Eid el Kebir

A few days after we arrived we started hearing about an upcoming national holiday called Eid el Kebir. People were telling us to food shop a few days in advance because everything would shut down for several days around this holiday.

Some people were also leaving town for it, and their reasons were explained in gory detail. The celebration involves every family in the city slaughtering a sheep inside their house – sometimes more than one – stringing it up on the rooftop or over the courtyard for disembowelling and skinning, and then the sheep’s heads would be burnt on bonfires down the streets. The skins/fleeces would also be piled up in the streets and the smell was apparently awful.

We talked to westerners who had experienced it before and the horror stories sounded apocalyptic – streets running with blood, the stench of burning flesh, locals running wild in the streets brandishing bloodied knives.

The actual celebration was on Saturday the 28^th, with most people on holiday the Friday before and the Monday after. We did as we were told and stocked up on food in order to bunker down for the weekend.

Several days before Eid, I started seeing sheep being brought into the medina. The idea is to keep the sheep in your house for a few days, like a pet, before killing it. At first it was just the occasional sheep, rope wound around it’s horns, being wrestled down alleyways – the sheep digging it’s hooves in, clearly knowing what it was in for, and young boys excitedly hanging on the other side of this tug-of-war. Then it was sheep in trolleys, two at a time, being wheeled down the road. We were driving back from the new town when I spotted a sheep poking it’s head out of a car boot. I even saw a sheep being carried on a scooter! In the Ain Azliten car park I then saw vans with half a dozen sheep being unloaded. Finally, it was whole herds of sheep being shepherded into the medina and down among the shops and market stalls.

I also started seeing impromptu stalls set up for selling sheep fodder, and the day before Eid the knife sharpeners arrived with their foot operated whet-stone turning and glistening as it sharpened hundreds of knives for butchering. On witnessing these scenes and knowing the fate of the animals my face must have belied my vegetarian sensitivities and I was often the cause of much laughter among the locals.

When talking to a local man we were told of the idea behind Eid el Kebir. Apparently it was originally designed as a way of giving to the poor – rich people slaughtered a sheep and gave two-thirds of it to those in need. Only now everyone buys a sheep, as to not do so would mean losing face in the community. People sell their televisions in order to afford a sheep, there are sheep loans, and people are usually still paying off the sheep they bought at least two years before. A live sheep costs around 2500dh, a lot when you consider that the average wage is 2200dh a month.

Still, the celebration is a family occasion, where people travel to their home towns to get together and the children’s excitement in the streets was palpable.

In the days before Eid, we had gotten used to the sounds of baaing from the rooftops. The night before, the baaing was drowned out by a chorus of men singing near our house. The singing and chanting seemed to go in rounds through the large group, building and dropping, always in harmony. It was magical to listen to and went late into the night. When I awoke the next morning before dawn I could still hear singing and wondered whether they had sung all night as part of the celebration.

My apprehension had been growing as the day of the slaughter grew closer, and we had even been invited to a local family’s celebration. Vincent wasn’t bothered by it as he’d seen slaughtering before and had butchered animals on my parent’s farm in England. However Mike had called with an offer of refuge at the Clock – as it was closed a bunch of people were going to hang out and use up some of the leftover food in the fridges while hiding out from the surrounding butchery. We decided to go there instead.

In the morning I had sat on the terrace with a cup of tea but had had to retreat inside – I could hear baaing from the roofs all around me and couldn’t bear listening for the moment when they would stop – literally the silence of the lambs. I turned some music on to distract myself.

At 1pm we decided to head to our car – about ten minutes walk away – to collect some more of our belongings, as we’d just moved into a long-term rental house the day before and wanted to unpack everything. The plan was to trolley a load of stuff down to the house and then walk back up to the Clock for two-ish. The slaughter usually takes place in the morning, so I figured things would have calmed down a bit and I would be fine. Wrong!

We walked out into scenes of death and devastation. In the time it took for us to walk from our house to the car-park we passed eight or nine ‘barbeques’ – cremation sites fashioned from a base of old bed springs and piles of wood on which the sheep’s heads are burnt. Blackened skulls and smouldering sheep’s horns littered the edges of the sites and the acrid smoke filled my lungs as I struggled to get by. Buckets of entrails, their grisly contents overflowing onto the pavement, were placed nearby. And piles upon piles of sheep skins, the wool matted with congealed blood and the raw-skin sides facing upwards lined our path. The narrow streets left little space to negotiate between the burning bones on one side and the buckets of gore on the other. Desperate not to look I tried staring at my feet, with Vince guiding me by the hand, but my peripheral vision was filled with everything I didn’t want to witness.

