Tunisia #4: Aish aish (10/28/07)

Greetings again from Tunis, and my charming hotel room on the rue de Palestine:

The conference went ok.  I wish I could give you more detail, but the last two days I got a terrible case of, er, travellers illness, and I definitely don't remember much of Friday, which was a haze of exhaustion and multiple medications.  Jeff said I could stay at the hotel, but I felt like that would be being too much of a pansy so I manned up, got myself some crackers and water, and pulled it together.  I honestly will miss some of our participants: Hajer and Faouzia were so excited about me learning Arabic that they specifically spoke as Fus-ha as possible around me and made an effort to include me, and Moez who shared his pictures of his daughters with me...I even have a soft spot for Lotfi, who totally cheated me as much as he could but who has a wonderful smile.  And the man whose name I don't know, who mumbled in Arabic about the pause-cafe and somehow we made it work in putting things together for the participants.  What I have found is that Tunisians are just like Angelenos: half of them are amazing and nice and wonderful and the best people you'll ever meet, and the other half will manipulate you any way they have to to get what they want. 

Saturday night, we had dinner at Liliane and her husband's house after she took us shopping in the souqs of the medina.  I bought myself a present for having made it through the week - a lovely wool Berber blanket.  I am excited for the cats to roll all over it and cover it in black fur!

Today I decided I would be no Dido, and throw away Carthage just because of a male (or in my case the hordes of them and trying to avoid them).  So while my coworkers stayed in Tunis, I made my way to the TGM station and took the train out through La Goulette (if you look on a map, the train runs along the spit of land outside of Tunis and then up north along the coast, it's cool!) and out to Carthage.  Carthage is a very wealthy suburb of Tunis now, beautiful along the lines of Nice or Cannes or Beverly Hills: rich white stucco houses surrounded by lush bougainvillea, palm, lime trees along hillsides overlooking in this case the gulf of Tunis.  Most of the ruins of Carthage are under protection,  but I imagine some houses overlaid the ancient Punic city.  I walked up to the Byrsa hill where the Carthage museum is, tooled around, and then came back down the hill and across the train tracks to the Punic ports musem (1 room) and the Sanctuary of Tophet.  At Tophet, I met Salah, a very knowledgable guide to the site.  He showed me around, and interestingly enough, claimed the site was a graveyard of children.  When the children died, the people believed they should sacrifice a small animal to Ashtarte/Ishtar (goddess of fertility) so that the next child would be healthy.  So when archaeologists uncovered the site, they found children and animal remains.  His story was interesting (he was actually very cool, and we had a very good conversation) but the Lonely Planet's explanation was slightly...different.  LP claims that this site was a child sacrifice site - hmmm...either way, it is actually a beautiful site and one of the best, most ...laid back and pressureless conversations I have had here.  

Tomorrow, we head out to Dougga.  My coworker says it's only an hour and a half drive, but I have been in the car with him back and forth from Mahdia, and he has been working in Tunisia long enough that he now drives like it (that is to say, the rules are - there ARE no rules!) so I think with my boss in pursuit in a second car, it will take us a bit longer.  But anyhow, we are to meet the French who work there, as well as seeing our colleagues and participants who were at our workshop who work at Dougga, so it should be a good day.  Keep your fingers crossed for me that I get on my flight to LA ok on Tuesday -- Air France picked a fantastic time to strike! 

Aish Aish (may God bless you)

Tunisia #3: The Rough Guide (10/23/2007)

Assalema bikum:

 

The conference is officially underway.  It was an exhausting week of 14-hour days in preparation, with some conversations being wonderfully easy and some being near incomprehensible.    To use the word interesting would be an understatement; this conference is an education unto itself. The cultural differences, and odd institutional relationships at play here, are mind-boggling.

Sunday we also had the chance to explore the medina of Mahdia.  The port city, built by the Fatimids in the early 900s in order to take Cairo – and was abandoned in 967.   This spit of land juts out into the Mediterranean, with its blue blue window shutters and sea and brightly white stuccoed medina.   The farthest point of the spit has a cherry red lighthouse, a cemetery spilling down the hill to a Fatimid gate, standing without its walls as a porthole to the sea, and a Fatimid fortress.   It is beautiful and charming, your prototypical Mediterranean fishing village with white buildings and domes clustered together along cobblestoned streets.  And again, the aqua shutters are ubiquitous.   I went wandering alone, while everyone else waited for their fresh fresh (literally, the garcon went to the fish market to buy it) fish lunch, since mine had been spaghetti and come and gone.   I wandered up to the mosque, which was destroyed in the 1500s by the Spanish and rebuilt.  It was closed for prayer, and someone came up to me to inform me that Muslims pray five times a day (like a PSA, or something, for the random blonde lady).   Turns out he was a shopboy at "Mama Bazar" around the corner.  Somehow I ended up on a stool drinking mint tea with Lotfi, the owner of Mama Bazar (bizarre), who had pictures of himself all over the store, along with his cheap wares that I didn't want to buy (hey man, if I can scratch off the top layer, it's not real silver.)  Later, after I bought a bowl from him, he insisted we take a photo together, where he insisted on holding the jewelry he gave me.   This photo pretty much sums up my Tunisian experience, or at least 1000 words worth. 

