Sushi, Bagels, & Rabat

We arrived in the capital city in the early afternoon, landing at the small airport outside of town. Things went surprisingly well as our handler came aboard to welcome us to Morocco and let us know that our car was waiting to take us to our hotel. I still had to order catering for our flight out of Rabat and I was worried that our passenger had ordered fresh sushi of all things. Not only that, he wanted everything organic, including his coffee. I didn’t even know if this would be possible to get in Morocco. I tried explaining to our handler what I needed for our next flight out, but unfortunately he couldn’t understand what I meant by sushi, even when I proceeded to draw my best outline of a fish and a California roll on a piece of paper. Thankfully, the chef was brought on board to speak with me and he told me that the sushi was possible, but he wasn’t so sure what the seventh item down the list was. I then tried to draw the seventh item - my best illustration of a bagel, but could only come up with a large circle with a smaller circle in the center and not to mention, lots of perplexed looks. I continued to draw lots of circles within circles, saying bagels over and over again. Then I had a flashback of my last game of Pictionary where my teammate would start drawing the same image over and over again, only then, I was able to actually say what I was drawing but nobody seemed to understand. Finally, I gave up hope that there would be bagels on our next flight out of Rabat to New York City (Oh and with whipped cream cheese of course, not regular). Between the sushi and bagels, I was glad we had an extra stash of fresh bread and peanut butter on board if all else failed!


We departed the plane, and walked out to the van that was taking us to our hotel. The environment was much different than any country I had been to in the past. It wasn’t like Tokyo, or Hong Kong, but seemed much more remote, even though it is the capital city of Morocco. We arrived at our hotel – the Hilton Rabat. The lobby was beautiful, which ironically made me feel more like I was in Morocco than driving along the city streets. We asked the front desk if we could get a taxi into town and the concierge asked if we would prefer a tour of the city. We figured we had enough time so we booked a 3-hour tour, which cost us a total of about $30! Unfortunately, or driver didn’t speak any English, so he would stop at random places around the city always saying, “YOU GO HERE.” He spoke French, but apparently that was the only English phrase he knew. At the time, we knew we were touring some very important and old landmarks, but had absolutely no idea what we were looking at. A few days later, I did a little Google research and found that our first stop was of the Royal Palace. I honestly wasn't too impressed by the palace, but maybe that was because we only were able to view it from the outside. The next stop were some medieval ruins known as Chellah (which dates back to the third century BC).
Chellah holds the remains of a Roman town called Sala Colonia. Other than the enormous bird nests on top of the old pillars, we noticed an abnormal amount of cats within the Chellah walls. We realized the cats were not only here, but all over the city of Rabat.


Other photos below are of Hassan Tower, which is the minaret of what was supposed to be the worlds largest mosque until the construction ceased when the sultan passed away. In the same vicinity, we also saw the Mausoleum of Mohammed V which contains the tombs of the king and his two sons, King Hassan II and Prince Abdallah.




The building was beautiful and surrounded by royal guards. When we walked inside, we saw the tomb and listened to the chant of the Koran reader who sat in the corner.

I also think we walked through the Kasbah des Oudaias or the 'village within the city.' There were lots of tiny streets with blue paintings along the walls. There was smells in the streets of fresh sweet bread and what looked like peanut brittle covered in honey although I didn't dare to buy any. We did buy a coconut Macaroon from a vendor who seemed to be serving huge trays of desserts to tourists, which I was quite satisfied with! It was getting late and we decided to call it a night. I wished I was able to do a little shopping in the local markets while there, but maybe next time.

When the time came to board the plane for our trip back to the States, I miracuously saw tiny little bagels sitting in a nice wicker basket. Who would have known that I could credit all of those nights honing my Pictionary skills to one day saving my job!! He was actually a very polite and interesting passenger who was going to his new movie premier in New York City. He also gave me the inside scoop about some new movies that he was currently directing that are coming out next year. His newest though, we saw tonight in the theater and it was quite good! In the end, it still amazes me that in this profession, I can spend days getting to a certain country and to a certain city, via many other certain countries and certain cities and I do this all for one 7.5 hour flight to New York City with one passenger.