DAY 242: Casablanca, the Moroccan oceanside city made popular by movie quotes from the 1942 Humphrey Bogart movie, has come a long way since then. For one, it's no longer in black and white.

With the sun out and people about, it was a much safer environment to explore than the late night I had arrived before. My first order of business in big modern metropolis -- Casablanca is Morocco's largest city with a population of five million -- was to switch to a cheaper hotel in a livelier section of town. Using my Lonely Planet map and more than a smattering of high school French (Morocco is a former French colony), I checked out the two other hotels the driver wouldn't take me to the night before. Both seemed fine -- the airport taxi driver was obviously out for a commission at one of his hotels -- and I ended up moving my bags to the Hotel Colbert in the center of the city, a neighborhood of internet cafes, restaurants, a cinema playing Van Helsing and various shops.

Of course that meant a KFC and McDonald's was down the road; I checked out the latter to see how Ronald the clown did things in Morocco. Basically, the menu was the same (just in Arabic and French), except for a sandwich called "Le 280", which is a mouthful to say as much as it is to eat.

"Le deux cent quatre-vingt menu, s'il vous plaît."

Le 280 describes the 280-gram weight of the halal meat patty -- "They have the metric system, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is" -- served with lettuce, tomatoes and lots of onions in a dense square roll.

I SPENT MOST OF THE DAY exploring the streets of Casablanca by foot and "petit taxi" (cheap little red Fiat Unos that zip around town), from the traditional Moroccan drum band playing in front of a crowd at the modern-looking Hyatt Hotel, to the Moorish architecture of the governmental Place Mohammed V, named in honor of 20th century sultan-turned-king Mohammed V. I walked from the wide-open sights of the deep blue Atlantic Ocean, to the store-lined narrow streets and alleyways of the medina, the old city. (The Hostelling International youth hostel did exist there, on a car-accessible road even, despite what the airport taxi driver told me the night before.)

But of all the colorful things Casablanca had to offer, nothing matched the grandeur of its latest architectural masterpiece, the Hassan II Mosque, the third largest house of religious worship in the world, after the mosques of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. However, a Turkish tourist told me that he had seen all three mosques, and Casablanca's Hassan II was definitely the most beautiful, with its colorfully decorated walls and shiny marble floors.

CONSTRUCTED OVER A PERIOD OF SIX YEARS between 1987 and 1993 on a 24/7 work schedule, the Hassan II Mosque was built under order of King Hassan II, successor to Mohammed V at a hefty construction price tag of about $800 million (USD). King Hassan II was a progressive modern-day thinking ruler because he actually commissioned non-Muslim, non-Moroccan French architect Michel Pinceau to design it. Pinceau was also an out-of-the-box thinker; instead of the usual round domes of traditional mosques, his roof was rectangular and flat, with an electric-powered retractable sunroof.

"You are lucky," tour guide Ilham told me and the three dozen American, Dutch, French and Turkish tourists behind me. "The roof is open. Normally it's closed."

Ilham, a friendly trilingual Moroccan woman took us on the 2 p.m. Thursday guided tour (the last one before the Friday holy day), which was also an unorthodox thing to do; all the other mosques in Morocco didn't permit non-Muslims inside. Ilham took us around the mosque, an incredible religious facility with a capacity of 25,000 -- 20,000 men on the floor, 5,000 women in the cedarwood-fenced platforms above. She pointed out the 200-meter tall minaret (picture above), the impressive Italian chandeliers and the underground ablutions area where Muslims performed the traditional daily bathing customs. Nearby was a Turkish hammam (bath), which would be available to non-Muslims too -- that is, as soon as the mosque's management found a private company to run and maintain it.

Above all, Ilham pointed out again and again the bright colors of the elaborate decorations all over the walls and the floor. It was just another example that modern day Casablanca had come a long way since those old black and white days. For my first day in Morocco, it looked like it was the beginning of a colorful friendship.