Walls Up and Walls Down (Feb/March)

A bathroom doorway unexpectedly appears...

Meanwhile, back at the house things were progressing rapidly. Our builder had blatantly ignored any restrictions of the V2 ‘simple permission’ and proceeded to knock walls down, change doorways and basically do all the major structural changes that were supposed to wait until we had the V1 permission.

One morning we’d arrived at the house to find a doorway knocked through to the bathroom, as we’d planned, to turn it into a dual-access ensuite.

“I thought we weren’t meant to make any alterations to the layout until we get the V1?” I said to Vincent.

“Err, no, we weren’t,” he replied and popped off to try and find our build manager. After speaking to him, we were reassured that the doorway wasn’t a problem because there had been a door there originally, but it had been bricked up later on.

This explanation was perhaps ok in that instance, but couldn’t be stretched to the other, more major structural jobs that followed. Our builder glossed it over however, saying that it wouldn’t be a problem, everyone did things this way and we’d have the appropriate paperwork eventually.

“But what about the building inspection the authorities have to do before we get the V1 paperwork?” I asked. “Surely they’ll notice that the layouts have changed – all they need to do is look at the original plans that our architect has drawn up.”

“Don’t worry,” said the builder, “I know people at the baladiya and when the time comes there won’t be a problem.”

“Fine,” I said, “but if there’s baksheesh that needs to be paid because of this, it’s coming out of your pocket not ours.”

The big changes were coming thick and fast: cracks repaired and some walls entirely rebuilt, doorways being opened out and turned into arches, floors/ceilings (depending on how you look at it) between levels being rebuilt and new wooden beams being put in, and, most excitingly, walls being completely removed and replaced with solid metal beams as horizontal support.

This was the most exciting because it totally changed the sense of space and suddenly let in so much more light.

We’ve done this in two places. Firstly, on the ground floor we’ve created an open kitchen in order to gain a valuable extra couple of metres and to make the kitchen activity a feature of the restaurant. Secondly, on the first floor we turned a narrow, non-functional corridor room into a balcony, which, when furnished with a bar and stool seating will create the perfect place to perch when dining solo or in twos and look directly into the kitchen action down below.

Creating the balcony has also brought in tons of light to the two dining rooms it joined – through the new, big archways, sunlight suddenly illuminated what had previously been dark corners.

We’ve also decided that the balcony is the ideal spot for leaving the brickwork exposed, thus creating another feature. (An experienced medina renovator friend has assured us that he knows how to properly seal the wall so the lime and sand mortar doesn’t crumble).

These major changes had really made us appreciate the value of our engineer, who had been visiting the site twice a week to supervise the work. It was he who ensured that two metal beams were used to take the load when removing the walls instead of just one, and he was currently monitoring the new cracks that kept appearing in the walls of the dodgy top level.

It was becoming more and more apparent that this level had been hastily and cheaply added on at some point and a lot of rebuilding was necessary. Unfortunately, modern, hollow bricks had been stuck on top of the properly built walls, and then concrete poured onto thin metal beams to make the roof. The drainage from the flat roof hadn’t been done properly and so rainwater had rotted the concrete and rusted the beams through. So, as the walls were being repaired on the floors below, the house had begun to shift, causing bigger and bigger cracks to split apart the shoddy brickwork. We were going to have to remove the top metre and a half of all the walls and rebuild them using proper bricks, and then redo the whole terrace/roof. For the moment though, the builders had slapped a bit of plaster over the new cracks and our engineer said it wasn’t in any danger of collapsing. Phew! That would have been a few too many walls coming down for our liking…

Rebuilding a wall on the first level.

The wall almost rebuilt and our builder's novel scaffolding through the walls.

The blue wall, just before its destruction...

Let there be light! The balcony is created.

Opening up the kitchen and repairing the upper wall - the floor in-between obviously needs replacing!

Metal beams in and second level kitchen wall fixed.

Customs – Part Two (Feb)

We arrived back home at around midnight and collapsed into bed, only to have to roll out of it again not many hours later. Back in the train station once more we had an eerie feeling of déjà vu.

“Weren’t we here at exactly the same time, embarking on exactly the same journey only yesterday?”

