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!