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.

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.