Moulay Idriss: Roman Ruins and a Cooking Class

After an intense first month in the medina we realised that we’d been so focused on our house project that we’d barely seen anything further afield. So when a friend suggested a daytrip to a town nearby where he was building a holiday home we jumped at the chance to take a break. A few friends piled into the car with us and we set off one morning for Moulay Idriss.

Moulay Idriss is one of Morocco’s most important pilgrimage sites because it houses the mausoleum of the saint from which the town gets it’s name. It has only been open to non-Muslims for the past 70 years or so, and only allowed non-Muslims to stay overnight in the town for about the past five. It’s also a very pretty, chilled out hill-town so is a great place to escape the bustle of Fes medina.

We took the scenic route past some beautiful views of mountains and lakes and then wound through old olive groves and villages to approach the town from the back. Predictably, out of the three police traffic controls we passed by on the way, we were stopped by two. Both times we hadn’t been speeding but the appearance of a foreign plated car always seems to signal ‘opportunity’ in the minds of the cops here. Once again though, with a bit of Darija and Vincent cleverly opening an empty wallet (he had stashed our money in his pocket earlier) we managed to be waved on without too much trouble.

We spent the afternoon at our friends half-finished house having a lazy lunch and enjoying the view, then noticing the waning light Vince and I took the opportunity to photograph the Roman ruins at nearby Volubilis. The UNESCO archaeological site is beautiful but looked even more spectacular in the fading light with stormy skies behind it, so we both ran around taking photos for an hour or so, with the plan to come back another time to explore properly.

Back in Moulay Idriss, we all headed to a hotel that our friends co-own and were lucky enough to be treated to an impromptu Moroccan cooking class by the mother of one of the staff.

We all took turns chopping and peeling, while her son translated her instructions to us and we wrote down the recipes as we went. The Moroccan lady was impressed with Vincent’s chopping skills and he immediately went to the top of the class!

Some of the preparation techniques caused consternation however, such as the method for peeling root vegetables. In the absence of a vegetable peeler, we were instructed to boil the carrots, potatoes and beetroot whole with their skins on. After they were cooked, we then had to scrape the skins off the boiling vegetables with a blunt knife and/or our fingernails…juggling a hot potato while scraping the skin off with your nails is not a process I would recommend, but it is very funny to watch.

Over an hour or two we helped to prepare a lamb tagine with prunes and almonds, warm salad of carrots, beetroot and potatoes, tomato and cucumber salad and – my favourite – a hot salad of aubergine and tomato.

The aubergine is charred and produces a fantastic smoky flavour, and when combined with the chilli and garlic of the chermoula paste is sensational. 

Ingredients:

2 tomatoes

2 aubergines

2 tsp cumin

2 tsp red paprika

1 tbsp veg oil

2 tbsp olive oil

1 ½ tbsp chermoula paste (see below)

Method:

Cook the whole aubergines directly on a gas flame until soft, turning regularly to blacken all the skin. Remove from the heat when cooked and place in plastic bag to steam off the skins. Meanwhile clean, peel and dice tomatoes.

Peel the aubergines removing all the skin and then chop roughly.

Fry the tomatoes and spices over a high heat with most of the oil, stirring and crushing them as they soften.

Mash the aubergine into the tomato mixture, stirring well and leave the mix to reduce down to a sauce like consistency. Stir through the chermoula and a dash of olive oil and serve with chunks of bread for dipping.

Chermoula paste is made by chopping two red chillis, a whole bulb of garlic, a handful each of fresh coriander and flat-leaf parsley and grinding the whole lot with a mortar and pestle. Add salt to taste at the end and a tbsp of olive oil, mix well and store in the fridge for adding to fish, meat, sauces etc.

Needless to say, we had a wonderful meal and were delighted to not only try some home-cooked Moroccan food but to learn how to do it ourselves as well. We drove back to Fes feeling energised from our day away, and resolved to return again soon. Next time however, we would bring a vegetable peeler.

Progress!

At our first dinner party we had the opportunity to get to know a British couple that we’d briefly met two years earlier. They provided us with a different perspective on the building process as they’ve chosen to manage their builds (they are restoring two properties simultaneously) themselves instead of using a company. This has involved them sourcing all their own tradesmen, from masons to plumbers, and finding suppliers for all the materials from scratch.

