Friends had warned that I’d find Casablanca too crowded, too industrial, too much like Cairo. Spend the most time in Marrakesh and Fez, they advised.

Well, if the rest of Morocco is even better than this dynamic port city, then it’s going to be a great first trip.

Reporting (on Guantanamo detainees, next month’s elections and Islamists in North Africa) consumes the days, leaving the evenings free for absorbing Casablanca’s ocean breeze, fresh seafood, relaxed atmosphere and mélange of cultures.

It was jarring to realize how very Francophone this country still is – so much more so than even Lebanon, where employees of the national airline unfailingly answer the phone with a cheery “Bonjour!” I spent a couple days trying to memorize phrases in the guttural Moroccan accent; a French refresher course would have served me better.

In Morocco, a half-century after independence, French lingers in restaurant menus, street signs and everyday conversation. Escargots are street food – you buy a bowl of them in a soup of mint and herbs, pluck a safety pin from an overturned lemon and skewer the snail meat. It’s summertime, which means all the Moroccan immigrants are home from the Paris suburbs, livening up the streets with European fashions and French-Arab hip-hop beats.

Amid the many vestiges of colonialism (the language, the architecture, etc.), it’s refreshing to see so many people walking around in their djellabas, the traditional Moroccan hooded gowns. In Egypt, no middle-class person would be caught dead outside his or her home in a galabiya (the Egyptian version of the djellaba). In Morocco, however, you see street kids wearing them as well as ultra-chic women who rock them with stilettos and Fendi bags.

I have no idea if it predates French rule, but this place takes café culture to an extreme. You can buy a nos-nos (café au lait) or mherssa (double espresso broken with a splash of milk) from countless sidewalk cafés filled with men who have nothing better to do on a weekday. And I’m talking All. Day. Long. Hours are whiled away at salons de thé, where the famous Moroccan mint tea flows round the clock.

“We are a nation of loiterers,” joked Fouzi, my Moroccan friend and travel companion.

A high unemployment rate means little money and lots of free time. In broad daylight, Moroccans roll potent hashish joints and puff away against a soundtrack of rai or reggae. On a walk tonight I saw a guy with his face buried in a plastic bag, huffing glue just a few steps from a five-star hotel. Beggars are relentless, as are the shoeshine boys and the scruffy men who approach café patrons with knockoff designer watches or perfumes.

As in many other Muslim nations, Islamists have stepped in to fill the government’s voids. Here, they feed, clothe and educate the poor, while simultaneously reinforcing the families’ ties to Islam. The Saudi Wahabbi influence that’s spreading through Egypt, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and other places is much less overt here, though this is a topic I want to explore more and examine for regional differences.

On the surface in Casablanca, at least, bushy Osama-style beards and full facial veils are rare. When they need to, however, the Islamists reveal their hidden strength. A few years back, Fouzi tells me, 4 million Islamist supporters turned out to protest an Israeli offensive against Palestinians. And that was in a country where Islamists are under scrutiny and don’t have their own newspapers or TV channels to communicate with followers.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, the U.S.-allied monarch known among his subjects as M6, is combating the region’s renaissance of political Islam by (a.) mass arrests of Islamists, (b.) playing up his long dormant but official title of “Prince of the Believers” (Fouzi says Morocco is technically still a caliphate; it never fell under Ottoman rule), (c.) retaining veto power over key government posts such as the defense and interior ministries, and (d.) aggressively launching development projects in many long-neglected provinces.

We hope to travel to Rabat, Marrakesh, Fez, Oujda and other cities to check out the political and social forces at work across this country. Next month’s elections should be an interesting showdown for Morocco’s colorful players: the young king and his government, secular opposition parties, the moderate Islamists of the PJD and the more militant Islamists spearheaded by the enigmatic Nadia Yassine (whose party always has boycotted government participation).