Tunisia - The last few days

I’ve just finished two months in Tunisia and I’m flying home on Air France. I’ve got a lot to say. More than I can possibly write. But I have a few things I’d like to talk about because they’ve been on my list for a while.

The first one is safety. I’ve been sort of pondering this because it is one of those big things that are so misunderstood by people at home. Of course moving to Tunisia (and traveling in Egypt earlier this summer) there were a lot of people who were worried about my safety. Let me just say this. I feel much safer in North Africa than I ever do in most large American cities. And I’m not alone. I know quite a few people who agree with me on this. Terrorism gets dragged into everything because of the nature of the world we live in today. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about walking down the street and being worried about getting mugged.

There is something cultural about Arab or Muslim countries that makes me feel much safer than I ever do at home. It’s hard to describe but I think it all goes back to the way the culture places such a high value on guests. I don’t feel threatened in the streets even at three in the morning because crime just doesn’t exist in the same way it does at home. Whereas in New York you have to worry about being mugged or stabbed or shot, there isn’t violent crime here. If anything, there’s a little robbery of tourists, but only in extreme cases. I don’t even think that it would occur to Tunisians as a possibility because it is such a foreign concept. It’s just something cultural.

Something else I’ve wanted to mention for a few days now is the food situation. I love the food. Tunisia has got to have the best food in the world besides Mexico. I love everything that we ate while we were there. There was only one exception to the food situation being great. Breakfast. My idea of breakfast is so Americanized at this point in my life that I just cannot be happy with anything else. I can make do, no doubt, but let me just say this, American’s know how to eat breakfast. I miss pancakes and waffles and sausage and bacon and eggs and cereal. I could go on but you get the point, I’m not satisfied with a little bread and yogurt. That doesn’t cut it. I miss a real breakfast once in awhile.

The second thing on this topic is sauce. America does sauces. I don’t understand the rest of the world’s disdain for ketchup and barbeque and ranch. I live on those three things and could put at least one of them on just about any meal I eat. The problem though, is that no one else in the world does this. I guess it’s less of an observation about Tunisia than it is about home. So let’s get back to Tunisia. Everything here can be eaten with bread. Which I love. I eat at least a baguette a day, sometimes two. I eat bread for every meal and in between. Tunisian food can either be eaten with a spoon or bread and I love it. It’s just the right amount of spicy, not too overpowering yet just enough to give it a bite. And the spices are always perfectly combined. I like the salads and light summer food. I like the sandwiches and tuna and harisa.

One thing I don’t like about Tunisian dining is the water situation. Whereas at home we are used to water being free everywhere, in Tunisia that is definitely a foreign concept. You can expect to pay for water everywhere you go. Which I’m a little bitter about. I’d like to live thank you very much. It doesn’t have to be bottled or anything, just give me a glass of tap water. That’d be sufficient. I’m not picky or anything, I just want to not dehydrate in the sun.

Okay, next couple things to mention. Washing the street. What is it with Tunisians watering their front steps and the street out front. They just soak it and then sweep the dirt away. So it can dry and blow right back in front of their shops. It’s a complete waste of time and water. The streets are full of dirt, pushing more into them and isn’t going to solve the problem caused by the wind and dust. Dust accumulates like crazy here because of the desert. We can sweep the steps one day, and within two or three they’re covered again and we have to go back and do it all over.

Taxis are also an interesting situation. Here, they are very sensitive about slamming the door. And I’m not talking about throwing it that hard. Just at all. They are very sure it’s going to destroy their entire car if you close the door with any force more than that of a five year old. Gotta be a cultural thing. They are however very polite and easy to deal with in comparison to taxis anywhere else in the world.

Which leads me into my final points. These are by no means the last thoughts that I’ll have on Tunisia, but they are some of the major ones that I think about everyday. I love Tunisia and would happily stay forever. I think it is one of the best countries in the world. The people are what really make it. They have a great attitude about life. They enjoy their lives and each other’s company. They’re optimistic and hard working. They know how to live life in a way that I think is admirable. I don’t think that I’ve been anywhere else besides Costa Rica or Barbados where the people have been this wonderful.