We discussed the pros and cons of this approach at length, with the husband being the one in favour and his wife discouraging us from following their example. The arguments for doing everything yourself were mostly financial – a company has extra costs built in and by controlling the sourcing of workers and materials you kept prices down and had a beady eye on everything that came in and out of the work site. For example, the practice of skimming off materials – a few bags of sand here, some cement there – would be eliminated.

The arguments against were that you had to buy insurance to cover any accidents on site and the build took twice as long because you were starting a process that you had no prior experience of and a lot of time was wasted through learning by trial and error.

We concluded that because we were trying to open a business as quickly as possible that any financial gains made through managing the build ourselves would probably be lost in the extra time it took to get up and running. However this couple has been a goldmine of information and contacts for us. Since catching up with them for dinner we had a meeting to discuss their experiences a bit more, which turned out to be the most profitable hour I’ve spent talking to anybody so far. They recommended an architect, an engineer, a topographer and a plumber, knew both of the builders we were considering using and steered us in the right direction and then introduced me to a French guy who is currently having his house restored by the builder we were leaning towards. He had also used the same engineer and plumber and recommended all of them.

The couple and the French guy all provided me with lists of what they’d paid for everyone’s services so we could compare and be sure we weren’t being ripped off. 

Finally, we were getting somewhere!

In the meantime, Vincent had organised an electrician to move the meter boxes outside our house and reconnect the power.

This was a lengthy process that involved three meetings before the work actually took place. Once to meet the electrician at our house to discuss the work, another time to discuss how much it would all cost, and a third time to drive into town to purchase the materials. Eventually the day arrived to actually do the work, but commencement was delayed while cement and sand was purchased – it had been forgotten in the original materials run.

Finally everything was ready and the first work on our house began.

The old meter boxes were disconnected, a hole was dug in the wall outside to relocate them to, they were reconnected to the power line outside and earthed. Earthing involved digging a metre deep hole in the ground and burying a copper rod in the ground with a mixture of coal, salt and water.

Two new fuse boxes were also put inside the house to prepare for when we have the whole place rewired. The work took a whole day – during which time interested neighbours stopped by to peruse the proceedings and a kindly lady came out with a tray of mint tea and biscuits she’d just collected from the bakery [traditional kitchens in the medina don’t have ovens, so the women make bread and pastries at home and carry them on trays to communal bakeries with wood-fired ovens where they wait for them to cook and them bring them home again].

During the work, it was also discovered that we’d had water connected to the house the whole time. In the downstairs kitchen one of the workmen just opened a valve in the corner to get the water flowing again so he could make cement. After a few hours however, a pool of water was found amassing in one of the rooms upstairs. “I think you have a leak,” the electrician wisely deduced. The valve is now shut off again until we investigate the plumbing.

It had taken almost a month, but our house had reached the first stage. We had power and water.

Smash and Grab

It’s amazing how life can deal you extreme highs followed by dramatic lows, all in the space of an hour.

I had finished my last Darija class and was elated at having persevered despite my struggles, and made it to the end. Driving home at dusk, looking forward to the weekend ahead with another dinner party with friends planned for the following evening, I had the radio turned up and was singing along to Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstitious’.

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a man stepped out into the road in front of my car. I slammed on the brakes, but did not have enough time to avoid hitting him. It’s hard to describe what that moment felt like but things slowed right down and then got very fast again. Shock, horror and disbelief quickly followed by panic were the sensations that washed over me in those few seconds. I punched on the hazard lights and jumped out of the car. The man was lying in the road with his leg at a strange angle and was groaning in pain. Thankfully I couldn’t see any blood and he didn’t appear to have hit his head.

I started babbling apologies at him in French, which he evidently didn’t speak, but thankfully a woman passing by stepped in to translate as he only spoke Darija and the little I had learnt definitely didn’t prepare you for this type of situation.

Not knowing how to call the police or an ambulance or really knowing what to do in a foreign country where up until now I’d been relying on Vincent to translate difficult conversations, I got someone to help me lift the man into the back of my car. He didn’t seem to be able to put any weight on his leg and I feared it was broken. With vague directions from the woman who had helped me I set off to try and find the hospital.

Between the man groaning in pain and being unable to give me directions in a language we both spoke and me being in total shock and panic, we only got a few hundred metres down the road. He had me pull over and motioned to use my mobile phone, which he then used – I suppose – to call a friend or family member to tell them what had happened.

