Here and there again

I just wanted to go for a quick walk, exloring the surroundings of the hotel. Well, it turned out to become a 3 hour high-speed walk as I got ambitious once I had left the building.

Casablanca features the 2nd largest Mosque in the world which only a couple of years ago has been built with a 900 Million Dollar investment. And its almost ubiquituous, you can see it from anywhere in the city.

So, I made myself the goal to get there, preferably in time o reach back to my room to prepare todays course session. And as the Mosque looked to be really far away I put on some speed in my walking (well, yes the urge to loose weight played its role as well). it was a really interesting excursion. For one did I see that the corniche consists almost entirely of sports clubs (of differing quality but apparently all of them upscale), I discovered nice houses environments as well as slums (and yes, I did think about hiding my ipod then, and did not expose my digicam to the dozens of people laundering around in that specific environment.

The mosque itself is impressive, if you are into such buildings you should definitely visit. I wonder if I would have been allowed to enter as a non-muslim. In fact I even did go after some toursit group (only to get in trouble by doing so, as this was "interdit" whatever reason there might be for that - maybe they were all newly converted muslims). Anyway, I managed to get out of that situation and made it back to the hotel in time - sunburned at my forehead.

The session itself went quite well. Note to self: be more pushy on a) reading cases before class, b) keeoping time in group work, c) and deliver more "warstories" from own experiences.

Good night.