The next thing the country has going for it is the best geography anywhere besides Croatia (sorry Tunisia, I just love the mountains that drop into the water and lavender and olives that cover them all). What a beautiful and varied place. Deserts in the south, mountains in the north, and beaches all around. The weather is always perfect and the sun is always shining. How could you not be happy about that?

Along with the food those are my favorite parts about this place. I’m going to miss it and I’m sad I couldn’t stay longer. I will most definitely be back to visit because I am that jealous of the people that get to live here their whole lives.

Carthage through a lens.

Tunisia-Trip to Tabarka & Dougga

This weekend we took our third and final trip here in Tunisia. I know that I never wrote about the last trip but there wasn’t really that much to tell. We saw the coliseum at Djem, which is the second biggest in the world, smaller than only the one in Rome. We hung out on the coast for a bit, spent a night in a great hotel, and went parasailing the next day.

On this trip, there are a couple of things that I want to mention. There isn’t much reason for me to recount everything minute by minute, but I just want to talk about those things that I thought were really amazing. We left early (like usual) and drove for a couple hours until we made it to our first stop. Dougga is a collection of Roman ruins that I have to say are the most amazing ones I’ve ever seen. Most times, ruins are surrounded by a city and everything that comes with that. Cars, pollution, crowds, you name it. But Dougga wasn’t like that. It was one of the largest cities in northern Tunisia during its heyday and was a regional capital. What was so amazing about the place was that it was in the middle of fields and olive groves. There was almost nothing around it.

And the view was spectacular. You could see for miles down the valleys. It was hot and dry, with fields of hay and lots of olive trees overgrowing everything. The best way I can describe it is to say go watch Gladiator and the bit where he goes home to see his family. That is what it looked like. Just beautiful, only pictures can describe it.

As for this morning, we took a boat trip out onto the Mediterranean. It was a great morning because we cruised along and the weather was perfect. Not too warm yet because it was early, lots of sun and wind to keep us all smiling and comfortable. We had piles of fruit with us, and some music to entertain us. But this is what I wanted to mention. The music was billed as authentic Tunisian music. That was played on a snare (sp?) drum. Somewhat odd. Pardon me for being skeptical of its authenticity. The dancing that went along with it go a little old too and I wish that we had just been allowed to enjoy the peace and quiet that is the best part of being out on the water. We cruised up the coast for a while and ended up with a coast guard escort to the Algerian border. It was only a few miles away and we coasted around for awhile taking pictures of the shore and being disappointed we couldn’t swim ashore. This is the second country (along with North Korea) I’ve only gotten to see but not venture into. What a bummer. I just feel like it’s such a waste, I’m so close and can’t go check it out. I’ve heard lots of conflicting stories about it quality wise but I’d like to check it out someday. Almost everyone here in Tunisia has traveled there (our host brother was there for a soccer match this weekend) or was born there. Several Americans that we have met have even spent a lot of time there.

We drove home and spent several hours sore and grumpy from the heat. The air conditioning was on and off so we were cooking at circa 100 degree temps in the back of the bus. Of course that meant we were sucking down water and coming close to passing out. What can you do? We made it back and couldn’t get a cab so Kevin and I walked home and got showers before starting our homework.

Tunisia-Welcome to the desert. Djerba, Matamata, and Tozeur.

Music of the day: Sonny Landreth

Quite the weekend to recount. As one of the other guys put it, “I just lived out half of my childhood dreams.” I just got back from southern Tunisia and what a country.

Our flight down was to Djerba which is an island off the coast that has been fought over for as far back as anyone can remember. The Romans and Carthaginians started things of course, but it has been invaded and fortified and lost by the Arabs, the French and the British. Despite all of that we didn’t really see that much of the island because we were only there one night and the day that we were there they had planned out as a rest day, so we spent it on the beach. Which was sort of nice, I’m not going to lie, we were a little tired after the week.