After that we set off again, with him directing me to turn around and head back the way we’d just come. Frustrated at being unable to understand anything he said to me, panicked and at a loss to what to do I just kept driving.

One word that I did eventually understand was ‘floos…argent’ the Darija and French words for money. He was asking me for cash instead of taking him to the hospital. Feeling responsible for having hurt him and wanting to make things right in the proper way, I refused and repeated “SSbeetar, T’Beeb!” (hospital, doctor). Things where going nowhere so when he again asked me to pull over I did, and tried to call a friend who speaks Darija to help me translate what the man was saying and/or help me find the hospital. When he didn’t answer, the man asked to use my phone again. I handed it over and he went to make a call.

Suddenly, the back door had opened and the man was sprinting – on his supposedly broken leg – off into a field, clutching my phone! Completely gobsmacked I only managed to jump out of the car and utter a feeble “Hey!” before he had disappeared into the night.

Stunned, I got back into the car and drove off down the road looking for a place to turn around. When I eventually got back to the road he’d run down I saw that a mound of earth blocked the way and it was impassable by car. He had deliberately got me to drive to a spot where he could easily escape on foot and I’d be unable to follow, should I have been foolish enough to bother.

Driving home again in a daze I tried to process what had just happened. It was incredible. Of all the eventualities that pass through your mind when you accidentally run someone down with your car, them making a miraculous recovery and stealing your mobile phone is definitely not one of them!

I parked the car and examined the front bumper where I’d hit him – there were no marks or dents. I replayed the accident in my mind and realised that I must not have hit him very hard at all – he hadn’t rolled up onto the bonnet, he hadn’t hit his head when he fell and I had braked quickly enough to almost stop before the impact. However in my shock and panic I had assumed he was genuinely hurt and his groans of pain were real.

Walking the rest of the way to our house I felt faint and nauseous. The horror of actually hitting someone with my car still far outweighed the loss of my phone. I didn’t care about the phone at all, I was just relieved the man was ok and all I kept thinking about was how much worse it could have been for him.

Although after getting home and discussing it with family and friends they made me realise how much worse it could have been for me too. Not thinking clearly I had put a strange man into my car while alone, panicked and confused. Everyone else was just relieved that all he did was steal my phone. Some friends even went so far as to say the whole accident had been a set-up, but after going over it again in my mind I am convinced it was just a case of opportunism.

However, considering all the possible outcomes, including the potential injuries he could have sustained and the hospital bills we could have faced, personally I was just glad that all I’d lost was a mobile phone. What I’d gained was immeasurably more valuable – a wake up call as to the type of place I was now living in and a lesson about how much more street smart I was going to have to be in the future.

Black, White or Grey?

Since arriving there has been no shortage of people willing to give us tips and warnings about the house renovation process based on their own experiences. While this has been very welcome and we would be clueless about how to proceed otherwise, the volume of information you need to absorb in a short period of time is huge. Plus, a lot of the advice we have received has been totally contradictory.

The main difficulty seems to be that there’s no correct way of doing things here. In Europe there are building codes, procedures and safety nets set in place and there’s one way to do things. In Morocco there are at least three ways to do things. One, play totally by the rules (although it’s not always clear what they are) and be forced to make changes to your house that are completely arbitrary and defy logic while at the same time taking a very long time to get the correct (and more expensive) permissions. Two, get a simple building permission and a dodgy builder, proceed exactly as you wish and then pay lots of baksheesh to the appropriate people later on to get the building approved and/or your license to operate a business there. Or three, take the middle path where you try to do as much as possible correctly until you reach the point where your business plan/budget/building’s character will be compromised, then find the grey area in between.

Everyone we’ve spoken to has had to find ways around ‘rules’, but the difficulty is in knowing which ones are flexible and which are going to cause you problems.

Take the second staircase rule for instance. Since we were told about it we’ve discussed the problem with others who cite the various examples of other businesses in the medina who only have one entry/exit route and no-one has had the rule enforced. The layout of traditional medina houses makes the addition of a second staircase – especially in the smaller properties – disastrous aesthetically and space-wise.