Trying to stay calm I took deep breaths and forced myself to keep moving. By the time we made it to the safety of the car park however, I was struggling to stay composed. “I cannot walk back through that again, I just can’t,” I gasped to Vince. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can face it.” He suggested that I call Mike and see if he was at the café yet – only a short distance away. I nodded and dialled Mike’s number, praying that he would be there. He answered, but was at his place in the new town. “Are you ok?” he asked. I had managed to keep it together until that point, but as I tried to say “I’m a bit shell-shocked” I dissolved into tears. “Stay there,” he said, “I’m on my way.” While I waited, hiding out in the car and trying to get myself together, Vince organised a trolley to take the stuff back to the house and arranged to meet me back at the Clock as soon as he could. Ten minutes later Mike rescued me and ushered me past another couple of bonfires to the refuge of the café. “Look up, not down!’” he instructed. “Check out that lovely minaret, and over there, aren’t they wonderful beams,” he rambled, trying to distract me.

Finally I collapsed gratefully onto a couch in the café with glass of wine to calm me down and asked “how did you get here so fast?”

“Well, I raced out of the house and there was a huge queue for taxis,” he said. “But then I saw a scooter going past - and I’ve seen people do this but I’ve never done it before – so I stuck out my arm and flagged him down yelling ‘Batha’, he pulled over, I jumped on and here I am!”

The image of Mike gallantly riding in on a scooter – not quite a trusty steed but close enough – to rescue a damsel in distress, was so comic that we both laughed uproariously and the trauma of the day began to seep away.

Later that night as Vince and I walked home the streets had mostly been cleared and the fires had died down. The next day – well-overdue because of an unseasonably warm November – the rains finally came and washed the streets clean again.

Restaurant Research

Everybody we meet wants to know about our plans for the restaurant, most importantly what type of food we’ll be serving. Our ideas of doing Mediterranean cuisine – with lighter French, Italian and some Spanish influences – are met with joyful exclamations, as this type of food is not readily available in restaurants in the medina. During our first forays into the food shopping available in Fes we have begun to see why.

So far we have not been able to find many of the ingredients that would be essential to our menu. Mushrooms? Limited to button, of poor quality and expensive. Rocket? None. Basil? Bitter, not easily available and expensive. Capers? Only in season and you have to salt and preserve them yourself. Truffle oil? None. Cheese? Expensive! Doing a Caprese salad with fresh mozzarella would hardly be worth it as your profit would be so low because of the price of the cheese. Pine nuts? None. Good risotto rice and quality pasta? Non-existent. And so on.

A discussion with a local restaurant owner about rocket made us realise we were going to have to look beyond the methods we were used to for getting provisions. After attempting to grow rocket on his own rooftop, this guy had done a deal with a local farmer to grow it. He’d bought the seed and given it to the farmer, guaranteeing that he could sell the entire crop and make a large profit. Summer had come and gone and no rocket crop appeared. Apparently the farmer had decided not to be a farmer any more and he was back to square one.

We had been hearing that provisioning was better in Casablanca and Rabat but who wanted (or had the time) to drive that far on a regular basis to get supplies? I had been formulating the idea of setting up a restaurant co-operative in order to overcome this problem. The restaurants in Fes serving non-Moroccan food were but a handful, but an emerging scene with professional service and good-quality product was evident. With rumours of between three and five new places slated for the next 18 months, the opportunity to start a collaborative body for the benefit of all of us seemed obvious.

When having dinner with the owner of one the restaurants at the forefront of bringing change to the dining scene in Fes, we found a kindred spirit. He had opened a Japanese restaurant two years earlier, but had had to broaden the cuisine to include Thai because of the dining public and provisioning difficulties. He drove to Rabat regularly to get fish fresh enough for sushi. He had also had the idea about a cooperative between restaurants but hadn’t found an ally. Over the course of the meal we resolved to start something between ourselves and then bring others on board once it was set-up. That way we could get better supplies, better prices with collective bargaining power and try to persuade some companies to deliver because we would be buying larger quantities between us.

Part of our research plan is now to make trips to Casablanca and Rabat to ascertain the produce available and talk to suppliers. We may be a year away from opening the restaurant, but these sorts of challenges need to be tackled well in advance.

Restoration Research

In between my Darija classes we started the process of searching for a building team, an architect and a structural engineer. After our initial apprehension at the idea of undertaking the permit and planning stages ourselves, we had grown in confidence after talking to more people and felt that we could get it done properly without the help of the consultants. We had been given two recommendations for builders by different friends and started there.

On Tuesday we met the first guy, who came as part of a team with another local who also happened to work at the baladiya’s office. This is a bonus as he has contact with a number of engineer’s and architects, plus he could get our plans approved quickly. We walked them through the house, Vince explaining in French the changes we wanted to make as we went from room-to-room. There was much discussion about how to get the essentials done on a small budget – good! – and appreciative comments about the house, location and view. They also said that all the modifications were easily doable. The verdict on the roof was the same as before, not good, but the metal beams may be able to be salvaged if they weren’t rusted all the way through. We then accompanied the builder to two other of his current projects in order to see the quality of work he did. One was an enormous riad with a central garden, about six months into it’s restoration. The work looked good, the team working there seemed efficient and best of all, the owner was on site so we were able to have a quiet word. A white-haired French gentleman in his sixties with sparkling blue-eyes informed us that he was very satisfied with the work so far. A second property we inspected also looked as if it was being renovated very professionally, so we made an arrangement for the builder to come back through our house the following week to give us an estimate.