What was weird about it was that the place they had booked for us was a huge five star resort. It was comfortable and all, and we had a great time on the beach and in the pool, but it was out in the middle of nowhere so we couldn’t go see anything else on the island. In addition, being in Tunisia, the place was absolutely packed with sketchy European tourists. They were out of control and way to excited by really bad entertainment like singing and dancing. We at least had the class to skip all of that and spend out night out on the beach looking at the stars and skipping stones and talking.

So since I haven’t got much to say about that, I’ll move on. Saturday, when we left, we wasted our afternoon going to see a town that is famous for its ceramics. Which would have been great on its own except that we were in a huge group because we had a class assignment, so they refused to bargain with us and we ended up not really getting much of anything. They had wanted us to work on our bargaining by buying something for our host families, but living with two guys we didn’t really see much that they would like. They’re not really the nice pottery type of people.

So we hit the road and stopped farther a long in the souk to wander and check things out. There wasn’t too much there that we hadn’t seen but we spent the time chatting it up with the locals. Kevin ended up in a long discussion about sunglasses with a guy who ended up so desperate to sell them that he dropped his price from 45 to 3 dinar. Meanwhile, Katie and I stopped to talk to three older men in a carpet store that were in the midst of lunch.

 They were interested in us and where we were from so we spent about ten fifteen minutes with them. Her Arabic is much better than mine so I listened to them speak which was good enough for me. Just following along was a challenge. We all headed back to the bus and drove off towards our next stop, Matamata.

Matamata is about halfway across southern Tunisia (check out my facebook maps to see where it is) and is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, there are a lot of troglodyte dwellings, some dug into cliffs, some just underground, you name it, they’re there. The reason being that the Berbers had to flee the Arabs. The Arab armies conquered the plains and drove the Berbers up into the mountains where they had to keep a low profile. Later (a lot later, the 1950s and 60s) they were relocated for a few different reasons so there are actually two separate Matamatas.

One is the old one, and one is the new one. The new one was built because the Tunisian government wanted to move the Berbers closer to government services. That was the official reason of course, but the unofficial one was that they wanted to integrate the locals into the rest of the country. It worked to a degree and at the same time ended up providing a little bit of economic development. Lots of former undergrounders came up above ground and promptly turned their old houses into tourist attractions. Today, they get enough visitors a year to keep themselves in business and it has become quite the attraction in southern Tunisia.

The other reason that Matamata is interesting is partly because of the first. George Lucas visited in the 1970s and liked the area so much that he decided to film a movie here. Tatooine from Star Wars, was partially shot in Matamata, which is a city in the province of Tatouine.

Nice spelling change, what a creative guy. So on Sunday we visited Luke’s house. Turns out, as the movie doesn’t show, it’s in the middle of the city, not out on a desert plain. How misleading is that? It was interesting, though, and we took more than enough pictures to remember it by. Today it’s a hotel and you can sit and have dinner where Luke and his family once did.

We left the house and moved on into the desert for our two hour drive to our next destination, Tozeur. To get there, we had to cross a lake. A waterless lake. It has water in Winter, but during the summer it dries out and is covered in salt crystals that turn is as white as paint in some places. We stopped partway across and wandered around for awhile, even tasted it.

The pictures don’t do it justice, you can’t even imagine how empty it is. Not a living thing as far as you can see. Just you, salt, and wind, lots of wind, it just howls across the lakebed. We climbed up a hill someone had built and took as many pictures as we could before we piled back into the bus to continue on.

The next stop was our destination. We took a drive through town quickly before we made it to our hotel and dinner. It was a nice place with a pool and all, we had a corner room where we dropped our stuff before running back up to dinner. Good food as well, one thing that was nice was that all of the desert bars had fresh fruit. I must have had a good 10 or 15 nectarines over those three days, in addition to the watermelon or two that I also demolished. Part of that might have been due to the heat and dehydration, but either way, it was a lot of fruit.