The other problem we’ve come up against was raised by the same team as the staircase issue – the engineer we liked and his dodgy partner that we didn’t. We brought them back for a second meeting, hoping to get the engineer on his own to ask whether he would work solo as we didn’t have a good feeling about his associate. We did manage to pose the question and as the reply was that they only come as a double act we’ve since decided not to use them. Anyway, at the second meeting the arrival of Mr Dodgy was again the portent of bad news to come. He swept in under a cloud of cigarette smoke, his heavily-lidded eyes half closed and yellow teeth flashing in a grimace that was supposed to pass for a smile. “Your kitchen isn’t big enough,” he said without preamble. He then proceeded to tell us that we had to turn one of the salons off the courtyard (crucial dining space) into the kitchen instead. When we immediately vetoed that idea his other suggestion was to extend the balcony above and build a wall out into the courtyard to add an extra square metre of kitchen space. Apart from the fact that this would be a very expensive exercise that would only create a small amount of extra space, it would completely ruin the lines of the house interior and compromise the original character of the building.

We explained to him again that the kitchen would be over two levels, connected by a dumb waiter and that we were already extending the downstairs kitchen as much as we could. He said he would show our plans and measurements to someone at the appropriate office and ask whether the split level kitchen would be acceptable.

All of this discussion was because of an arbitrary ratio decided by someone in an office that requires restaurants to have a kitchen space that is a certain percentage of their total dining area. We had already found this out ourselves when we obtained the restaurant requirements paperwork, and had gone back to the office to query the percentages, sure that there had been an administrative error. This is why we thought there had been a mistake: restaurants serving less than 30 covers need to have a kitchen that is 55 per cent of their dining area; between 30-50 covers you need 50 per cent; and for more than 50 covers you only need 40 per cent. So, the bigger the restaurant, the smaller the kitchen you are required to have. Baffled by this total lack of logic, Vincent asked the suit at the Centre Regionale d’Investissment to check the figures but was assured they were correct. “But that makes it very difficult to follow the rules,” Vincent protested. “I know, they are very ‘particulier’ (odd),” the suit replied. “That is how it’s written but commonly there are ways around everything. With baksheesh everything can be done, that is how it works.”

Astonished that someone who makes the rules would so readily admit that they are meant to be broken, we also learnt from this that the percentages had been set deliberately out of achievable range to force baksheesh payments in order to comply with them.

From this we’ve concluded firstly that our original plan of playing everything straight is actually impossible and secondly, the game is not meant to be played that way anyway. That’s also why it’s quite difficult for people who’ve been through the same process to give advice – every situation is different and negotiating the rules particular to your own project requires following your instincts rather than having the answers in black and white.

Rules of the Road?

Driving in Morocco is an interesting experience, akin to playing a large game of ‘chicken’. For a start they drive on the right, and as we have an English car this can often be hair-raising for the person in the passenger seat.

The thing that’s the most difficult to come to grips with is the rule applying to roundabouts. Unlike everywhere else I’ve driven where the cars coming on to the roundabout have to wait their turn to engage with the traffic already circulating, in Morocco it’s the opposite. It’s easy to get onto a roundabout because the cars already on it have to give way to you, but it’s sometimes hard to get off again. You have to stop mid-turn to give way to the vehicles entering which results in a build up of stalled traffic half-way round the roundabout. I caused a great amount of confusion before I got used to this, sometimes forgetting where I was and automatically driving the European way.

Apart from this though, other rules of the road don’t seem to apply when you’re driving around town (as we’ve already experienced, speed limits are definitely enforced on the motorways…).

The rule is, there are no rules. Or, know the rules and then ignore them. Two lanes can suddenly accommodate four vehicles abreast of each other, especially at traffic lights, which drivers see as a chance to jostle for position.

Both overtaking and undertaking are de rigueur, which is necessary when the traffic can consist of such slow-moving obstacles as donkeys pulling carts, ‘Top Moto’ trikes with trailers and the Petit Taxis, which never seem to be in a hurry.

The Petit Taxis are also a potential hazard, as they frequently stop in the middle of the road without warning to discharge their passengers. If you don’t run into the back of them, you may lose a wing mirror when the passengers arbitrarily open a door to get out in the middle of the traffic.

Care also needs to be taken when driving on the inside of a car entering a roundabout as they often drive straight, nearly side-swiping you instead of taking the trouble to turn the steering wheel and follow the curve of the roundabout.

You also need to watch out for pedestrians who start edging their way into the road, hoping that you’ll let them cross the street, as zebra-crossings are routinely ignored by cars.

