Cold evenings of Summer Love

Day 1: Arrival
We arrived at 1am in the morning local time. We were greeted by the host family and the party started Almost immediately the whole neighborhood was part of the celebration. T he following day, after 20+ hour sleep depravation from my flight (jet lag) I woke up to the sounds of prayers through a loud speaker of a nearby mosque calling on people to pray. This happens every 6 hours, Midnight, 6am, 12pm and 6pm.

Day 2: Sleep
Tough I wanted to get out and see around the city, I just couldn't. I needed to rest.  I slept until 4pm local time and I figured I had about 8 hours of sleep or so I thought.  My friend's brother in law, Khalid, was a great guide and like me, a surfer. So we walked around the castle of Rabat, taking pictures and went to the local market and tasted some foods.

We also went to a movie theather with some of the kids and saw Spider Man - subtitled in Arabic dubbed in French.  That was cool and the kids seemed to have enjoyed it.  We came out and as the sun was setting, it was around was about 6-7pm and the weather was nice with a coastal breeze.

Day 3: Wedding
The wedding was an experience to me, I have never been to a christian wedding before, all I I knew was that an Islamic wedding event was different than ours. So, I remained on chair for most of the wedding as no one else could speak English. However, everyone came to me to greet me and tried to somehow communicate with body language. Everyone at the party knew me.   The festivity went on and on all day long, and food just kept coming and people just kept showing up.

  My firend Khalil was so happy and his now wife had a big smile, the while thign was just joyous.  The wedding went as planned and everyone seemed to have enjoyed it.

Day 4: Surfing
As my newly wed friend took off to his honey moon, I wanted to enjoy and get to know the city better. I asked Khalid to go to the beach with me and surf. Fortunately, Khalid knew a little English! So we surfed, waves were nice and the weather was perfect. After the session, we met with some of his friends and chatted, and some of them knew English and Spanish, and French and Polish and German.... We talked and had lunch and were invited to a party that night.

Day 4: Party
At the party I met a couple of travelers from Poland, Germany, Italy, Canada, US, England and France and Spain.

On fellow knew 9 languages and was actually the translator, he was popular among the partiers. We all shared traveling experiences and adventures thourghout the night. At some point, probably 1am we headed to the beach, it was within walking distance, and sat in a circle, started a bon fire and chatted some more.  We play music and just had a good time joking around laughing.  There I met Barbara from the US and made plans to go to Spain.

Day 5: Goodbye Rabat and hello Casablanca.
Barbara and I walked around the Rabat for one last look and experience. As we are planning on when to leace Rabat, and big celebration exploded, the King, was getting married and the whole city was out celebrating. I had no idea what was going on and was kind of a surprise to us.  Food was given away to people, candy to kinds, fireworks everewhere.   Parade after parade, the whole thing reminded me of the movie Aladding.  Anyways, we decided to stay a little longer and enjoyed some of the celebration. At 5pm Khalid droved us down to Casablanca where we stayed at a hotel for one night ($39.00) waiting for flight the following morning for Malaga Spain.

Summary:
Rabat was a great place, people were nice, and the whole city is just beatiful. There seemed to be a lot of guides everywhere and tour buses everywhere. The weather was nice (around Aug). People were nice, the streets were clean.   If you go you must go to the beach, enter the castle and walked down the boulevard.  Downtown are was a little rough.  It is a busy city, there is a lot of traffic and movement but this is mostly downtown.