I got out of order here and so I have to go back. Just before dinner we took a buggy ride into the oasis. Towns are actually built on the edges so as to not waste precious land, while the oasis is used for farming. Something that I never new until this point. An oasis is generally an area that has water closer to the surface, making it easier to dig wells of course.

This oasis in Tozeur is famous for its dates. Dates are something that I’ve had before, but never really had much of a thing for. Until I made it to Tunisia where they’re huge. We eat them for breakfast pretty regularly and they’re not really that expensive. Date shakes are pretty common as well, and they’ve grown on me over the last few weeks. As it turns out I’m a date person at heart. We got out of our buggies and marched into the trees. One of the local farm owners had agreed to give us a tour and so we sat down on some logs for his speech. The most interesting thing that he explained was how every single tree in the oasis had to be pollinated. It turns out that while date palms do grow naturally, they’re sort of lousy at it. They only produce a few dates and take forever to spread and reproduce naturally. That doesn’t cut it if you’re trying to make a living off of selling dates, so the farm workers have to climb (yes, climb) every single tree (and there were around a million in this oasis) and pollinate them by hand. The result, the tasty box of dates that I bought to bring home to my host family.

After dinner, we had a swim and played sharks and minnows. Maybe not the most adult thing to do, but satisfying beyond belief. Until I almost passed out from a lack of oxygen. Got a little dizzy and had to sit down for a bit. That night we also found some bottles of wine at the bar and sat out by the pool until midnight. Great evening and lots of good conversation. We had to be up at 6 am though to leave so we hit the hay earlier that wished.

The next morning was by far the best thing we’ve done in Tunisia so far. We took a 4x4 trip into the desert to see some of the areas where Star Wars was filmed and I have to say it was a blast. We drove over some crazy stuff (as the videos posted on facebook may attest) and crossed some serious sand. As I always say, the people make the trip, and we had a great group in our car.

We sped off into the desert and the other thing of note is that music is also a major factor in making the day. Our driver was one of the younger guys, which meant that besides making him a little more adventurous driving wise, he also had a good taste in music. So our party car took off and we bounced around for the next 5 or 6 hours.

Our first stop was out in the middle of nowhere, we climbed up a hill sort of outcropping and we had a view for miles around of us of some of the areas where the movie was filmed. Hopefully someone can figure out which parts and tell me because I’m at a loss.

We left there and moved on to several other spots, cruising through the desert and sand dunes listening to Algerian pop and holding on as our driver threw us around the car. He was having a blast making the girls scream and then looking at Kevin and I and laughing. There isn’t much to say about the Star Wars sites, except that they are ridiculously remote and somewhat funny. They’re surrounded by dunes, and they look like a little city in the desert.

But when you walk into it, you realize that it is very obviously a set, especially when you go inside the buildings whose insides haven’t been finished because they weren’t used for any shots in the film. We wandered around it and took a bunch of pictures and then headed off to our last stop. Near the Algerian border there was a spring up in the mountains. We hiked up to it past an old town that had been destroyed about 40 or 50 years ago by a flash flood (in the desert mind you) and sat by the springs and waterfalls for a bit.

We had to be back in order to get some lunch and get to our flight so after a few minutes of splashing around the water we walked back down and hopped in the car. Quite the different drive back, we made it to a road and were so tired by that time that we all passed out and woke up in front of the hotel. We packed, ate, swam, and hit the road for our flight home.

Late Night Tunisia

Music of the day- Nick Drake

Yesterday was a break like I needed. We spent the morning sleeping and then decided to head out on the town. We live, as I mentioned before, just down the road from Carthage. We thought that we would go down and look at some of the ruins, but after getting there we found out that everything was ridiculously expensive. To get into each of the different ruins was ten dinar, which equals about seven dollars. That may not seem like much, but that's our daily budget, either see this stuff, or not eat was sort of the choice. We wavered and stood around for awhile and finally one of the guys at the gate started talking to us true Tunisian style. Really nice guy who asked about what we were doing in Tunis and all. Eventually we found out from him that everything is free if you have a student id. Which I did, so did Lilly, but Kevin didn't. So we decided to go back another day. Instead we went off in search of a beach. Which ended up being a true failure.

