Casablanca, revisited

So I went to Casablanca again this weekend, and it was so much better than last time. First of all, I didn't ever get ripped off, which made things happier. Second of all, I actually saw a lot more of it.
I went with two of my friends to Casablanca because my friend's deaf friends from the US happened to be vacationing in Morocco and wanted to meet up with her. After a lot of confused emails, we finally did and met Friday night and had a great dinner. The next morning we woke up, had breakfast, and then headed over to the Hassan II Mosque which we hung out around until the tour started, enjoying the waves at the beach. The Mosque from the inside was amazing. It is huge (it can have 20,000 men and 5,000 women). They hide loudspeakers into the architecture and have an opening roof. In the basement, there are huge fountains for people to perform absolutions, although they are only turned on on Fridays and during Ramadan. We then when to see the Turkish Hammam which was near by (it's a huge really heated swimming pool) that has never been used because of "administrative problems." After that we tried to get directions to what I called the "New Medina" because that was what my guide book had said. It took a really long time to get our point accross because they all thought I was talking about El Jadida, a city nearby. Finally we figured it out and took a taxi there. When me and one of my friends arrived (we had to take two taxis), we couldn't find our friends, and were worried we had lost them entirely because we saw them get in a taxi right behind us. Finally we saw them in a taxi--their first one had broke down and it took them a while to get another one.
We walked around and found the best restaurant ever with a really really nice proprietress, good food, good juice, and good desserts. After a nice, relaxed lunch we walked through the "new medina" which did not look at all like a real medina because the roads were actually big enough for two cars to pass each other and it was all planned out with a big circle in the middle. Then we decided we would try walking towards our hotel. We ended up getting on one of the big streets of Casablanca during rush hour. There were so many people (i would guess in the thousands) who were all trying to buy stuff along the street while beside us the traffic moved very slowly. So we walked and walked and then realized we had to take a taxi and it ended up that we were at least 15 minutes by car from where we were trying to get. Then it was time for us to go and we took the train back. It was such a nice trip, plus I learned some ASL and had some interesting conversations about the nature of deaf people learning how to read.