Using your horn is not just for extreme circumstances, it is regularly used to remind someone to pick a lane instead driving down the middle of the road, warn a vehicle that you’re under or over taking them so they don’t arbitrarily swerve into you without checking their mirrors (what mirrors? what indicators?) or to blast the car in front of you when they don’t move off at a green traffic light quickly enough. We have both changed the way we hold the steering wheel here, to allow our thumbs to be permanently on the horn.

Basically there is no courtesy to other drivers, and the person who gets there quickest is the one who is least afraid to get their car scratched or dented.

The upside of this is that you get to do all the things on the road that you’ve always wanted to do back home but never dared. Slow-moving vehicle sitting in the outside lane? Undertake it instead. Grandpa snoozing at the traffic lights when you’re in a hurry? Wake him up with a long toot on the horn. Bus blocking your path? Squeeze alongside it at the lights and create an extra lane.

Duck, weave, edge people out and push in. Driving here may be chaotic but it also allows us to be the really bad drivers we’ve always secretly wanted to be…

Hot and Hairy in the Hammam

Ever since I arrived in Morocco I’ve wanted to try out the local way of bathing – in a hammam. As we’d discovered when we bought our house here, bathrooms at home consist of a squat toilet and a tap. Locals bathe in the hammam about once a week (I believe bathing weekly is required by the Koran) at specific times – days are for women only, nights are for men. Apparently Thursdays are the busiest as Friday is the Muslim holy day and most people want to be at their cleanest before they visit the mosque and pray before Allah.

I’d spoken to ex-pats who’d tried it and had mixed reports – some found it relaxing, others found the concept of washing among other people’s exfoliated skin and clumps of hair not to their liking. However I’d heard that the hammam ritual was a great social occasion for women who sometimes spent hours there chatting and gossiping with friends and family members and I was curious to see it for myself.

I wanted to visit the hammam with a local who could show me the way things were done rather than just turning up unprepared, and recently an opportunity presented itself. A fellow student at the language centre where I was taking my Darija classes had been staying with a local family and her ‘house mother’ had offered to take her before she left Fes. I asked if I could tag along and she agreed.

I was briefed on what to take – a bucket to hold your bathroom products, a towel, flip-flops, a plastic stool or mat to sit on and a change of underwear as most women wash wearing their knickers.

I headed through the medina clutching my red bucket filled with shampoo, shower gel and so on and was amused to see the reactions of shopkeepers and passers-by when they clocked a Westerner clearly on her way to a hammam. After the double-take they usually grinned and a couple shouted out things like “Hammam? Mezzyan!” (good).

My friends ‘house mother’ lent us both rough black gloves for exfoliating and on the way bought some strange-looking brown goo in a plastic bag from the hanoot (corner store). It turned out that she wasn’t coming with us after all, she’d already bathed three days before and was just going to drop us off and instruct the women what to do with us. Apparently we were getting the ‘works’ – a scrub down and massage.

She led us through an anonymous doorway and down some tiled stairs, past a curtain and into a large changing room similar to those at public swimming pools but without the lockers. There were benches and hooks on which to leave your stuff and a few women in various states of undress, who all looked surprised to see two Western women there. This hammam was a small one in a hidden backstreet of the medina and clearly didn’t get many ‘tourists’.

My friend and I shyly stripped down to our pants and flip-flops and, bucket in hand, were ushered through by the attendant. We passed through a corridor and ducked under a heavy plastic flap into a big room where about a dozen women of various ages, shapes and sizes were sitting on stools or plastic mats in their underwear. Steam filled the space and the blue-painted walls and domed roof dripped with condensation. Each woman had two or three buckets of water in front of her and a scoop for pouring water over themselves, which then ran into a drain in the centre of the room. In the corner was a large trough with a pipe pouring hot water into it – this trough was attended by an older skinny woman wearing baggy drawers who distributed the buckets of water to the women bathing. It’s hard to tell the ages of people here as many appear prematurely old due to their tough lives, but she looked well into her 70’s.