 We talked to some guys down the road via Kevin's Spanish and ended up on a not so great beach. We turned around and walked back the way we came and up the coast towards Sidi (Bou Said, I'm gonna refer to it by Sidi from now on because a) I go to school there so it'll come up a lot, and b) because I'm too lazy to type the whole thing). So we walked up to Sidi, about a half an hour walk past one of the President's palaces and several other residential neighborhoods. We got there just as Katie and Rose called us so we got some water at the grocery store while we waited for them to catch up with us. We made it down to the beach eventually, after some serious hills, and had our first cultural experience of the day. As we sort of expected, it was all men. So of course the girls were super popular and got stared at the whole day. It was a little awkward but they actually didn't really notice, just Kevin and I. We spent the day warding off teenagers who kept trying to play ball closer and closer to us all. We spent a few hours there listening to music and talking and swimming. The water was surprisingly cold and salty, little bit of a shock to the system. We finally had to leave because Rose and Katie had a wedding and Lilly had some other ceremony to go to. Kevin and I were coming home to have some dinner before the game because we had invited everyone over to our cafe.

We weren't really sure how many were going to show so we hedged our bets and said 5 or 6 to Bessem and the cafe owners. We sat down just the two of us and got some coke's and tea and a hookah with prime real estate right in front of the TV. After about half an hour people started showing up. They had a little bit of trouble finding the place because it is sort of in the middle of nowhere, but not nearly as many as they could have. At first it was just Kevin and I and Nihel which was funny because she was the only girl in the place and all the guys kept looking at her like she had three heads.

They definitely weren't used to seeing women in the cafe but it was alright after awhile. Claire and Kate showed up to back her up so it got less awkward. And then Bessem and his friends got down there. A few others showed up later and we had to move somewhere else because there were about 12 of us. It was a great group though, and as you might know, had you watched the game, an excellent match. Well played by both teams and I can honestly say one of the best games I've ever seen. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. But it ended with only a couple broken glasses and lots of yelling and rowdy Tunisian crowds. We headed out and got congratulated by half the place on our team's success.

It was about 10 and we wanted to go out so we stood around in the road for awhile debating what to do. Megan and Allison and David and Leah's families called to say they'd planned something so we all took off to get our stuff and meet up. Kev and I changed quick and then walked down with David and Nihel to his place to get Leah who'd gone home with her host brother. We picked them up, and then went to Megan and Allison's to get them. Along with their host sisters, cousins, and friends. We left and got lost three times on our way to the bar. In the end it took us two and a half hours from the end of the match to get to where we were going with all the stopping, starting, chatting, getting lost, etc.
It was an odd situation. None of the Tunisians we were with had ever been there and they were as surprised as us by how the night went. It ended up being a super expensive and exclusive Tunisian night club. With lots of techno (not my thing) lots of pricy drinks (not my thing) and an awesome night out with our friends. There were about 15 of us and when we got there they told us we had to either buy a bottle of something or buy food. Turns out that a bottle in a Tunisian night club runs about 250 dinar (175 dollars) a little above my price range.

 The food was ridiculously expensive too, but we caved and Allison and I split a hawaiian pizza. Mmmmm pineapple. Megan and Kev got calamari which was pretty good, and a lot of other people got pizzas. So we sat and talked, had a few beers, wandered around on the beach, and danced to ridiculous Tunisian music. It wasn't a normal day out for me by any means, or anyone else in the group, but it was really fun. We started to get a bit tired though and everyone finally decided it was time to leave about 3:30. We made it home and were crawling into bed just as the sun started to come up. The roosters made it a little hard to fall asleep, but we managed.