Yep. Unfortunately so. Only this time we were armed with every possible piece of paper we could find. As Vincent had commented yesterday: “In future, when dealing with bureaucracy in this country, we need to travel with our filing cabinet.” Wise words indeed.

The morning went much more smoothly as we knew exactly where to go this time – bypassing the obnoxious lady at the office, we headed straight for customs at the warehouse.

After waiting for 20 minutes the chief customs guy appeared back at his porta-cabin and glanced over the new papers we presented. Everything seemed to be in order this time – job done? No chance.

Next it was back onto the office merry-go-round. We were pointed in the direction of yet another bureaucrat on the same site, who ignored us for 15 minutes before deigning to stamp the relevant piece of paper, enter the details into his ledger and send us back to porta-cabin number one. By this time though, everyone had left for lunch.

With nothing left to do but get lunch ourselves, we asked a security guy if there was anywhere to eat around here. Sure, he told us, just down the road. Foolishly or optimistically – you decide – we followed his directions and set off on foot. Once more, after 15 minutes of walking along the same dusty industrial road we were no closer to anywhere that looked like lunch. We gave up more quickly this time and hailed a Grand Taxi (these are beaten up old Mercedes that pick up and drop off people randomly and manage to squeeze seven people in at a time – very interesting when you’re tucked in with a big sweaty mamma in a synthetic leopard-print djellaba) and headed to a restaurant we’d spotted earlier.

Back at the site, and everyone back on duty, we carried on with the ritual to and fro and finally were standing in the TST warehouse, uniformed customs guys at the ready, correctly stamped papers in hand, and a fork lift truck headed towards us carrying a pallet with all our worldly belongings on it.

Deposited at our feet, the customs guys handed us cutters and motioned for us to start peeling through the layers of shrink-wrapped plastic and bubble wrap that swaddled our boxes like an Egyptian mummy. Apparently we had to open it in case we’d rigged it with explosives or something. The uniforms descended, picking boxes at random for us to open – although it quickly became apparent that they were fixated on books. “Books? Books? Which ones with books?” was the incessantly repeated question. They also wanted to know if we had any maps, especially maps of Morocco. “No, the only Moroccan map we have is back in our car in Fes,” I told one eager young inspector. “Can you show me?” he said. “Uh, no, like I said, it’s in Fes,” I insisted, inwardly groaning at the prospect of having to go back and fetch it – fortunately he’d moved on. He’d discovered copies of the newspaper and magazines I used to work for back in Australia and got very excited when I pointed to the by-line on the front page and said that was me. Off he went, round his colleagues, showing everyone. From then on it seemed like they were just being nosey, asking to see our wedding photos and so on.

Finally, with no illicit political or religious books being discovered, they started to pack everything back up. Concerned at the haphazard way our previously beautifully wrapped cargo was being repackaged, we took photos for insurance purposes, mindful of the fact the boxes still had to journey to Fes before making it undamaged.

With the inventory checker satisfied and correct signatures and stamps obtained we headed back to chief customs guy in porta-cabin one for the final sign-off. He looked over our papers again, scratched his head, and checked again. Hmmm.

“You don’t have your carte de sejour?” he said. “Not yet,” Vince replied, “we haven’t started the application process yet.”

Hmmm. “And do you have a letter from customs in England saying that you have officially left the country?” he asked.

“Err, no.” This was the first we’d heard of this new, apparently critical piece of paper.

He picked up the phone and dialled, presumably to ask a higher power what to do. Vince and I looked at each other resignedly and waited to hear our fate.

Shaking his head, sympathetic chief customs guy hung up the phone and cleared his throat. “I will have to write a letter to Rabat,” he said. “Because you do not have the correct papers, customs in Rabat will need to consider whether to release the goods,” he continued.

“This will take about a week, insh’allah, and then you need to come back to Casablanca.”

Silently taking in this new bombshell, Vince paused before translating this latest exchange for me.

I didn’t explode however. Somewhere along the line during this ridiculous debacle I had given up caring for the time being. I felt that it would work out somehow, my only concern was the mounting storage charges that would continue to accumulate while letters went back and forth between Rabat and Casablanca.

We shrugged, thanked the man for his time and prepared ourselves for yet another four-hour train journey home.