On Wednesday we met the second builder who had been recommended by Louis, our original contact in Fes. He had used him to help finish off his own house, when he’d fired the previous builders who were ripping him off. We instantly like the guy who seemed very genuine and said lots of lovely things about our house during the tour. He said straight away that giving an estimate was very difficult before seeing the plans, and that it would be better to do the work in stages, reassessing as we went. He then started to talk about ways of getting around various permissions and back-door tactics, so we stopped him there and explained that we needed to be above-board. Doing private houses where nobody sees the work is one thing, but a restaurant would be open to the public and therefore, need to stand up to proper inspection. Plus, we didn’t want to jeopardise our prospects of getting licenses or have to pay bucket-loads of baksheesh to get them.

We also inspected some of this builder’s previous work which seemed well-finished and over coffee he agreed to help us find a structural engineer in the mean-time.

Both sets of builders came through with contacts for potential architects, one who was also an engineer and we arranged appointments for them both to see the property on Friday.

Meeting number one was with Louis’ builder, who presented us with a gentleman who could undertake the topographic survey, engineering survey and architects plans for us all in one. Vincent showed him around, conversing in French, and he confirmed that it was possible to create the balcony, extend the kitchen, add a security exit door to the street (a requirement we had discovered for restaurants) and install a dumb-waiter. [With only one narrow staircase between the floors we are planning to fit a dumb-waiter to transport the food between the kitchens and second level to cut down on stair-case traffic]. He also pointed out the grim state of the third-floor ceiling, which we were by now fully aware of.

All was going well, when his colleague and partner arrived. After a quick inspection he declared that we were going to need to build an additional staircase. According to him, the regulations had changed recently due to a restaurant fire in Casablanca where some people had died. I rolled my eyes and asked Vincent to translate where exactly he thought we could possibly fit another staircase in an already small restaurant without totally ruining the space. The man shrugged. Vince said that our restaurant was relatively small and for the number of people we would have on the second floor, one staircase would surely be fine? Besides, there were plenty of restaurants in the medina with only one. The discussion continued with them eventually saying they could try to arrange things so that we wouldn’t have to build another staircase. The colleague then said in an aside to Vince that he knew guys in the fire and safety department who could be paid to look the other way. The meeting ended with a quote for their services: 25,000dh to get the house to the building stage. When we asked for a breakdown of the costs it worked out as: 2-2500 for the topography, 5000 for the stability/engineering assessment, 8-10,000 for the architect, another 1000 for the drawings, 1000-1200 for a fire assessment, a 200 agency fee, assorted other costs and taxes. Vince and I discussed this afterwards and thought maybe we could get them to do most of it, but bring in a cheaper architect as we didn’t need any fancy plans or creative input, just simple drawings of the few changes we wanted to make – most of which involve moving or enlarging doorways. After a few days of reflection however, we are both feeling dubious about the second man involved – the engineers colleague. His manner was shifty and the second staircase story sounded like a ploy to extract baksheesh. We are still undecided.

The second architect we met was a portly man in corduroy who looked and sounded French despite being named (like half the men in Morocco) Mohammed. He had worked on some prestigious projects, like the restoration of a large mosque, and was very into preserving traditional structures in their original form. Given this, he balked at our plan to change the entry so guests would arrive through the salon instead of into the courtyard – necessary as we have to extend the tiny downstairs kitchen. Apart from that though he liked our plans and chatted away extensively to Vince in French. [Most of the communication with officials and locals that’s gone on the past two weeks has been undertaken by Vince, and his native French speaking has made our lives a LOT easier.]

He was very knowledgeable about historic buildings in the medina and gave us a brief history of all the significant buildings that can be seen from our rooftop, which are quite a few given the scope of the view. He wanted to know what we’d paid for the house and was impressed at the 500,000dh figure. He said that with the view and the location he would have expected it to be more like 800,000. He also said that the style of the wooden painting in the house and the layout meant the property was likely to be 400 years old. We were happy to hear this as we’d been asking for opinions about the age of the property (realising that the estate agent’s 400-year-old proclamation may not have been accurate) and had been hoping it was as old as we’d been originally told.

Vincent arranged to meet the architect again next week to discuss ideas and fees, but we were pretty certain that given his pedigree, he would be way out of our league.

Darija Disasters!

Part of my plan on moving here was to learn the language, as I was keen not to be an ex-pat who doesn’t communicate with the locals in their own tongue. Plus, we would be employing local staff when we eventually opened the restaurant and I would need to understand what they were saying. A lot of Moroccans are amazingly multi-lingual, speaking French, English, Classical Arabic and Darija, but the main language used on the streets, in shops and in daily conversation is Darija. Darija is an Arabic dialect particular to Morocco – apparently Moroccans can understand Egyptians perfectly, for example, but not vice versa.

