Success

Yesterday, we had our biggest day by far at the cooking school. The U.S. Embassy in our country brought in 12 people for a day to our city. We broke them into 2 groups to make things a little more manageable.

The first group of 6 stayed at the house to cook while the other group took a 2-hour tour around the city. Then we did the flip around 1pm and frantically cleaned all the dishes and reset-up the stations for the next group.

All in all, we had an excellent time filled with laughter, stories, GREAT FOOD (bell pepper salad, eggplant salad & chicken tajine with walnut-stuffed apricots) and then the inevitable HAIL STORM that lasted about 10 minutes. Being a former TOUR GUIDE myself, I was relieved to hear that the outdoor group at the time was in some horse stalls or graineries. But that just makes for better memories of the day. Whatever it takes for people to remember us, right? We're already in the works for a day in January to bring another group.

Life Stories

One of the great things about my business is the customer. In a country where "the customer is always wrong", it is very refreshing to do the opposite and treat every customer like they are the most important person to me. Since that never happens to me, it's great to do that for someone else. Go figure!

Every single person is unique and brings all sorts of experience and stories to the table. This is an excellent opportunity for Nisrine, our teacher, to learn various aspects of culture. At the same time, I try to get fun stories about life from each customer. We have definitely had some noteworthy ones in our first year. Here are only some of the backgrounds / stories that have come across our path:

Famous Neighbor - One gentleman I was talking with was describing life growing up in Alabama years ago. He told me that as a kid, he had a speech impediment, and he had to stay after school every day to read out loud to his English teacher. While he was reading, she was editing a book by his neighbor, Harper Lee, and that book was To Kill a Mockingbird.

Alligator Killer - For anyone that knows my family, my wife's mom found a 2-foot alligator in her yard one day. Instead of running away scared, she marched into her garage and found her shovel. She proceeded to beat the gator over the head until he died, then cut off the tail and invited her neighbors over for Fried Alligator Tail.

Our First European Crew - We have started venturing out from the United States and hosted our 4 ladies from Southern England for a week. They enjoyed staying in a riad (traditional home) and loved taking the cooking class. One major difference between the two cultures was the amount of salt that should be properly added to a dish. Moroccans love their salt while the English have an aversion to it. In the last few weeks, we have had guests from the Congo, China and Saudi Arabia.

Reality Show wannabe married to a famous voice - We were told a few weeks before this specific group came in that a professional cook was interested in taking a class. We did not tell Nisrine til after the class was over, and even then she was nervous. During the class, come to find out that she had auditioned for "Hell's Kitchen", a reality show that pits aspiring chefs against one another at the shot for management at an exclusive restuarant. She wasn't weird enough to make the cut. And her husband, he is the voice for the Country Music Awards and CNN commercials.

I have many more stories to tell, but the kids love waking up extra early on a Sunday morning to get their day started. Concentration gets lost and tasks are pushed aside til a later time.

Curve Balls

Just when you think that things are getting settled and the kinks are being removed, that preverbial "curve ball" always seems to get thrown. Why is that? Is it another test? Why can't things just stay easy for a little while? Let's get some experience with how things should be working instead of having to do new things and figure something else out.

I say this because our first 6 months as a business have got a lot better than we expected. We have taught about 17 classes and had a few groups stay in the guest house. We made it through our trial runs and are a legitimate business (with the exception of trying for our Guest House Authorization next week). So things have been going well. We will see how challenging it will be to get the authorization for the Guest House.

Having to always stay on your toes sure does make your calves tired after a while.

Waiting & Waiting & Waiting

I've come to realize that patience is an incredible virtue to possess and yet extremely hard to maintain. Trying to get things done and accomplished in life sometimes require relinquishing control for a bit. And with that relinquishment comes a reliance upon other people or things, and more specifically, their time frame.

Right now we are in a period of waiting for things to happen. For the last week, we have been waiting on our money from the States to make it past all the authorities and security checkpoints. But alas, it has finally arrived.

Not only were we waiting for the money, but we are also in a time period of waiting for: our Residency Card, the personal Cooking Stations, completion of the contract on the house and the family to move out, & something else very important that is currently slipping my mind.

The card will take however long it takes for the authorities to get around to it (since we aren't giving them a little something for "coffee".) The cooking stations will take almost 2 months, supposedly. The contract on the house will be finished sometime in the next 8-10 days. And the family will move out sometime in the next week or so.

We waited on pins and needles for the transfer of money from the States. It finally arrives and both the "notaire" and the owner of the house are either sick or really busy. They are in a hurry to finish things, yet now we get to wait until tomorrow morning to finalize everything.

All that to say, we get to keep learning the art of patience, control our breathing, and try as we might to keep the excitement of renovating a house and launching this business to a minimum. It sure is difficult to not keep dreaming about the possibilities and fall asleep within an hour every night.

But hopefully all will fall into place and Savor Morocco will be launched by it's scheduled time frame.

Oh yea! I remembered the other fairly important thing. It is my website for my business and my brochure (English & French translations). Those are the other projects I am waiting on. Lots of plates spinning at the same time.

Getting Started

Just want to start out by saying that this is the very first time that
I have ever "posted". It might take me a little while to get used to this.

The main reason that I have started this blog is so you can see the progress of Savor Morocco from the beginning. It is an exciting, yet very scary and frustrating thing to start a business in a foreign country. The language & cultural barriers are daily obstacles that must be overcome, and perseverance is one of the only things that will allow anyone in this situation to become successful.

In the days to come, I will document the creation of Savor Morocco, a cooking school for tourists that venture over to Morocco. For example, just yesterday we committed to purchasing a "dar kbira" (or large house) in the middle of the city. Instead of my white, foreign face looking at this place and wanting a deal, a "national" friend of mine found the house, did all the initial bargaining, and once he got down to the final "non-foreigner" price, I had a chance to see it. After 6 months of looking at houses (at least 30 different properties), my "national" friend found this place in about 24 hours. We committed to buy this 3-story, 2000-plus square foot house for a little over $40,000. Pretty good deal if you were to ask me.

Now we just have to wait for a few days until we get to close on this place. And unfortunately it is not a peaceful few days of waiting. In this country, people's "word" isn't "as strong as oak". We put down a 5% deposit and got a small contract written up and legalized. But that still doesn't mean that the owner won't sell it to someone else this weekend if they offer a better price. So we just wait and see if our 11am Monday morning meeting with a "notaire" will still happen. Gotta love it!