Post Script:

I wrote a letter of complaint to our moving company about TST’s incompetence in Casablanca, which was taken up by Vanguard – the shipping line – and battled out on my behalf. Fortunately the British side of the company was able to see reason and offered to pay our storage fees to date as compensation.

In the meantime, customs mysteriously decided to release our belongings with no further paperwork. Vince made the third journey to Casa alone and after paying customs 3000dh in ‘taxes’ and TST’s 1600dh storage fees our boxes were finally on the way to Fes.

They arrived the next day and were carried through the winding medina streets by a team of sweating carrosers (guys with two-wheeled trolleys). It was with great excitement that we unpacked some of our things, finding stuff that we hadn’t seen in several years since leaving Australia.

However we waited and waited and waited for the promised reimbursement of the storage fees until finally in May I emailed the shipping line directly.

The good old British side again got involved and TST responded by saying: “Mrs Bonnin must present herself at our office in Casablanca in order to receive the cheque” !!!

You can imagine how unimpressed I was upon hearing I had to travel to Casa again in order to be compensated for being made to travel to Casa…

This was my email response:

Dear Amal,

Unfortunately I never received the emails asking me to collect the cheque, thank you for your persistence.

However, asking me to travel yet again from Fes to Casablanca (a four hour train journey) to collect the reimbursement that was offered because of TST's original incompetence - which resulted in us having to travel to Casablanca three times at great inconvenience - is a joke I'm afraid. Morocco has a very good postal system. Please use it. Our current address is….If you require a receipt, I will be happy to send you one, also by post.

Could you also ensure this is taken care of this week, as I am going away for the summer and would like the matter resolved before I leave.

This was sent May 27^th. Unsurprisingly no cheque arrived before we left on June 8^th and I’ve received no further response. Rest assured though, I will resume correspondence once we get back in September…I’ll keep you posted! 

Customary Cock-ups (Feb)

Apologies to all for the long silence on the blog and thanks to those who have kept prodding me to get back to it. Without going into detail about the reasons why, I have been going through huge upheavals (which I suppose comes with the territory when you relocate countries and take on new projects) which have occupied my head-space so completely that I’ve been unable to write. This has been hugely frustrating for me personally as well as a lot of you who have been pestering me for new updates!

Anyway, suffice to say that the dust has settled somewhat and I’m finally feeling able to commence writing again, albeit being quite daunted about how much I have to fill you in on to bring things up-to-date…

Where to start? Where I left off I guess would be logical, but it’s hard to get my brain to focus on the events of five months ago when so much else has happened in-between. However the story has been linear so far, so despite being tempted to tell you the latest news immediately I feel I should keep the flow going (and hopefully some suspense) and try to retell things in the order they happened.

So. We had just got back from our wonderful break by the sea in Asilah when I received an email informing us that our belongings – which were being shipped from England – had arrived in Casablanca.

We had been waiting endlessly for this moment as we’d expected our boxes to arrive before Christmas (and had been especially missing our cosy dressing gowns for the morning dash to the bathroom in the freezing cold!) but due to Christmas shipping congestion (?) they weren’t due to arrive until February 3^rd. Our delight at the shipment arriving a week earlier than this was short-lived however, as the attached invoice was the first of many cock-ups that ensued.

We’d been warned by other Brits who’d shipped goods that getting your stuff from Casablanca was a drama, but while hearing these stories we had felt secure because we’d organised (and paid for) our company to deliver directly to Fes.

The company on the Moroccan end had forgotten/ignored this fact and sent us an invoice for delivering our goods to Fes (among other random incomprehensible charges) that totalled nearly 7000dh. Unimpressed I fired off an email to our British delivery company and asked them to intervene and get the invoice amended as we’d already paid for delivery. A few days later an amended bill arrived for 4400dh, which apparently covered administration, taxes and sundries.

We then phoned the company in Casa and asked what was required to get our goods released. We were told that we needed to bring our passports and the payment for their invoice to an office in Casa – it was not ok to simply put a cheque in the post. We had been hoping to avoid another trip to Casa after the last time and had believed our stuff would be delivered to Fes without us having to go there, but apparently not.

Resigned to another long journey, we bought train tickets for Vincent’s next day off (in three days time) as there was no way we wanted to attempt driving in Casablanca again.