After talking to a few friends who had taken classes I decided that an intensive three-week course Darija, held at the Arabic Language Institute in Fes, was the way forward. When I inquired, it turned out that coincidentally there was a beginners course starting the following Monday.   

Despite being swamped with house-related tasks, I decided to jump head-first into adapting to life here, and signed up.

Monday morning, bleary-eyed at the 8am start time, I began my first lesson.

There was only one other student in the class – a 22-year-old Belgian student working on her doctorate – and our teacher was Moroccan. The perfect environment for learning quickly! The description of the class as intensive was no misnomer however, and for the next two hours we moved at frenetic speed through the basics – how to ask and reply to introductions such as my name is, I come from, my job is etc. Then greetings, which is a very involved process in Islamic culture. Apart from saying hello or good morning, it is necessary to ask after the person’s health, husband or wife, children, family and general well-being, answer all these questions – with a healthy number of references to God/Allah thrown in and then take leave of each other with many blessings and best wishes for peace and God’s help.

We then finished the first class with learning the words for I, you (male), you (female), he, she, we, you (plural) and they, with a healthy dose of conjugation 101 thrown in for good measure.

Needless to say, I walked out of there like a zombie. My brain was screaming with the overload, especially as it had been many years since university and I was unused to being mentally stretched to such an extent.

Plus, the pronunciations involved completely foreign noises that used a lot of guttural or throat sounds that did not come naturally. This was going to be even more of a challenge than I’d anticipated.

The next class was no better – 8am again the next morning – as we raced through numbers, days of the week, nationalities and their conjugations, occupations and their conjugations, and then conjugating verbs in the present tense. Hooray! Adding to my sense of ineptitude was my classmate, who seemed to pick everything up instantly, could already pronounce the words effortlessly and seemed to have the memory of a elephant. Feeling completely stupid in comparison, I was even more disheartened when the teacher moved the classes at her pace and left me flailing, bewildered and frustrated in her wake.

On top of this, we’d been handed a new class schedule as apparently the previous one had been drawn up based on only one student. We were entitled to even more hours of torture and as the first week had been ‘light’, they were cramming in twice as many hours in the following two weeks to ensure we got our full quota. My favourite day was going to be Thursday, where we had one class from 8-10.30 in the morning, and another from 3-5pm. Plenty of time in between to get the house surveyed, power connected and digest the lesson before moving on to the next session…

The third class I attended was a slight improvement as it was at 4pm, and not being a morning person I hoped that my brain would be more engaged at this time of day. It started well, with me remembering some of the greetings, and how to count from one to ten, but derailed when the teacher launched off into another stream of Arabic that we hadn’t yet learned and expected me to be able to follow. Concentrating fiercely I realised he was looking at me enquiringly. The babble must have been a question and he was waiting for an answer. Seeing my blank look he repeated the statement more slowly, and I got the first bit but then lost him. Once again it was repeated and again I had no clue what he was on about. More annoyingly, my classmate was sitting there apparently having no trouble comprehending the whole thing. “I have been studying, I just don’t understand this bit!” I protested to my exasperated teacher, frustrated tears welling up in my eyes. He switched to English and explained what he’d been saying, and surprise, surprise, we hadn’t covered it yet. How was I supposed to understand it yet, and how the hell did she already get it?

My wounded pride received a small salve at the end of the class however, when it was revealed that the Belgian girl had already visited Morocco twice before and had had lessons from a friend, plus she was currently doing a home-stay with a local family and so had been immersed in the language for quite some time. I still felt irked though – the class was supposed to have been for total beginners like myself and should have been moving at a beginners pace.

The final class of the week (Friday was cancelled due to a national holiday) passed much the same, moving at break-neck speed through more numbers, food names, meal-time expressions, night-time expressions, and expressions related to hygiene, transportation, illness, asking for help, congratulations and apologies. We also covered conjugating in the past and future tenses for good measure. The class ended on a high note however. After the teacher left the room, my class-mate turned to me and said “I think I finally understand your pain – we’ve reached the limit of what I already knew – and I can’t believe we covered three different conjugations in the last half an hour!” I rejoiced. Finally, she didn’t understand something so easily! Relieved, I said “perhaps, if you don’t mind, next week we can ask the teacher to go more slowly so we have time to go over things a bit more before moving on.” She agreed. Things were looking up.

The next day the situation improved even further, when I bumped into the director of ALIF at Café Clock. (He is someone I also know socially and I’d mentioned my upcoming scheduling woes to him earlier in the week.) He’d come up with a solution to the hectic classes we were due to start the following week. If I could get my class-mate to agree and the teacher was open to it, he would extend the lessons by another three days to spread out the hours “in a more humane fashion,” he said. Thank GOD. I had been dreading the schedule and despite putting a brave face on it, I wasn’t sure if I would cope. After a couple of phone calls, the deal was done and I was saved. Add to that a four-day break from classes due to the national Eid El Kebir celebrations and I was sure I’d be able to get back on track in time for the next onslaught.

