.

I knelt down and caressed the pitifully skinny little animal, feeling a sense of finality, knowing that my experience had come to an end. I wanted to tuck the kitten into my pocket, but knew that his destiny was to join the pre-sunrise howling ritual someday, keeping the Old Medina mystery alive before the Casablanca sunrise.

Two days later, I was in Cameroon, which, unlike Casablanca, has now become familiar. The word familiar is a bit of an f-word to me, for my life pursuit has been one of avoiding the hum-drum and the ordinary. My worst nightmare is to live a “normal” life, without excitement, without howling cats and mornings before the Casablanca sunrise.

I’m doing my best to keep this spirit alive amid the chores of Green Eyes in Africa—accounting, cleaning up children’s messes, English lessons, teaching dance, swimming lessons, and the like. But in the spirit of adventure revival, the other day I forced myself to go to the Mokolo market, a completely chaotic place where they sell everything from shoes to blenders (on the ground). Normally, many sellers are aggressive and hostile. Some even grab your arm to try and make you purchase their knick-knacks.

I made it through the Mokolo Market more easily thanks to the cats of the Old Medina.

By doing things that make me nervous or even frighten me—I’ll keep my Casablanca sunrise alive. After all, Morocco is part of Africa, as is Cameroon. And where but in Africa can one find the best opportunities for adventure?

When things become drab, I need to listen, closely. I need to listen for the howling cats.

PS: They say that what you mentally put out into the universe comes to you. Well, precisely two minutes after I finished writing this blog, I received a call. Grandma Abomo, who cares for five of our orphans, called me to tell me that Modeste, 11, has broken his arm. Um, not really the type of adventure I was looking for. I’m off to deal with a broken arm.