We sat on our plastic mats and had several buckets of steaming water deposited in front of us. Taking our cue from watching the others we began ladling the hot water over ourselves and I produced my normal shower kit and started washing. Any inhibitions we may have had quickly dissipated – most of the women there were far from the ‘body beautiful’ and they let it all hang out! We’d been told that we were signed up for the full treatment but when nobody appeared to help us we just relaxed and got on with it. After five minutes however a big mamma with orange hennaed hair and saggy beige undies came over, fished out the rough black glove from my bucket, plonked herself on the floor beside me and motioned for me to start rubbing the brown goo on myself – this was clearly meant to be soap but the greasy consistency made me wonder if it was made from animal fat. I pushed the thoughts of the recent sheep slaughtering from my mind. She then began scrubbing my back with the exfoliating glove – so far, so good. Things got a little interesting however when she grabbed my shoulder and directed me to lay my head on her ample hairy thigh. She extended my arm over her shoulder and began scrubbing my upper body to within an inch of it’s life. This was ok, but her enormous pendulous bosoms slapping me in the face when she stretched to scrub my stomach was rather alarming. Trying not to catch my friend’s eye for fear of laughing at a rather inappropriate moment I instead focused on her bushy eyebrows, knitted together in concentration as she removed several layers of my skin.

This process continued over the rest of my body until I was completely buffed and rosy. I was then handed over to the skinny water attendant for the massage phase, which involved her rubbing more of the brown soap into my skin and then bending my legs in to my buttocks while I lay on my stomach. After being rinsed off with a bucket of hot water I was then left to my own devices, so I proceeded to wash my hair while watching my friend go through the same ritual. Once the scrubbing and ‘massage’ was done with we were able to settle into girly conversation while continuing our own personal ablutions. It was fascinating to watch the other women – one performed a similar extensive body scrubbing on a girl who was obviously her daughter, a girl next to us in her late teens spent at least half an hour washing and combing her luxuriant black hair, and a bent backed rotund grandmother vigorously brushed her teeth – all the while chatting away about the ups and downs of their daily lives.

Women can spend two hours or more at the hammam – it’s the one chance they have to relax and do something for themselves in total privacy from the men in their lives. A weekly break from the busy routine of caring for their husbands, families and homes. No wonder they take their time in there! Also, in winter when the houses here get very cold (none have central heating) the warmth of the steam-filled hammam certainly encourages you to linger.

My friend and I spent a relatively short time (45 minutes) there – to stretch out the process to two hours takes practice! – and emerged back onto the street refreshed and glowing. We both felt cleaner than we had in a while and our skin was soft and flushed from the exfoliation and heat. It was a very relaxing experience and while I personally like to bathe more often than once a week, I will definitely be visiting the hammam again when I feel the need to get away from it all for a while.

Images - Medina Life

“Play It, Sam” - Casablanca

Unfortunately our first trip to Casablanca was not for tourist purposes, but from the little we managed to see of it the city of today bears little resemblance to the one portrayed in the legendary film.

Our dash to Casa (as it’s called by locals) was purely a Mac rescue mission. We called the Apple repair centre the day before to ensure they had the right hard-drive in stock and jumped in the car as soon as my classes had finished at 11am. We hoped to make it there by 2pm so that the computer could be fixed in time for us to drive back the same day.

After printing off some basic street maps we hit the road by 11.30, planning to get straight on the motorway to Rabat – the same road we’d arrived by a few weeks earlier. Vince was sure he knew the way but after driving around in circles for about half an hour we were still no closer to even leaving Fes. A policeman’s directions left us clueless and it wasn’t until we got lucky by asking a guy in a van for help that we got anywhere – he was heading the same way and motioned for us to follow him. Finally at 12.15 we were on the right road. Why is it that when time is of the essence that everything goes wrong? On the way to Casa we were pulled over the police THREE times. Not because we were doing anything wrong, simply because we were driving a foreign registered car and they wanted to give us a once-over. We started to realise how it must feel to be a turban-wearing, bearded Arab trying to get through a Western airport. The first two times my minimal Darija had a positive effect – the stern looking cops broke into wide grins when I greeted them with “Sbah-l-kheer, labass? Kulshi bikhiir? l hamdu llah” etc and very quickly waved us on. The third cop wasn’t impressed however and asked for our insurance papers (which we now had!), then Vince’s license. The policeman said in French that we had failed to stop properly at a stop sign (total bollocks). Thankfully he was addressing me (because our steering wheel is on the ‘wrong’ side now he had approached the passenger window) and I pretended not to understand what he was saying. Vince also kept silent and hoped he wouldn’t query why a man with a French driving license couldn’t speak French! After repeating himself a few more times and us responding with blank expressions, he gave up and walked away.

