Late sleep in today for a change - 8.20am.  Managed to enjoy a hot shower - now that we have finally managed to work out how to get the hot water running - before changing into some fresh clothes.  You will not believe how good that felt - we had smiles on our faces for most of the day - nothing could dampen our spirits - excuse the pun!

Another fantastic breakfast with omelets (made in front of you) and french pastries.  We are enjoying this luxury while we can.  It was part way through breakfast that we first noticed the rain and not long after that I noticed the lightening that was accompanying it.  We decided to hole up in the hotel lounge and wait til at least the storm had passed.  We didn’t mind - we had our bags and it’s the first rain they have seen in over a month.

After paying up our hotel bill (due to the extended stay caused by the lost bags), we ventured out.  The storm had passed but the rain persisted.  We headed to an internet cafe a couple of kilometres away and we were saturated by the time we got there.  But we could deal with that - cause we now had our bags and could finally make plans to move on.  Cath updated her website and I sent a message to the family letting them know we had arrived safely and had not run off and married a stranger.  You would be surprised how many people warned us about that

Also got most of the way through a complaint email to the airlines before I hit a button on the keyboard (no idea which one - we are using french / Arabic combined keyboards and we are having enough trouble finding all the letters) - and managed to lose the whole thing with no patience left to start all over again.

I then noticed that it was 1.40pm and realised that we had 20 minutes to get to the Hassan II Mosque before it’s last tour of the day so we finished up and jumped into a Petite cab.  For those of you that are unsure what I am talking about picture a red smartie with a taxi sign on top that has no concept of road rules. 

That’s the other thing!  The roads of this country may as well be on another planet.  If I had my ticket book / autocite, I would be having a field day.  You know how roads occasionally have markings on them?  Well here they are for decoration only - or so it would appear.  You find a spare space you and you squeeze through - bugger anyone else!  The same goes for indicators and occasionally traffic lights.  They appear to be optional extras.  Not to mention the horns!  They are used with the same frequency that I use the accelerator in my car.  As you can imagine, it doesn’t achieve anything except making a lot of noise.

We arrived at the Mosque just in time for the tour - still wet cause it hasn’t stopped raining. The mosque itself is a magnificent building.  Costing over half a billion dollars to build it took 6 years with workers on the job 7 days a week for it to be finished.  Inside the prayer hall they can fit around 25,000 people (it’s something like 60m high and 100m wide).  Outside in the front entrance they can fit another 80,000.  No expense was spared and the detail and craftsmanship is amazing.

After the tour we headed on foot towards the medina.  Did I mention it was raining?  Well by now raining is an understatement - bucketing is more accurate but by this stage we were already wet and figured ‘How bad can this be- really…’  Looking back I want to give myself an upper cut over the back of the head.  Anyway we headed towards Rick’s Cafe but it was closed so we kept going towards the Casa Port Train station to get our tickets to Rabat for the next day.  That idea was soon pushed aside when we saw the crowd at the train station trying to avoid the rain and looking at Cath and I like we were mad.  Come on have they never seen two backpackers before???  It was irrelevant that between the two of us we had enough water soaked into our clothes, hair and backpacks that we could have broken the drought back home.

It appeared that every person in Casablanca was at this station and every petite taxi was outside leaning on their horns.  It was something out of a bollywood movie - all Cath and I could do was laugh.

It was at this point that the thought occured to us that maybe it was too wet to walk and we should get a taxi but then we realised that no taxi driver in his right mind would stop for us looking the way we were and we would probably flood it anyway.  So we walked the remaining 4-5 blocks on foot back to the hotel for a hot shower, dry clothes, dinner and then a very early night!