El Andalous - All Change!

El Andalous - Rooftop Pool in Use

El Andalous is really more than a block of flats; it’s a small community. At least, in my time here, it’s been a small community, although I think this partly came about due to the water and electricity being cut off (see blog 2013, September, Flashback - What Could Go Wrong?). This action brought all the owners together to discuss how to proceed and we’ve stayed together ever since. I’ve been lucky, because I haven’t known it to be any other way.

It’s all a bit of a long story, but many owners weren’t paying maintenance because they felt the standards here were unsatisfactory given the amount charged for upkeep. Finally, we got together as a group, and tried to negotiate in a friendly manner, and to date this has achieved some success. I’m not a negotiator and I’m also not someone who really notices dirt or who worries about noise (although the rats were a problem!), so I let others handle that aspect of things while I report back to everyone as to what’s happening via the newsletter. It’s always best to play to your strengths!

We also meet every week to get to know each other and to let people voice any issues that they have. This has had the bonus effect of people now feeling they belong here more and that it’s a community of friends rather than of strangers. We are now also the envy of the other two beachfront apartment blocks who are not so organised (yet).

Of course, we are in a way just a random bunch of people thrown together and, of course, there are differences of opinion and differences of culture (predominantly UK and Russia, but some other Europeans and some Egyptians, too). We’ve learned how to communicate with each other, hunted out the few people who can speak both English and Russian (all Russians or Eastern bloc, of course, thus confirming the prejudice that the British are lazy with languages!), and come to understand why others have the concerns they do.

This time of year is always a bit sensitive because the next year’s maintenance is approaching and there’s usually growing unrest about how satisfactory the services are. This then calls for a new set of negotiations about what should be achieved.

Anyway, thanks to our negotiators, we’ve now got several improvements at El Andalous. We now have a gold and silver membership system, allowing benefits such as discounts at our local restaurant, use of an additional beach, etc. The hope is that the benefits will grow over time; getting the membership system started was a major hurdle overcome.

We also got agreement to have the use of the heated rooftop pool. The pool had already been there for a while, but we weren’t allowed to use it and it was rumoured to be earmarked for the use of the building company’s benefit only. Anyway, loungers were provided, we’re now in, and people have been using it. We still need additional furniture (bins, parasols, etc) and it turned out not to be heated yet due to a missing part (the heater?), so we continue to push for this.

Another huge benefit was a weekly bus to the shopping mall for a fee of 5 LE return per person. It’s a little minibus that holds 9 people plus shopping, leaves at 7pm on Monday and returns at 9pm. Given that a taxi is 60 LE return, it’s a great plus.

We were also supposed to be having a security gate installed, but this seems to have got a bit lost in translation somewhere, but we’re still pushing at the moment.

In addition, we were provided the services of a professional trainer to bring the cleaning standards at the complex up to scratch and to train the management here. This is still in progress, but we have high hopes.

In some ways, it all seems a bit surreal to me, as if I’m playing a part in some kind of reality-TV show where they thrust people together and they have to organise themselves; a TV set where some people will find one thing a huge issue that others just don’t understand, and vice versa. But, at the end of the day, surprisingly, we actually do all get on pretty well and manage to reach a pretty broad agreement.

Certainly, since I’ve been here, there have been many new things that have improved my life here (the beach being the main one, and I wasn’t even particularly fussed about having our own private beach originally!). Bit by bit, we really are moving forward.