The shambolic nature of our trip continued when we eventually reached the outskirts of Casablanca. This time it was my poor map reading skills (or the crappy map – the excuse I prefer!) that sent us way off course. We were hopelessly lost and overwhelmed by the size of the city and the lack of street names, so decided to ditch the car and take a taxi. It was now after 3pm. We scouted around for a landmark to leave the car by so we could find it again later and found a large hospital. After questioning a local we wrote down the name of the hospital and the suburb we were in and grabbed a cab. The cabbie’s eyes widened when we showed him where we wanted to go – we were nowhere near where we thought we were and it was a long way to the store. However, after a few wrong turns we finally made it to the Apple repair shop by 4pm. They had been expecting us but as it was now so late the guy said he couldn’t have the hard-drive replaced until the following morning. We had nowhere to stay and needed to be back in Fes for appointments early in the morning. In despair I laid my head in my hands on the counter and looked distraught. Vince hurriedly explained that we’d driven all the way from Fes, had a nightmare getting here and had to leave again that night. The combination of Vince’s begging and my feigned distress caused the guy to take pity on us and he relented. He promised the computer would be ready by 6.30pm.

Jubilant (and starving!) we headed to a restaurant on the corner and celebrated with caprese salad and pizza – both rarely found on menus in Fes. Sitting in that restaurant, surrounded by the traffic-packed streets of Casablanca and watching three trendily dressed youngsters – a girl and two guys socialising and flirting – at a neighbouring table, it seemed a whole world away from the traditional medina of Fes. With not a head scarf in sight, pizza on the table and members of the opposite sex socialising without chaperones it was a very different Morocco from the one we had experienced so far. The setting threw into sharp relief just how unique medina-life in Fes really is (I will talk about the experience of living in such a traditional society later).

The phone rang at 6.15pm – my lap-top was fixed and ready to be collected. When the guy demonstrated my Mac working again I was ridiculously happy. We headed back out onto the street and spent 30 minutes trying unsuccessfully to get a taxi – it was rush hour and the ‘Petit Taxis’ we did manage to flag down would not take us to our destination. We went back to the restaurant and asked the waiter to call us a cab, which he tried repeatedly with no avail. Eventually he drew us a map on a napkin and directed us to the nearest ‘Grande Taxi’ rank. Once there we hopefully approached the man in charge – it was now nearly 7.30pm. He also balked at the distance of our destination and suggested we ask a ‘Petit Taxi’. “But the Petit Taxis told us to get a Grande Taxi, and now you’re telling us to get a Petit!” I complained in my best French. “We have money, we know it’s far but we just need to get home please!” He went over to one of the cabs and had a long discussion, during which we silently pleaded with the God of Taxis to get us on our way. Finally he motioned us over and we got gratefully into the cab. “So, you know where we’re going?” Vince asked the driver. “No,” he replied, “I don’t know the hospital but I know the suburb. I’ll just ask someone when we get there.”

Too tired to care and just relieved to be going somewhere we sat back and watched him negotiate the hectic Casablanca traffic. We got stuck behind an accident for a while but eventually began to recognise some of the streets. “It’s definitely somewhere around here,” I said. Mr Cabbie pulled over to ask a passer-by for directions but after several minutes of head-scratching it appeared that he had never heard of the hospital. This started a pattern that was to be repeated for the next hour or so as we drove round and round in circles. “Hospital Moulay Rachid? I have no idea” was the common refrain. We must have asked about 15 people, including other cab drivers in the area, but the hospital no longer seemed to exist. Our cabbie resorted to doing lines of snuff from the back of his hand while driving as a way to quell his rising frustration.

Finally, miraculously, as we drove down yet another random street, the hospital appeared before us. Stressed to the gills but relieved to be close to escaping Casa, we gave the patient cab driver a hefty payment and limped back to our car. It was 9pm. It had taken us nearly three hours to find our way back to the car and we had a three hour drive ahead of us.
Thankfully the demon of lost drivers had finally tired of playing with us and we managed to get onto the highway home without drama. The rest of the trip passed fairly uneventfully (except that after filling up with petrol the station didn’t take foreign cards and Vince had to hike down the road with an orange-jumpsuited station attendant to the nearest Shell garage…) and we finally got home at 1am.
And maybe it was because we’d had such a hellish journey, or maybe it was because the contrast between Casablanca and Fes medina had been so marked, but when we wandered through the peaceful car-free streets of the medina back to our house, we both felt relieved and grateful to be able to call such a place home.  

