Moving Forward in a Decidedly Moroccan Fashion (Part One)

Once we had decided on our engineer, architect and builder things started to move forward relatively quickly. Everything here takes far longer than you expect, mainly because of the bureaucracy involved. We met the architect and engineer recommended by our useful friends and over the course of a couple of weeks had some plans underway. The process is quite drawn out – first we met them both (separately, but the process is the same) at their offices in the new town to say that we were interested in their services, then we made another appointment to meet them at our house and explain what we wanted to do, then there was another meeting to get a quote for their services based on what they’d seen, then we had another meeting to let them know that we’d decided to employ them, then another meeting back at the house to discuss things further (and in the architect’s case to get some sketches and measurements) and so on.
At the moment we’ve managed to obtain the all-important ‘attestation de stabilite’ from our engineer, which after all the hype is simply a standard letter where he fills in your name and address and says the house won’t fall down. This letter, which you need to obtain your building permit, costs 3000dh/300 Euro. Ironically though, they can’t really tell the proper stability of the house until building work actually starts – once you start removing the plaster from the walls you can see where the cracks are and how bad (or good hopefully!) it really is. Our contract with the engineer also includes him making regular visits to the house during the build to check that things are being done correctly for the structure, and drawing up plans for the electricity and plumbing – but that comes later.
What we need the architect for is to draw up fairly straightforward plans and put together all the paperwork required to get the correct building permit. In order to do that he needs certified copies of our passports, copies of the house papers (known as the melkia), the plans from the topographer, the attestation de stabilite from the engineer and (this was the first we’d heard of it) something called an attestation fiscale.
We had already obtained the topography plans (surprisingly cheap and painless), the certified copies of the documents and the attestation from the engineer and happily handed them over at another meeting with our architect, thinking that we were almost done with the paperwork. After reading the attestation de stabilite though, it seemed there was a problem. “All this says is that the engineer will visit the house during the building work, it doesn’t say the house is stable,” he informed us.
Hmmm. We rang the engineer who was also perplexed (“but the document says it’s an attestation de stabilite” he insisted), but after getting him to speak directly to the architect they agreed on what had to be done.
We then arranged yet another meeting with the engineer and had to go back and get a new piece of paper with an extra sentence added, explicitly stating the house wouldn’t collapse.
Then there was the mysterious attestation fiscale (tax forms). “You just need to go down the road and get a form and sign it,” said the architect. Sounds simple right?
The office was closed at that moment as our meeting had been at the end of the day so we arranged to come back the next day, meet the architect and he would take us through it. He wasn’t there when we next turned up however, so his assistant drew us a map and off we went. After finally finding the right place we were confronted by two rooms, multiple desks, Arabic signs and crowds of people milling about in a disorganised queue. We loitered for a few minutes before Vince simply interrupted one of the paper pushers and asked where we could get the correct forms. Thank God we hadn’t ‘queued’ as the forms were not collected from their office, you had to get them from the tele-boutique (phone shop) across the road. Once we got there the only reason we could deduce for this randomness was that the shop had a photocopier so perhaps the office had sub-contracted out their forms. Anyway, we got the papers and headed back to the architect’s. He had arrived in the meantime and filled out the details for us (as the forms were in Arabic script and therefore unintelligible). He then offered to take us to a totally different office where the forms now had to be stamped. We had just got out the door when he said “you do have your passports don’t you?” Ah, no, no-one had mentioned that. “You have our certified copies, won’t they do?” I suggested. He thought it might be ok so we retrieved the copies and headed to this other municipal building. A couple of floors up was a similar scene to the previous place – lots of random desks and semi-queues. We waited for nearly 20 minutes only to be told (predictably) that we needed our original passports and the copies that had been certified in another of their municipal offices wouldn’t do.
We came back the next day, but the office was closed. And the next. After the weekend we finally had the forms stamped and headed back to the first office where we’d been originally sent to get the forms in the first place. Finally we were ready to get the elusive attestation fiscale. But no. We queued and were then informed that we needed to bring copies of the house papers as well. Which were back at home in the medina of course. (Every time we have to go to and from the Ville Nouvelle – where all the administration takes place – it takes around 45 minutes. The drive is only ten minutes but you then have to park on the medina outskirts and walk for a good ten minutes dodging pedestrians, donkeys and wheeled carts to get to the house, retrieve what you need and then repeat the process in reverse.)
We gave up for the day as we couldn’t face anymore. The next day we returned with all the documents and finally lodged the papers to obtain the attestation fiscale. It had only taken us a week and a half. Vince resolved “in future I’m going to carry around our whole filing cabinet just in case…”

What’s in a Name?

