32 things learned in Tunis

In no particular order:

1) When a clean, empty bathroom presents itself, use it. Shower. Brush your teeth. Pee. Whatever you can do. You don't know when you'll get another one.

2) Watch your head. Amy was watching her step while walking in Sousse, and came within an inch of colliding with a freshly decapitated cow's head hanging outside of a butcher shop. Really.

3) Butchers hang freshly decapitated cow and sheep heads outside of their shops on the sidewalk (See #2).

4) You never know when you will strike up a conversation with a world famous rally car driver, who then gives you his address and invites you to his home in France.

5) Flies can indeed land on your lips when you are napping in a windy louage.

6) Berber ladies carry cell phones and teensy little change purses folded into their many winding layers of clothing.

7) Berber ladies in red = married.

8) If you can speak Spanish, and the person you're trying to talk to can speak French AND Italian, you can basically have a normal conversation.

9) When Tunisians play the ethnic guessing game, Korea comes late, or never, on a list that starts with Chinois, Japon, Hong Kong, Philipinnes, Tokyo, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. And yes, Tokyo is considered a country.

10) Sometimes Tunisians think things are funny that are not. Like saying "heil hitler" to someone who they think is Italian (still haven't figured that one out). Or laughing, joking, and making charades as if they are pumping a rifle and shooting at you. Or pretending they have a bomb on a bus. Or saying Amy must be related to Bruce Lee. (Okay, maybe that actually is funny.)

11) Sahara hot.

12) Sahara windy.

13) Sandstorms hardcore.

14) Gas cheap.

15) One CAN get tired of warm, crusty baguettes.

16) Nothing can redeem a man wearing capris.

17) Being disconnected from the Internet is more challenging than expected.

18) Gabe is good at drawing street maps, but dislikes writing street names.

19) Chewing with your mouth wide open and picking your nose are acceptable public activities in Tunisia.

20) Old French and German men really like riding their motorcycles around Africa.

21) It really would have been smart to have learned some French before coming to Africa.

22) French people really do say "puton" when they swear.

23) Do yourself a favor and poop in the public WCs in your hotel, instead of your poorly plumbed, poorly ventilated private toilette.

24) Bathing with antibacterial wipes actually feels pretty good.

25) Tunisian coffee is DELICIOUS.

26) YAB brand banana yogurt is to die for.

27) A 2-meter Berber headscarf is absolutely the most useful piece of performance gear in the world. Thousands of years of field testing behind that shit. Keeps out the heat, keeps out the cold, keeps out the sun, keeps out the wet, keeps out the sand, can be used as towel, blanket, napkin, belt, sarong, tablecloth, pillowcase, etc.

28) After a week in the Sahara, a 2-meter Berber headscarf can smell really bad.

29) When riding louages, you should always position yourself to be in command of the windows.

30) Camels are giant, smelly beasts, but babies in the wild are shockingly cute.

31) Medina hostels, while cheap, are not an acceptable housing option.

32) Just because something is listed on a menu doesn't mean that the restaurant will serve you that food or has it that night. It is more accurate to say that if an item is listed on a menu, the restaurant at some point in its lifetime served that food to a guest.

Ephemera (Sunday, May 23)

We spent our rainy Sunday roaming around Carthage, once the playground of Dido and Aeneas, today a tony suburb 30 minutes outside of Tunis. It takes some work to imagine what the city must have been like 2,000 years ago, but there was something about the ruins of the Antonine Baths, an ancient Roman bath house along the sea, that stunned both of us.

Weird. I mean, we've both put a lot of care into trying to get out of New York, wean ourselves from the rat race and do some soul searching. For us, at least, that's a lot of what traveling is - actively seeking perspective in the vistas of foreign and alien places and cultures, maybe better finding our own way in the world, how we might shape it and have an impact. But there was something ... something just completely tragic and beautiful about the ruins in the gray, misty cold, knowing that overpriced cafes and taxis were just a few blocks away, that a measly few dinar could get us access, to crawl over this dead grandeur. Time was just so tragically obvious and sad. The Romans thought they were building an empire to last forever. And yet here we are.