...And Lows

The end of our first week was dominated by more dramas at the RADEEF. We decided to pay the bills of the previous owners just so we could move forward with getting power and water back on. The issue had become less urgent since we had decided to get a long-term lease on another house in the medina while the work was being done on our place, however we would still need electricity and water for the builders.

After paying the bills, we arrived at the desk for ‘annulation/ouverture’ of accounts. We were informed, after much frowning at the computer screen and endless key tapping, that the power and water was still connected at our house and should be working. We assured the man that it was not. Being a friendly and helpful soul, he summoned a man to go with us to the house immediately and ascertain the problem. We trotted along behind him through the streets to our house, and opened the front door to show him inside. Apparently there was no need. He looked at the hole in the wall where there should have been a water meter connecting two pipes, and up at the wires leading to our house. After much gesticulating and sign language we figured out that the meter had been either vandalised or stolen, as the metal box designed to contain it was not secure, and that the wires to our house had been cut. Which seemed very strange as it would have taken someone on a ladder a lot of trouble to do so. Anyway, we headed back to the office where the situation was related to the man behind the desk.

It was, of course, our problem and could be fixed, but at our expense. We were told it would be repaired by the following Tuesday, insha’Allah.

With relation to changing the accounts into our name, we were provided with a long list of the documents required to do so and told to come back the next day.

We dutifully returned the next morning, papers in hand, and after half an hour of endless head scratching, key tapping and animated discussion with two other colleagues, they eventually managed to change the electricity and water accounts into Vincent’s name. Not before we parted with another huge chunk of change however. The cost of changing the name and repairing the wires and meter was another 2137dh (€200). Then, just when we thought we were done, another problem surfaced. Our electricity meters were located inside the house – in the old style – and would need to be moved outside so the RADEEF could check them more easily. We would need a permit to do so – another 145dh – and were told to attend to it as soon as possible. Sighing, we obtained the permit, paid more money, and left the RADEEF feeling very hard done by.

The post script to all this is that after haemorrhaging money every time we walked into the RADEEF office, and spending far too many hours there, more than a week has passed since the promised ‘Tuesday’ repair job and we still don’t have power or water at the house.

Highs...

The next few days passed in a blur of activity as we tried to get started on the long list of things that needed organising. So far the list has remained around the same length because as soon as we cross something off a few more things are added. Plus, the amount of time it takes to get something done here is usually three times what you’d anticipated, so we rarely achieve as much in a day as we’d hoped.

There were several highlights among the daily tasks though.

Firstly, we were overwhelmed by the generosity of the people we’d asked for financial help and the speed with which the emergency house funds arrived. The day after we’d asked for assistance these people came through for us, only adding to the sense of fortuity surrounding everything that has been connected with this project so far.

Secondly, we moved out of the guesthouse and into temporary rental accommodation with a lovely American lady who generously opened her home to us. Having a kitchen to use cut down on the expense of eating out three meals a day and we started to feel a little more settled in the medina.

Thirdly, we went back to our house kitted out in old clothes and armed with bin bags, rubber gloves and cleaning products. Clearing out the rubbish, dust and grime that had accumulated felt like progress and it was good to see the house emerging from under all the garbage. During this afternoon we also met some of the neighbours – a troupe of local boys scampered into the house after us so I decided to let them explore. After they started harassing us for money we had to kick them out however, and they then spent the rest of the afternoon knocking on the door every 30 seconds, despite repeated threats from Vincent. Finally I heard a local lady come out of her house and start berating them in Arabic, so I went outside and stood by her with my arms crossed, looking stern. I don’t know what she said to them, but it worked! I thanked her profusely and introduced myself in my limited Arabic, and she invited me to see inside her home a few doors down. I went but we were unable to communicate any further, so I resolved to start learning Darija (a Moroccan dialect, different from classical Arabic) as soon as possible.

Fourth, we visited the Centre Regionale d’ Investissement to obtain information on opening a business. We found a very helpful guy who gave us all the criteria for opening a restaurant and the forms for registering our business name. After our meeting with him, we walked back out into the street where Vince suddenly stopped and shivered, then grinned. “What’s up?” I asked. “I just got goosebumps!” he said. “It finally feels like this is really happening, we’re really going to open our own restaurant.” It was a good moment.

During the week we were invited to dinner by a super couple, her American and him French, who act as consultants for people restoring houses in the medina. They were a wealth of information on the processes we needed to undertake before getting a permit to start work on the house.

[There are two ways of getting work done in the medina, one you do all the paper work, get proper permissions and pay quite a lot up front to get things done legitimately. Two, you get a simple permission and pay under the table to get things happening quickly. We’re taking the first route because we want to open a restaurant and need to have everything above-board in order to get licenses down the track.]

