Romance lingers in busy Casablanca
You can buy anything while doing lunch in the casbah. A colourful hawkers’ pageant cycles past our pavement cafe pulling barrows laden with olives, dates, vegetables, bread, yoghurt, strawberries, cherries and melons.
A water carrier in red-and-green Aztec dress sells water by the goblet, but we stick to our bottled product.
Casablanca passes by our streetside table. Imitating the locals, we buy bread and nectar-sweet melon to augment our lunch order.
Moving among the lunchtime crowd, a shoeshine boy polishes our shoes to a shiny gleam for small change.
Beggars move from table to table, living off the generosity of those who feed the less fortunate.
A haze of smoke from charcoal barbecues and wood-fired ovens swirls over the row of informal pavement cafés. The spicy aroma of roasted kebabs and kofte seduces us with our first taste of spicy Moroccan cuisine in the marketplace.
Sipping sweet mint tea, we dip chunks of bread into a bowl of fiery harissa (chilli sauce) and enjoy an exotic lunch over a Casablanca concerto of car hooters, muezzins and hawkers crying their wares.
The meat market in the nouvelle medina is not for the squeamish.
When I ask what kind of meat we’re eating, our guide laughs and points out the bloody signage hanging over each stall - a grisly camel’s head swaying grotesquely on a long neck, a severed horse’s head and, to our relief, a sheep’s head at our chosen café.
Our guide says approvingly: “Don’t worry. The meat is very fresh.”
But I wish I hadn’t looked.
If you’re looking for Rick’s Café, you’ll find it near the waterfront on one of the wide boulevards reminiscent of Paris.