One of the important decisions we’ve had to make was choosing an accountant – in the beginning to help us set up a company and register our business name, and later on to manage our restaurant accounts.

There are two types of accountants here – accountants or expert accountants, so naturally you would think an expert accountant is the better option.

We’d had several recommendations from friends so began meeting these prospective accountants to see how they stacked up. Not having any experience in this field it was hard to tell who was good or not, so again we went on our impressions.

Together we met the first guy, an expert accountant who had been well recommended by a long-term resident of Fes. He seemed impressive, had all the right answers and a professional looking office. He also told us to be wary of many accountants here, who simply put up a plaque and practised accounting without any qualifications. He was well qualified himself, with a degree from France.

Vincent went to see the second candidate, a lady who had been suggested by a couple of people. She, however, was not an ‘expert’ and gave some conflicting answers to the first guy, contrary to the information we had from several sources. We wanted to know when we should set up our company, for tax reasons. She said it was better to do it sooner rather than later, but we’d heard it was better to wait so as not to waste the tax breaks given to new companies – as we wouldn’t be operating for another year.

Based on these impressions, we decided to go with the ‘expert’ guy and were on the verge of starting our business name registration process with him when a lucky intervention made us reconsider.

I was catching up with a friend and mentioned that we’d finally made a decision on our accountant. When I said who it was she paused and said “Hang on a second I think that’s the same guy that *** was using, and she’s just had some major problems with him, let me give her a ring to check.”

On the phone her suspicions were confirmed and she passed me over to our friend who quickly urged me “don’t touch that guy with a bargepole!” It turned out that she had followed the same recommendation we’d been given and had also been impressed with him at the beginning. However, once she had given him her accounts he had been impossible to get hold of and was never available. In the end she had had to force her way into his office to take back her paperwork. “You’d naturally think that the ‘experts’ are better,” she said, “but actually they are often dealing with very big companies accounts, so smaller businesses like ours fall by the wayside and get overlooked. The guy is a nightmare. *** recommended him to me as well, but he is not really business-minded – in future I’d only take his advice on tiling or plastering, not accounting.”

Saved just in time, we had to start the process again from scratch and again began visiting different accountants.

In the end we found a lady (who had also been recommended, but this time by someone who was running a restaurant) who seemed brilliant. She appeared very clued-up on the ins and outs of the Moroccan tax system and was very friendly and approachable, where the other guy had seemed a little arrogant. Most of our friends here actually prefer the female accountants as they’re les egotistical.

She has recommended that we set up our company later on, but ask our builder to make the invoices out to the (future) company so we can put the building expenses through the company and therefore claim back the TVA (20%).

We’ve since taken the first step towards setting up our company, which is registering the business name. You have to choose five options for a name, and then she takes the form to Rabat to see if any of the names are available. We wanted to call it Restaurant Faracha (the Arabic word for butterfly) because my name means butterfly and we’d come up with the name for the house two years earlier when we were signing the papers with the estate agent. Dar Faracha had a nice ring to it and the name had stuck, but we couldn’t call our business ‘Dar’ anything, as we weren’t a guesthouse, as the inclusion of ‘Dar’ in a business name implies. So, we wrote the name we wanted in five different variations eg: Faracha Restaurant, Restaurant L’Faracha etc. When we presented her with the form we were told that we had to write five completely different names, so had to think up four new options on the spot.

We Googled the word for butterfly in the languages that matched some of the cuisine we would serve and came up with Papillon, Mariposa and Farfalle. Farfalle sounded too much like the pasta shape and Papillion had too many connotations from the book and movie of the same name. We then looked up the names of different butterfly genus/species to see if anything jumped out (we’d taken over our accountants laptop while she patiently waited for us to make a decision). The genus Vanessa Cardui was called Painted Lady butterfly, which in French was known as La Belle Dame. We liked these name options so added them to the list. In the end we came up with Restaurant Faracha, Restaurant La Belle Dame, Restaurant Butterfly, Restaurant Mariposa and The Painted Lady Restaurant. We hoped for our first choice, but also quite liked La Belle Dame.

We were told it would take a week or so, but that we should have the reply by December 23rd, my birthday.

The day came and brought with it a very good birthday present – our original choice was available and so Restaurant Faracha was born.

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…