It seems the first step is to get a topographic survey that shows the house in relation to the surrounding properties and clearly delineates the outline. They will also provide base plans for how the house is now. After that we need to get a structural engineer to check the walls, ceilings, floors and general structure to see what needs fixing. We then tell him what we want to modify and he sees if it can be done without the house falling down. He produces an ‘attestation de stabilite’ which then needs to be adhered to throughout the building process. Then, we get an architect to daw up the plans for the modifications we want to make. Finally we submit all this to the ‘baladiya’ who issues the building permit (hopefully!).

Feeling daunted by all this and wanting to ensure the paperwork is done right, we discussed bringing in the couple to help us through the beginning of the project. They came and saw the house later in the week and gave it the once over. She is a structural engineer herself, but isn’t licensed to practice in Morocco. However we were keen to hear a professional opinion on the structure of the house.

Downstairs started out fine, the cracks in the walls were not disastrous and most of the wooden beams looked ok – except for the kitchen. We may have to check out the plumbing, sewerage and drainage under the courtyard but this was expected. The second floor was also ok, the wall we want to take out to create another balcony could most likely be done. Some of the beams would need replacing and a wonky floor would need pulling up. The third floor was where the serious – read expensive – issues were revealed. This level had been added later, and unlike the lower levels was made of concrete. The weight of this was what had caused the cracks in the walls below. However the main problem was the ceiling, where the plaster was flaking away to reveal rusted metal beams. Apparently this meant that the concrete roof – which is also the terrace – was probably rotten and would need to be completely redone. We hadn’t seen this level when we originally viewed the house, as the family living on this floor was out and had locked the doors. Although even if we had seen the dodgy ceiling beforehand, we would have still bought the place anyway. Further inspection of the roof terrace showed that a section of it had been re-concreted to cover up the problems beneath. The verdict? Overall a great house with some fantastic original features, a stunning view, but an unfortunate roof. It could have been a lot worse.

A New Beginning

After a fitful sleep in which my mind whirled with what lay ahead, I awoke to the morning call to prayer.

The sound was magical. Nothing gives the sense of being in a completely foreign place as much as the calls to Allah as the dawn breaks. The medina is full of mosques and five times a day the megaphones attached to the minarets thrum with the chanting that resonates around the city in a chorus of devotion.

[I have since found out that the call to prayer is called the adhan, and is done by a guy called a muezzin. The gist of what they are saying is: God is the greatest, there is no deity except God, Mohammed is the messenger of God, make haste towards worship, come to the true success, prayer is better than sleep (only said in the first call), God is the greatest, there is no deity except God. I will write more about my impressions of living in a Muslim community later, but in brief it’s pretty cool].

We breakfasted on a roof terrace, sampling three traditional types of Moroccan bread – one brown and circular, one polenta-like called Harcha and one layered, flaky and buttery – my fave, I’m still trying to find out what it’s called. YUM!

After organising a local phone number we excitedly headed back to our house to see it in the light of day.

We were greeted by a huge variety of rubbish strewn throughout the house -

bags of garbage that had been chucked in through the courtyard opening, dried fish heads, odd shoes, pieces of a bicycle, sacks of dirt, broken picture frames, smashed glass, metal piping, old tiles, handbags, mouldy clothes and plastic bottles.

Some parts of the house were smaller than we remembered, some larger. We walked from room to room discussing the plans that we had formulated in our minds over the interim and seeing how they matched up to the reality of the space. We quickly realised that the downstairs kitchen would have to be extended into the entrance hall and the entry rerouted though the salon. However most of what we had envisaged was possible. Looking past the layers of grime our dream was still vibrating beneath the surface and simply waiting for us to set it free.

The house had retained it’s charm and great energy and the space was perfect for our restaurant.

On the flip-side, the monumental scale of what we had taken on, how much there was to do and the reality of the project was fully apparent.

We then met with the estate agent who had sold us the property and collected the deeds to our house – some very old and exotic looking pieces of paper covered in tightly written Arabic script. We also received a barrage of helpful advice and recommendations. The biggest piece of news we learned was a major set-back however. We had planned to get the house revalued and then approach the bank for a mortgage in order to obtain additional funds for the restoration. Apparently the system here is not as easy as in the UK, France or Australia and we would struggle to get a loan from the bank – even if we were able to, it could take around six months to process.

We headed to Thami’s for lunch to digest the news and reacquaint ourselves with our favourite hole-in-the wall local restaurant from our previous trip.

Over cous cous and tagine we formulated a back-up plan for financing the project. Although reluctant to place the burden on other people’s shoulders we realised we would have to ask for help. We decided to call-in the favours offered by Vincent’s parent’s and a sympathetic previous employer.

Our next stop was the RADEEF office (the company that provides all power and water), clutching two years worth of unpaid bills that we had found stuffed under the door of the house. We wanted to get the power and water back on as quickly as possible because we were still entertaining the idea of camping out in our house until we could find long-term rental accommodation.