Mac Meltdown, Darija and a Dinner Party

The week after Eid was a strange one, overshadowed by the meltdown of my lap-top. Nothing much could be achieved as many people were still on holiday until Wednesday – which was the day my hard-drive died, and after that I was preoccupied by the loss of my computer and also unable to achieve much without it. It wasn’t until the little machine stopped working that I realised how much I relied on it here. It was my connection to the outside world and information via the internet, it was the place where I did my writing, it was our office that contained notes on the research we were doing here, it was my photo album and where I worked on my pictures, it was my guitar lessons as the programme I was learning to play from was on it, it was my source of music as we didn’t have a stereo until our belongings were shipped, and it was our entertainment source for watching movies in the evenings.

Vincent had been playing chess on it when the computer froze and we had to shut it down manually. The next time I tried to start it up a blank screen appeared accompanied by a clicking sound, and then a folder with a question mark over it started flashing. I knew it was bad. The next day I spent hours in an internet café scanning Mac help sites and forums, and most reports of the flashing question mark sounded fatal. The other difficulty was that Macintosh is not widespread in Morocco and I didn’t know how to get it fixed.

By the time I got to my Darija class that afternoon I was distraught. I was so preoccupied that my brain was as shut-down as my hard-drive and I was completely unable to answer the teachers questions. Backed into a corner by her repeated questions that I could only respond to with a blank gaze, the feeling of frustration and humiliation pushed me over the edge. I fled from the room in tears mumbling apologies and saying “I’ve just had a REALLY bad day…” I abandoned the rest of the lesson and retreated home. That evening the thought of going back to class the next day made me so miserable that I wanted to quit the course altogether. However when Vince vocalised my thoughts by saying “why don’t you stop going if it’s causing you so much anxiety?” I resolved to continue, simply because I didn’t want to be a quitter.

Going back the next day felt like a real achievement – I had come very close to giving up but hadn’t done so. The clouds also cleared slightly on the computer front – a friend’s flatmate had previously worked for Apple in America and would take a look at my laptop. He also knew a place in Casablanca that did professional Mac repairs if necessary. His examination and attempts to repair my Macbook confirmed my worst fears however. The hard-drive was toast and I had lost weeks of writing and all of our photos from Spain. I had backed-up recently but not recently enough.

Now resigned to the loss I distracted myself with the preparations for our first dinner party. We had been settled into our rental house for a week and were embarking on a series of dinner parties designed to showcase what we do to build future support for our restaurant and also to get to know our new friends better.

We made a big expedition to Metro to get supplies – wine glasses, plates, napkins, candles, speakers for the iPod (because without the laptop we had no music), ramekins and baking equipment, wine and of course, food. We had planned to serve fish as the main course but being post-Eid (and fish days at the market were Tuesdays and Saturdays) we could not find fresh fish anywhere. The fish on display at Metro was the same as the week before and the smell coming from it was a red alert for major food poisoning. We bought frozen and hoped no-one would notice!

Vince spent most of the day cooking and after my morning classes I ran around making the house presentable, folding napkins, lighting candles etc.

[Earlier in the week we had hired our first ever cleaning girl, a local student who had been recommended by a friend. The experience was strange as we’d never had anyone do domestic work for us before and I felt uncomfortable watching someone do the menial tasks I normally did myself – we hired her simply because the house is big and time-consuming to clean, plus we could afford the luxury, but that was the part that was making me uneasy. I compensated for my discomfort by making her lunch when she’d finished and sitting on the roof terrace chatting. I guess by trying to make her feel like a friend I was attempting to make the job less about a status/money divide and more about her helping me out. I think being brought up in a society as classless as Australia makes the concept of paid ‘servants’ uncomfortable for me to deal with. Plus, having just spent the past two years waiting on and cleaning up after the super rich and knowing how that feels made me especially keen to try to make her an equal, not a ‘servant’.]

Anyway, the dinner party was a huge success. We served double-baked cheese soufflé with pear and walnut salad as the entrée, pan-seared grouper on a bed of confit fennel with a tomato, cucumber and coriander salsa and fresh peas and French beans as the main course and dark chocolate tart with vanilla ice-cream for dessert. The success of the evening was also due to the fantastic company and getting to know some of our new friends here just reaffirmed for us how lucky we are to have landed amongst such truly awesome people.