A very early Monday morning on Feb 1^st, we blearily settled in for a four-hour train trip. Upon arrival it took us a while to located the office (Vince had written down the wrong phone number and after struggling to get directions for a full five minutes over the phone on a noisy street finally twigged he was talking to a completely unrelated company…) but we finally made it around lunch-time.

After demanding a full explanation of all the charges we handed over our passports, paid the invoice and thought we were done. But the fun had only just started. We were then told that we had to take the receipt to the company’s other office in the shipping yard “just down the road”. “Is it walking distance?” we asked and were assured it was only ten minutes by foot.

Twenty minutes later we were still tramping along a dusty, dirty highway with trucks belching exhaust fumes in our faces, wind whipping grit into our eyes and every blaring horn slowly eroding our nerves, and the shipping yard was still nowhere in sight. We twice asked people for directions and were told we were going the right way so persevered. However with empty stomachs growling and the fatigue building from the early start to the day we eventually gave up and finally managed to hail a taxi. Thank God we did because the place was another ten minutes by car. Despite cursing the stupid woman who had told us to walk we tried to calm ourselves in readiness for the next inevitable obstacle.

Sure enough, after speaking to the man in the depot the second major cock-up (not counting the ‘walking distance’ rubbish) was revealed.

“Where is your inventory?” asked the man. “Umm, we have a copy back in Fes but it was also given to the shipping company in England.” Ok. “And your carte de sejour?” “We don’t have one yet.” “House papers then?” “Back in Fes.” “Business registration papers?” “Not yet.” The list of paperwork required to clear our goods through customs had suddenly grown from simply passports and a cheque book to every official document they could think of.

“Tell him we already asked their office what we needed and none of this was mentioned – this is their fault and they need to sort it out,” I seethed to Vince.

The man just shrugged and said we could go to the customs office and explain, maybe it would be ok.

Thankfully this other office was just across the yard. We located the right person after fighting through crowds of men brandishing sheaves of papers surrounding a cluster of demountables.

We explained our situation (we’ve come all the way from Fes, the shipping company neglected to tell us about these other documents, can we just fax or send them to you etc) to the customs man in charge, who although sympathetic was unable to help. The reality of what we had to do next began to dawn. We would have to go back to Fes, collect all the appropriate papers and turn around and catch the train all the way back to Casablanca again the very next day. Before we left the customs office though, we made them write down every single piece of paper we would need to bring and made them check it twice.

By now we were furious. The whole arduous journey had been a total waste of time and money and despite being ravenous, tired and dehydrated we caught a cab straight back to the shipping company’s office in town to demand some recompense.

After hearing our complaint the girl at the desk palmed us off onto her manager. “Your company has been grossly incompetent and completely unprofessional,” I ranted. “At no time in any of our correspondence or phone calls was this list of documents mentioned and your ineptitude has wasted our time and money. We now have to go back to Fes and then return to Casablanca tomorrow to sort this out. The least you can now do is pay for our train tickets as an acknowledgement of your mistake.”

The lady manager picked up her phone and spoke to her colleague who had corresponded with us.

“She says you did not ask about these documents,” she retorted. “It is not our fault, we deal with hundreds of shipments and it’s not our responsibility to tell everyone what they need to bring.”

“I DID ask what we needed and your company did not do their job,” I insisted.

“Well, you obviously didn’t ask exactly the right question,” she said.

Unbelievable. Then to add insult to injury she turned around and said “oh, and by the way, you need to pay us storage charges from when the shipment arrived until it is delivered to Fes.”

WHAT? Not only would they not admit their mistake and reimburse us for our trouble, they now wanted us to pay more money for charges we had not been informed about until that moment.

Added to that the goods had been due to arrive on Feb 3^rd; secondly, they hadn’t contacted me immediately; and thirdly, no mention had been made of these storage charges in their emails to me should we have been unable to get there straight away – which we couldn’t as, like most people, we weren’t able to drop everything and travel for miles across the country at the drop of a hat.

The conversation was clearly going nowhere however, so we resolved to contact a higher authority later on. Temporarily defeated, we dragged ourselves back to the train station – via a sandwich shop, fried prawn baguettes were not top of my culinary choices by but this stage anything would do – and began the long journey back to Fes.