We are taking the El Boraq fast train this afternoon to Rabat, but we have time this morning to visit a couple of places.
The Hassan II Mosque is our first stop. We decide to take the bus there to save some time and Debbie’s feet. Tourists don’t take the bus! But we do! Locals are so helpful. One fellow directs us to the correct bus stop, and almost the whole bus tells us when to get off the bus. It’s rather comical as one lady is saying get off here and a couple of men are saying get off further up the road. The bus stops sorta half way, we wave, thank everyone and hop off.
Hassan II Mosque was built by King Hassan II between 1986 and 1993. In order to complete the project in six years, it was worked on 24 hours a day. The architect was French and the thousands of workers and artisans were Moroccan. The mosque is 200 meters long, 100 meters wide and 65 meters high. Added together, these dimensions equal the days in a year. The mosque holds 25,000 people inside and the plaza around the mosque holds 80,000. It only fills up on very special occasions, such as Ramadan.
We don’t normally take tours, but we decide to do the tour of the mosque and we are very glad we do. The inside is filled amazing details, marble floors, handcrafted wooden accents, marble hand and foot washing stations, titanium doors (to resist rusting as the mosque is by the ocean) and a retractable roof.
As we wait for the English tour to begin, we watch large tour group after tour group enter and comment that it will be very crowded in the mosque with all these tourists. But, it is so vast inside that all these groups get swallowed and they are hardly noticed.
After the mosque we wander through the old Medina working our way back to the hotel. I had gotten used to the tourist old towns of the Balkans and am surprised by this one. It is run down, dirty and busy. This is a working class Medina. It is Saturday and the market is going full blast. Tiny old ladies with pull carts are doing their shopping. The popular stalls have a group of shoppers at them. The human traffic ebbs and flows down the very narrow lane, no one getting worked up about getting around a cart or old woman.
By 3:00 we are sitting on the fast train moving north east towards Rabat, the capital of Morocco.