Day 24: Heating and washing

Since Jaime and Tom left it has been very quiet around here. My days are spent getting life back to normal and once again enjoying the solitude of the natural life after all our frenetic activity over those fun five days.

Friday morning brings with it beautiful sunshine once again after the torrential rain of yesterday. Mart is working so, difficult as it is, I occupy my time with cleaning, tidying and relaxing reading my latest novel, Jodi Picoult's 'Keeping Faith' - outside sitting in the deckchair with a beer of course! This really is a life I could get used to :-)

Me basking in the sunshine

Beautiful roses from the rose market

Saturday dawns - and with it appears a plumber! We've been told that there is underfloor heating throughout the house, but despite trying all the various switches in the boiler room we still cannot get any warmth into the house. Obviously we don't need it at the moment, but temperatures fall and rise dramatically here - even day to day at this time of the year, so we want to suss out the system before temperatures plunge. Much to our amusement the plumber is a young guy who arrives dressed in a long stripey djellabah and sandals, along with another even younger lad who must be his apprentice. They do not speak a word of English so we make ourselves understood using signs and enlist the help of Said, the guardien, who is only too willing to help translate. This is the same plumber who installed the underfloor heating - however, he's forgotten which switches connect to each room, so it becomes a trial and error process, testing over the next few days which rooms heat and which don't when the different switches are flicked. I have a feeling this may take some time to get right! Not to mention that the sun is now so strong that the rooms are all hot anyway. This does not stop all the men strolling around the house every hour or so, touching various floors to test the temperatures. By the end of Saturday I've had enough...little do I know at this point that the same will happen for the next few days at least....

View from the roof terrace

So excited today, Sunday...Mike, the owner of the house, has told us to go and buy a proper washing machine! Probably not that exciting to you, but when you've struggled to wash towels and sheets in a broken twin tub without a working spinner, and had to manually wring the said items out by hand, even though they're not as clean as they should be (because the machine makes them dirtier than when they first went into it!), then you too would be excited at the prospect of a new machine! Mike is sending a man named Brahim to meet us at Marjane store in Marrakech who will help us with the transaction; it is highly unlikely that the store staff will speak English, and maybe not French either, so we are grateful for this help. Brahim arrives at 6pm exactly as arranged, and within 10 minutes we have bought our new Electrolux machine with a complimentary large box of Ariel!! We're not quite sure what is happening, but Brahim is on the phone to someone and we can make out that he's giving directions to someone else - five minutes later, the plumber from the house arrives, and the men load the washing machine into his small car whilst I clutch the box of Ariel. Tomorrow, we ascertain, he will bring the washing machine to the house and fit it for us. They don't hang around here like they often do in the UK...'no madam, you can't take it now, we'll deliver it in six weeks' sort of rubbish. So with the promise that by midday on Monday I will have a brand new washing machine, Mart and I head off for a celebratory McDonalds...Happy Days!

My new washing machine

New and old machine together

Sure enough, the washing machine is in full working order by Monday evening - not midday quite, but then this is Moroccan time! The only sad thing is that now I can't do washing with a view - but I think I'll get over that. This whole episode makes me think about how easy we have it in the UK - everything is so sanitised - even the chore of washing is so simple in comparison. We have pipes for the water already installed in the machine, a dispenser for soap which the running water takes with it into the heart of the clothing and another dispenser for special liquid to make our clothes soft, a rinsing and spinning action follows which takes all the work away from us. I don't think I'll ever look at washing as a chore again after my experience here.
A friend directed us to this link which we found quite interesting - take a look if you have a few minutes to spare        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w

Washing drying nicely in the sunshine

Tuesday arrives - and four wash loads later I sit down to continue reading my book...