Code Blue in Casablanca

We are in Casablanca.  Except for the container cars, it looks as black and white as the movie.  The fog clouds everything, like Vaseline on a lens. 

If I’ve learned one thing from my travels, it’s get out of the port city.  In every port, we dock at a big, industrial port, just like the freighters full of refrigerators.  There’s no grass, no trees, just a mile of warehouses and security and gates.

Casablanca is Morocco’s biggest city, and its most Westernized.  I just finished reading The Caliph’s House, an ex-pat memoir by an Afghan-Scot immigrant to Casablanca.  Same as many other stories, the burned out refugee from the 20^th century decamps to some exotic vacation land and then tries to remake it to the standards he enjoyed in his home country, all the while complaining about how expensive it is to do a renovation with the horrid people who do the work for him.  Our Academic Dean recommended it to me as a good introduction to the culture.  I generally find this sort of memoir discourages me from going to visit, but here I am.

Thanks to my reading, I am prepared for a country where the population cannot be trusted, is superstitious, and has to be tricked into working.  Thanks to the diplomatic briefing, I now have a more objective vantage point.   Now I know that the drivers are crazy, the taxis are insane.  No one follows the traffic laws.  Also, there are demonstrations, terrorist plots, thefts at ATMS, and harassment of women waiting for me.

As Captain Louis Renault asks, “What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?

Despite all of this, I am looking forward to visiting Morocco.  I have only one day in Casablanca and once we get through immigration, Sherrie and I are off.  It looks like we can walk to the medina and some of the main streets, to get a feel for the French Colonial architecture and the local crafts. 

Tomorrow I’m off to Fes, leading an SAS home-stay trip.  I had originally decided to travel with SAS because I thought Morocco played to the weakest of my travel skills, navigation.  My instincts are almost always wrong, and I’ve gotten turned around in every market I’ve been to on this trip.  My work buddy Chris had given me a hilarious but cautionary tale about getting lost in a souk, and I didn’t want to repeat it, especially not as a single woman.  So here I am, leading the group—I just hope I can stay out of trouble long enough to get the group back to home base.

Home base for one more week.  In just a week, we go through our last shipboard immigration, our last long lines to pick up our passport and get it stamped by bored people who would rather be enjoying the pastries our ship provides for them. 

Today’s wait was long enough that my computer finished downloading all the files I wanted from the public drive.  The lines stretched down a couple of flights of stairs, made longer by people who were sneaking in at the landings.  They listened in preport to the cultural information.  Moroccans don't wait in line, they push their way through.

Midway up the last flight, we saw our medical team in action.  "Code blue, code blue, code blue.  Deck 7"  The medical team came racing up the steps, along with several crew members.  Two for the stretcher, two with life preservers to use as pillows.  The passenger is okay, and left the scene in a wheelchair.  This is the team putting away the gear.  You can see two cooks (checked pants and hats), along with a maintenance guy (blue jumpsuit), several officers and members of the ship's medical crew.  Our SAS doc is already in the elevator with the patient.  (I have some decency.)

Faculty/staff are the first group to get off the ship after the Caribbean Sea, who won that honor as champs of the Sea Olympics.  With any luck, I should clear before lunch.  And that will give me a vantage point from which to take pictures of people struggling down the gangway with their carry-on luggage.