The expression on the guys face behind the counter when he brought up our address on his computer screen was not good. He raised his eyebrows, looked at us, back at the screen, then back at us. After clearing his throat a few times he announced that the total of back-payments owing was 2500dh, around €220…

Shocked, we asked to see a break-down of the payments, from which it became clear that the previous owners had considerately left us to foot the bill for their final three months of occupation. This, plus the monthly fees for the power and water connection for two years had added up significantly.

Balking at the prospect of paying off someone else’s bills we marched back to the estate agents to demand the contact details of the previous owners. Our request, and the reason behind it, was met with barely concealed derision. We were told that we had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting them to pay up and that we would just have to wear it.

Disgruntled we retreated to Café Clock (our temporary office as it has wi-fi, and most importantly is a central meeting place for everyone we know) to discuss our RADEEF woes. After relating our tale we learned that we were not alone, and Moroccans often left foreigners to pay their bills after moving out. It wasn’t unusual and we’d just have to swallow it.

The better news we received was that Mike had arranged for us to be invited to the one of the biggest party’s of the year – the annual Dar Roumana party, and it was happening that night. Many of the core medina crew would be there and it was the ideal entrée for us back into the community that we were to become part of.

That night we were led through a maze of streets further into the medina, ducking and winding down and down until we reached the dar (the Moroccan word for house, different from a riad).

Through a doorway we stepped into a breath-taking interior courtyard that opened up to the stars several floors above and centred around a fountain. The scale of the property and the immaculate detail of the restoration dwarfed our own little house and showed us how much we had to do. We were met by Jen – the owner and impeccable hostess – who led us to the bar and a whirlwind night of introductions, conversation, dancing, laughter and uproarious welcome began.

We had an amazing night and were overwhelmed by the openness of everyone we met. The sense of support and community was encouraging but above all the range of wonderful personalities, diverse backgrounds, talents and experiences of these people, all of who had somehow decided to make Fes Medina their home, impressed us the most. A mixture of the quirky, the adventurous, the creative and the eccentric, everyone was here because of a shared passion for the place and a desire to invest in the preservation of the medina and the creation of an even more wonderful place to live. We felt instantly at home.

Arrival

Two years later: Our first day back in Morocco was full of valuable lessons and experiences – some we had anticipated and some we hadn’t – that once learnt would stand us in good stead for our day-to-day dealings in the future.

The first two hours after disembarking from the ferry in Tangier were spent in an excruciatingly slow-moving queue of cars but provided us with a wide spectrum of cultural teachings. One, Moroccan drivers like to use their horns. In this case it was one driver expressing his frustration at the stagnancy of the line, which was then taken up as a deafening chorus by other vehicles creating a cacophony of honking. Two, every person who does something mildly official in relation to your paperwork (and there were quite a few of them who turned up at our car window) expects baksheesh. Three, trying to circumvent the process and joining the cut-throat queue jumping strategy felt like progress in the short-term but eventually ended up taking the same amount of time anyway – which we have already applied to our decision-making regarding building: cutting corners may be quicker but the result is not as you’d hoped for. And four, in any given situation, any place, and any time, there is always mint tea available.

Having been unable to obtain car insurance (the ‘Carte Verte’) before arriving in Morocco, we had learned that you could get temporary cover from an office at the port upon arrival. This was our plan. However, after taking two hours to move 20m through customs and the officials eventually waving us on our way without mentioning it, we were in a hurry to hit the road and forgot to get insurance. I realised this as we were on our way out of Tangier and heading on to the highway, but rather than turning around and going back to the dreaded port we decided to wait until we got to Fes and drive carefully in the mean time. This would have been fine except in our impatience to get moving Vincent put his foot down a little too soon. No sooner did we feel like we were finally on our way than a white-gloved policeman waved us down and we reluctantly pulled over.

Of course, the first thing he asked for was our insurance documents. Vincent pulled out our English insurance papers and registration forms and handed them over, but from the look on the guys face and the way he was tapping the papers with dissatisfaction we knew it was not going to suffice.

“Where is your Carte Verte?” he asked. Bugger.

Vincent launched into his most diplomatic deferential mode and played the part to perfection. This was not the first or last time that his native French would prove invaluable.

“We don’t have it but we were also confused about this, because at the port they did not ask for it and just told us to go, go!” he explained.

“That is strange, they should have given you a five-day pass,” said Mr Policeman.

“I know, I know that very well sir,” Vincent replied plaintively.

“I will forget about the Carte Verte as long as you get insurance in Fes as soon as you arrive. However as you were also doing 73 in a 60 zone you need to pay me a 400dh fine,” said Mr Policeman. Double bugger!

“400dh? I don’t have this much on me after paying all the baksheesh in the port,” said Vincent.

“This is a much cheaper fine than you would pay in Europe,” Mr Policeman retorted.

“Yes sir, but I don’t have that in cash, do you take credit cards?” Vincent asked hopefully.

“Ahh, no,” Mr Policeman replied with a smile escaping.

“So, where can I find the nearest cash machine?” asked Vincent.