Whites and blues (Wednesday, May 19)

We have found our way back to Tunis, and aren't really doing a damn thing. It's marvelous. But today we went to Sidi Bou Said, lovely little tourist trap about 30 minutes outside of the city. Much of the town is plastered with shops and offensively expensive cafes catering to the busloads of group tourists, but if you can escape the main drag, the town opens up into wonderful residential neighborhoods with beautiful vistas of the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Tunis. The blues and whites of the homes and the bright purples and oranges of the flowers were said inspire Paul Klee, and it's easy to see why.

Everywhere sand (Saturday, May 15)

The sirocco came through Douz. It is a blizzard of sand. It's in our eyeballs, in our ears, up our nostrils, everywhere. Gabe flossed sand out of his teeth. We wanted to take a video, but would have ruined our camera, which already has sand in all of its crevices, despite our keeping everything in Ziplocs. We are breathing sand, and even our Berber wraps aren't providing much comfort.

So much sand.

The Grand Erg Oriental (Friday, May 14)

Mohammed, our 4WD driver in the desert, drove us from Ksar Ghilane back to Douz straight through the shifting dunes of the Grand Erg. This was the heart of our Sahara trip - to swim through the dunes and hope that our Toyota truck would survive. Every so often, Mohammed would stop the truck, get out to climb the nearest high dune, and survey the sand. We have absolutely no idea what he saw, and as he spoke "only" French, Arabic and Berber, we couldn't ask. All we know is that he is brilliant, warm, and certainly we would have died without him driving us.


Nothing but windy, undulating waves of orange and gold. But words don't do the Grand Erg justice, so I leave it to the images. Video to follow soon ... damn the ban on YouTube!

The Sahara. For real. (Thursday, May 13)

You know how they say that the Grand Canyon is one of the few sights in the world that completely lives up to the hype? For me, the hype has always been about the desert, particularly the Sahara. I've always had a lot of romance wrapped up in my head about the Sahara. Something about the motion, the desolation, the absolute need for survival under a black sky. Even the word is exotic and gorgeous, to be breathed through. There is something terrifyingand darkly sexy about the idea of the empty desert, and I was totally ready to be disappointed.

But I wasn't. There wasn't anything about the Sahara that wasn't overwhelmingly beautiful, frightening, and vast, and that didn't, in an absolute and complete way, remind me that I am just a tiny little actor in a terribly gorgeous world.


Our Sahara was shaped by Ksar Ghilane, an oasis roughly 200 kilometers south of Douz, a tourist town that is the primary launching point for camel and 4WD Sahara treks (No camel trek for us - too dangerous in the summer). Ksar Ghilane is the largest oasis in the Sahara, and it is shaped around "the source," a small, muddy natural spring surrounded by palm trees and a few Berber campgrounds. Rappy had fun.


We spent the afternoon practing our headwraps with the young Berbers who live on the oasis. They are quick to offer opinions on your headwrap, and as a general rule, aren't fans of the Arab styles of draping. Too much conquering, perhaps.


The headwraps, made out of 2-meter long soft fabric, are used for everything from towels and belts to sun protection and rain protection and most of all, sand protection. (Not that it matters. The sand gets into everything. EVERYTHING.)

Once the sun went down and it was cool enough, we set out to explore the Grand Erg Oriental, which is literally a sand ocean lapping at the oasis. The sirocco, a summer wind that carries sand, was starting to act up, so we were fully wrapped and half blind, but we couldn't resist running through the dunes.


Sunset in the Sahara. I am small, and lucky.

Clean is a relative term (Thursday, May 13)

So, I "showered" last night in our little Berber cave. I used a combination of Oil of Olay Express Daily Facial Cleansing Cloths and Fresh Scent Wet Ones Antibacterial Hands & Face Wipes.

Just a few days ago, I washed Gabe's shirts in our medina hostel in Sousse, the call to prayer over the loudspeakers and the smells of fish, urine, and roasting pralines drifting up to our second-floor window. In the absence of a bowl (I used to use the cooking pots in our apartment in Bogota) I used a 2-gallon Ziploc bag and the detergent we carry around with us in a resealable plastic bag to soak the clothes.


Things change, non?