This week’s travel dream: Wandering my mother’s Casablanca

From day one, the Casablanca doesn’t disappoint.

Forgive me if I tend to wax nostalgic about Casablanca, said Olivia Stren in National Geographic Traveler. “For as long as I can remember,” my mother and I talked about someday visiting the seaside Moroccan city where she was born in a taxicab a year before the release of the classic 1942 film set in that same romantic milieu. She fled Morocco more than 50 years ago for political and religious reasons but has passed along a vivid picture of her hometown, with “its slicing light, its Ajax-white buildings, and its temperamental, wind-tousled Atlantic shores.” As we arrived in Casablanca together for the first time, we both had high expectations.

From day one, the city doesn’t disappoint. “Standing on our hotel’s rooftop terrace, we see Casablanca spread before us.” Our panoramic view is pocked by “grime-veiled apartment blocks,” but we also glimpse 1930s-style town houses “crowned with tropical gardens” and “minarets pointing up to preposterously blue Moroc-can skies.” Casa—as the locals call it—wears its bygone splendor well. I urge my mother to visit the city’s art deco district, which we learn to our surprise is the very neighborhood where she grew up. Her old apartment house is run down, but the boulevard’s beauty hasn’t entirely faded. As we pass a picturesque café that was frequented by the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, she says, “I thought the whole world looked like this.”

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