In the meantime another two cars had been pulled over so Vincent gathered up all the cash we had – 280dh – and offered it to him.

Distracted by the other cars he refused the money – whether it was   because he was wearying of us or was feeling generous we don’t know – and said, “Don’t worry. We will make the fine 100dh but just make sure you drive carefully and get insurance as soon as you get to Fes.”

Thanking the charmed luck that had been with us so far in all our Moroccan adventures, we drove off (much more slowly!) and were finally on our way to Fes.

The drive was filled with the fascinations of a new country – a foreign landscape dotted with passing images: grazing camels; a bent-backed old lady struggling to coerce a stubborn donkey stuck on a pass-over; people in rags by the side of the road selling buckets of nuts scavenged from a nearby forest.

We arrived in Fes late, wanting to collect the keys to our house before the agency closed, with no accommodation arranged and vague plans of camping in our house that night.

We eventually obtained the keys (the office was closed) and made our way back the house, anticipation building as we hadn’t seen it since we bought it two years earlier. We opened the front door and stepped inside a pitch-black hallway and groped our way to the courtyard. Of course the electricity had long since been cut-off so our first glimpse of the house was by the illumination of a mobile phone screen and a lighter…

The dimly-lit scene revealed piles of rubbish strewn throughout the room, dirt and dust galore. We quickly decided to find a accommodation for the night and to abandon any further exploration until the morning.

After installing ourselves in a guest house we made our way to the place where our journey had begun – Café Clock.

Our reunion with Mike (the cafe owner) was full of the energy and overflowing enthusiasm for which he is renowned – he excitedly introduced us to some other resident Aussies. The positivity with which our restaurant plans were received, amid welcoming exclamations about ‘new blood’ arriving in the medina, infused us with optimism and we ended our first day back in Morocco on a high.

A Little History

In October 2007 we were between yachting jobs and were pounding the pavements in Antibes, France. One Sunday I came across a newspaper article about property in Morocco which contained a small paragraph about Fes and the cheap houses available in the medina. Having always been intrigued by Morocco and looking for a place to open a restaurant that was within our financial reach, the germ of an idea was planted. During my research I came across the blog of Louis Macintosh and his house project in Fes. I dropped him a line asking a few questions about property prices and he emailed back saying that if we ever did decide to act on it we could stay with him in the medina. After a miraculous meeting with our bank in the UK (where they gave two unemployed people a large unsecured loan as a result of a few white lies and the lending policies that have now caused the current economic crisis…) we were on the plane to Fes and knocking on Louis’ door. He was incredibly generous with both his time and knowledge and rapidly got our house hunt underway, despite being hugely sceptical about our time-frame: we had just seven days to find and purchase a house.

Being told “it can’t be done” only spurred us on and on our second day we found the house we wanted. The house had a great feel about it, seemed structurally sound, was a good size for our project, had a great terrace and view and most importantly was in a very accessible location for a restaurant.

The only hitch was that there were two owners, one of whom lived a ten-hour bus ride away from Fes. While waiting for the arrangements to be made, Louis introduced us to some of the Fes medina crew. Café Clock (now a medina institution) was holding its opening parties – there were several! – and we had the chance to meet the locals. The people we came across were so supportive and of like-mind that we felt even more eager to become a part of this quirky community.

Meanwhile the second house owner was on his way to Fes and the sale was arranged for our last day in Morocco. We entered a convoluted process of getting the deposit into the country via several MoneyGram wire transfers, only made possible by the dedicated efforts of my mother in England and a helpful soul at her village newsagent.

The money came through just in time and we headed to the Adoul’s office. Walking through the streets of the medina with brown envelopes stuffed with cash hidden down your jumper is not an experience I’d recommend, however that was just the beginning of a day filled with anxiety. The sale was put in jeopardy three or four times due to incorrect papers, unpalatable taxes owed by the seller, the house price being suddenly increased and so on. Each time we had to leave the Adoul’s office and wait on tenterhooks to see if the problem could be resolved. We didn’t eat all day due to our stomach’s being so tightly knotted with worry and stress. Finally, 45 minutes before we had to take a taxi to the airport, the papers were signed.

Luck was on our side and the hand of Fate that had seemed to be guiding us to this point did not waver. The house was ours.

The Clean-up Begins

Our house has been empty for two years and was looking a little forlorn when we finally returned. However, through the dust, grime and rubbish we think she still shows plenty of promise and we can't wait to give her a new lease of life! This is the central courtyard and will form the heart of the restaurant.

This balcony on the second floor
overlooks the courtyard.

We plan to open up the wall on the
opposite side to form another
balcony and create a feeling of
openness and flow throughout
the space.

This is the pile of rubbish left behind for us by the previous owners, collected from various places around the house. This was also added to by generous neighbours who had chucked their garbage through the roof, leaving an appetising mix of dried fish heads, egg shells and ancient lemon rinds. Rest assured this will not be on the menu when we open!