Connecting to Casablanca

After getting some much needed sleep I woke highly congested and feeling rotten. After a bite to eat, Joe headed out to the airport shops and I headed back to the resting room to try and get some more sleep. Our connecting flight was at 12:50pm, and after a nice light lunch on the plane, we landed in Casablanca just 2hrs later. When we entered the immigration hall we knew we were in for a long wait as there were hundreds of people there and not that many gates processing them. I steered us towards a gate that had a smaller queue, which turned out to be a bad mistake as the processing guard was so slow!

After collecting our luggage, we headed to the customs clearance area – and this was even worse. There were just two officers and they were sending all people through the same line. It looked like they were opening and checking the luggage of two in three locals. When we finally got to the front of the line the guy waved us through – no check. We were then on the lookout for someone with our name on a card. After ten minutes of looking around we just pulled up next to a pole and waited. About 15mins later a guy came up to us and showed us a piece of paper with our name on it. He didn’t know the flight had landed as they monitors didn’t say it had. He had to find four other passengers. 45mins later he finally found the last two – they were at the lost luggage counter. The other four people were Brazilians and spoke a little English.

Does anyone speak English?

We were dropped at our hotel – the Sheraton – while the other four were being taken somewhere else. We were told there were four others going on the tour at this hotel, and that there were 20 people in total. Later at dinner, we found that the other four people were Belgians who spoke French and didn’t say a word to us during all of dinner. We decided this was going to be a long tour and hoped that there were some other English speaking people at the other hotel. We looked forward to meeting up with the other people on the tour tomorrow.