Old School

The hotel industry is working hard at the moment to develop new and better room keys; multi functional ones, or even making them disappear completely, having you open your door with your smart phone.

The scariest thing I heard about was the RFID-enabled loyalty cards that can be used as keys. At Hyatt, they use the RFID key-card information to track guest's arrivals; When travelers first use their permanent key upon arrival, for example in the elevator, a message pops up on the front desk computers letting Reception know the guest has arrived in the hotel. A few minutes later, Reception calls up the guest room to welcome him or her to the hotel.

If that happened to me, I would freak out (first time at least), but at the same time I must admit, I find it really interesting.

However, here at Riad Flam, we still use our regular... well, keys. I guess it's already classified as "Old school".^^

Today's work

For the past time I've been working on a Room Directory for the riad, and today I finally finished the French part.
I made all pages in Photoshop, and discovered too late that it would have been easier to do this in InDesign, since when starting out I didn't know how to use either of them.
So the result won't be perfect, but then again, this is a guest house and I think it looks good enough, doesn't it?

Here are some page samples, I couldn't put out all of the pages.

Since we won't be printing them before summer ends, please feel free to give me feed back, I'd really appreciate it!^^

Baby bamboos

It's that time of year again, when it feel like everything living around here multiply. Last year we had both baby parrots, tons of kittens, babies and giant bamboo sprouts.
Have you ever seen giant bamboo grow? It grows about 20 cm in one night, and it feel like they're never going to stop. So after last year's invasion, we decided to keep the sprouting on a minimum level this year. Well guess what I just saw; almost 10 new sprouts!

The funny thing about bamboos is that when they're growing, they look like a pole just coming out of the ground, and they never make any leaves before they've stopped at their final height (more than 10m) and then they start to create leaves, but from the top and down. I'll try and get you a photo if we let any of them grow this year.

Back to work

First day back at work today. I must admit it could be worse!^^

Well I better get going.

Spa Flam's new menu

Here we are, the first project of this year is completed! I'm happy to introduce Spa Flam's new selection of treatments.

Hopefully we'll get them printed and ready in a week or so. But now it's time for me to crash into my bed!

Un déjeuner à Marrakech

Had a delicious lunch today at "Un déjeuner à Marrakech"; Club Sandwich, Cesar Salad, Japanese screwers and Hamburgers... yum!

I'm more than proud to working with them!

Green hands

Since it's been nice and calm at the riad today, Khalid is taking care of the plants, giving them a bath.^^

New name badges

Just a quick photo to show off our new name badges... really nothing special it's just because we are obliged to have them.

Peachy, huh?^^

Latest edition of "Couleurs Maroc"

Went for a tasting at Dino yesterday, and returned with the latest edition of "Couleurs Maroc" that just got out.

Here's our 2 page advertisement of this last edition.. it's beautiful no?

 Graphics made by Couleurs.com

Fruity Break

Steve and I have been experimenting in the kitchen today to spice up our fruit plates for breakfast... had a lot of fun, and a lot of fruits!^^

Here's the result, for our winter season.

Apple and strawberries

Kiwis and strawberries

Bananas and kiwi

Orange and strawberries

Like them?

MobileMe... KillMe

I was supposed to make a cd with photos for an agency last night, but since my MobilMe account has been bugging these last months...! I had to make sure I managed to download ALL my files put up on MobileMe before being able to make my cd... I have set up so many things to make sur I can work from where ever, when ever, ever tried "logmein.com"? It's a funny software letting you access your computer from anywhere you wish... the only thing is, in order to download everything I had to download and then to access the computer from home I needed the computer at work to be up and running with a good internet access all night... Of course someone shut down the computer for the night, and when I woke up this morning only to arrange the cd... nothing was downloaded and I couldn't access the computer!!! *aarrgh*

So the rest of the day I've been spending trying to use the MobileMe without downloading all the files I needed (this i possible but very slow)... to make a story short, I've been watching this:


ALL DAY LONG!!!!

I'm so fed up with MobileMe, I really need something else to make this work properly or I'll go mad soon!

Killer Receptionist team

I've showed you before my killer team of receptionists, Bodil having a serious drink during work hours, and Flam hiding in the trash...

well put the two of them together and this is how serious things get in the Flam Reception.

God, I love my job!^^

Hicham Poppins?

Had to share this moment with you all, I had totally forgotten about this photo.

A couple of weeks ago I came to the Riad to work and walked in on Hicham trying to... well at first sight it looked like he was trying a bad form of suicide, than at a second look it reminded me of the Mary Poppins movie when she flies away with her umbrella.

Poor Hicham was just trying to clean out our bamboos and avoid getting crap on his head!^^

New receptionist?

Going from one new receptionist having a drink on duty, I just found a new candidate...

I'm starting to understand the real meaning with having problems finding good staff!

Scandinavian touch

As I've already said the airline Norwegian.no will start direct flights from Stockholm and Copenhaguen to Marrakesh in November, and I just got our first booking thanks to that!^^

I just received a booking from Sweden flying down in November...
Get ready Marrakesh, the Scandinavians are coming...

To book your next flight

New look

I have been thinking, and have decided to change the look of my blog, however I still don't know what to do about it, and to be honest I'm probably one of the worst persons ever having had the guts to try and use Photoshop, so I warn you all, it might take some time, but I hope to get a nice result someday.Now should you have any nice ideas, please let me know... I could really need some help around here.

And by the way I just realized I have totally forgotten to show you by Bar Menu that I was working on in Photoshop. It's nothing complicated, but I'm proud of myself... see for yourselves!^^

Well this would be the inside... Oh and by the way I dearly recommend the "Croque Monsieur", it's just wonderful!^

Pleased to introduce my life

I started this blog in the hope of creating some kind of sneak off in my daily life, and to be honest I haven't been that efficient telling you all my story from Marrakech since I got back from my holidays in Vietnam.

So I decided I should take it from the top, since most of my life these past 2 years in Marrakech, have been about my work and how to build up a Riad business.

Therefore I'm happy to introduce you to the Riad Flam where I spend most of my waken hours, and have been for the last 2 years.

At the moment, I'm helping Bodil getting into the Riad Flam habits, since she will be assisting me at reception, and I must admit she is working hard, especially trying to learn French!

So from now on, in order to REALLY tell you my story, a lot of my writing will be about my work and I'll try and sneak off now and days to let you get a feel of Marrakech.^^

Oh, just a teaser to give you an idea of where I spend my time.

New recruit

First day at work for my new recruit here at Riad Flam; Bodil... Working hard.^^

Birthday party

Yesterday was a rather nice and quite day... I actually slept until 14:00!^^
Last weeks have been very busy and I haven't got the time to write about anything, only work work work, so it was a nice break and a good opportunity to take up blogging since yesterday was Flam's birthday!


So we had some cake (brought by Naïma), together with some of our guests. Flam was in a hurry to dig into the cake and couldn't wait for us to finish our meal before bringing out the cake. So no surprise and she even put the candels in herself!^^


And in the background a beautiful bouquet was lit up by the fountain.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FLAM!!

A whole new world

We have decided to remake our bar menus at the riad, and today I sat down with Steve trying to figure out how to work Adobe Photoshop... without tutorial.

I must admit, I felt like an alien in a whole new world, trying to figure out how to make a straight line in black... in the end I decided it would be easier just drawing the line (1 pixel wide) with the pencil function...

And for all of you wondering what the result is; we haven't finished it yet! (yes, the line is drawn).

You'll see final result tomorrow, hopefully.^