My Morocco Trip - part 1

This will be the first of a series of blogs I'll write recounting my Morocco trip.  If you're not interested then feel free to skip over this.

We flew into Casablanca and stayed at the Barcelo Casablanca somewhere in the city center.  It was a nice western style hotel, but the wi-fi was virtually unusable.  Food was decent, and we did a bit of sight-seeing.  First off the bat after we dropped off our bags was we ran over to a local cemetery where we saw my grandfather's gravesite.  I've embedded a video of it here.

It took a bit of searching, but we managed to find it way off in the corner. It didn't occur to me to take video as I simply took video of the overall gravesite.  I did take a couple pictures and here they are.

This is a photo of the gravesite itself.  He passed away in January 1934, a good 40 years before I was born. Technically, he's my paternal grandfather's father.  There's a funny story that has made the rounds in my family about this specific guy. My grandfather was the youngest of 8 children. The first 5 had made it to Brooklyn. My great-grandfather decided to come over to Brooklyn to visit his first grandson and planned a 3 month stay. He ended up staying only 2 weeks before he decided to come back to Casablanca. In Casablanca he was a big shot and would sit in a cafe and do business. But in the U.S. things were very different.  One day, he was taking a trolly somewhere and was wearing a top hat and his best suit and a cane, just minding his own business. A fellow passenger leaned over and asked him if this was so and so stop. My great-grandfather looked at him like he was crazy and said "do you know who i am!?!?"  He couldn't believe people would actually treat him like an equal. The rest of the family in Morocco was hoping to come to America and thought that his early return was a good sign.  Once he got off the boat, he swore never to return again and the rest of the family had to wait till his death in 1934 before they came over.

A pic of my family around the gravesite.

It occured to me that almost 80 years before, my grandfather was actually standing where I was, burying his father.  Very surreal. There are caretakers who are paid to maintain these cemeteries.  We visited a couple others around here.

We also ate dinner at a Jewish Social club that is member's only.  However they allow international visitors to eat there. We had chinese food which we found ironic.

After a couple days in Casablanca, we headed to Fez, and stopped in Rabat on the way there to look at more jewish cemeteries and other stuff.

Will write more soon. I prefer to break this up into a series so people don't glaze over reading an extra long post. 

In the meantime, during the course of this trip, I took more than 100 short videos and spliced them together into several highly amusing films.  I'll be writing a post specifically about this so look for it soon.