In the end, the good the bad and the ugly: this is definitely (what I hope will be) a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  Next time I come to Tunisia, I will be much better equipped (and better packed, good lord why did I even pack one pair of heels?).   And at the least, it has given me some great material for characters in short stories.   And, thank God, I have some good music to dance to in my huge hotel room, the internet to maintain contact with my loved ones, and ...inshallah a sense of humor at the end of it all.     

May your toilets be equipped with toilet paper & functioning flush, your food be tuna-free, and your spirits light -

Tunisia #2: New adventures.... (10/16/07)

 

 **Part of my catching up on old travelogues...slightly edited from original email version to protect identities of individuals. Anthropological convention...

My enthusiasm was dampened a bit after a joyous late morning walk to have breakfast at the cafes alongside the Avenue Bourguiba - a man came up from behind my table, took my digital camera off it, and ran away (luckily I still have my Getty-owned work camera, so I was able to document my trip some).  I saw this fat hairy arm come over my shoulder, and before I knew it, his chubby ass had made off with my birthday present!  It is the first time I have ever been robbed in my life - never robbed anywhere in Europe, Russia, Turkey or Southeast Asia, so I guess it was my turn to buy some good karma.  The biggest loss is the pictures I hadn't yet added to my computer.  I hope some Tunisian kids eat well this month.

 

Then I made some new friends.  Two "gentlemen," Bechir & Ali, came to sit with me and chatted me up at the cafe as I waited for the commissariat de police to arrive to take my statement.  They seemed nice, so I figured, why not?  I can either pick them up now, or I can be hassled all day.  So I took my chances, and while I was taken to Ali's leather shop and shown around, on the whole they were tremendously respectful and showed me all around the medina.  We discussed politics, immigration, the educational and work systems in our countries...it was a very pleasant afternoon, which I needed after the rough wake-up call.

Bechir & Ali, Tunisian hosts/guides

 

I made it back to the hotel to meet Jeff & Francoise for dinner, after having some help from Bechir & Ali in picking out some Tunisian CDs.  (One has a video component, score!  They were 1,500TND.  That's 75 cents).  We ate at a place in the medina, Chez Nous, and headed back to the hotel to crash before meeting with our Tunisian counterpart this morning.  We showed up at her office, which is in an old palace in the medina, and it's gorgeous Islamic courtyard architecture, tiles everywhere, skylights in the domed central courtyard, walls covered with books and tapestries...I didn't talk much in the meeting, but it was an interesting power play of cultures and institutions (the director of the institute asked me if I understood French, after I had failed to laugh as heartily as he would have apparently liked, at his lame joke...no buddy I got it.  I got all of it.  It wasn't funny).  I thought to myself, I could easily work here because the office alone is beautiful.  Then...and then we saw Liliane's house when we picked her up for lunch. 

 

Liliane, a Frenchwoman, is our translator, and is married to a Tunisian dramatist.  They bought a house in the medina - huge carved doors, like you see on postcards, open into 30-ft hallways (I'm prone to exaggeration, and I'm not this time!) filled with books, mirrors, paintings, Arabic calligraphy...her home is arranged around a central courtyard filled with herbs, and plants, and cats...she handpainted all the decorations, according to accounts of what the house had originally been like, and restored the mosque on one end, and has yet to tackle the HAFSID (11th century) wooden walls on the north side of the house.  It is amazingly beautiful - the hard work of restoring an 11th century home shows! 

 

 

Liliane led us through the winding cobblestoned streets of the medina, past the Zeytouna mosque and down into a corridor with occasional skylights passing blotches of light into the small souqs lining it.  She turned suddenly, into a small alcove, and we sat down at the table that barely fit in the alcove, to order some salade mechoui and "the best lamb in the medina."  She was right, it was delicious!

 

After gorging, it was time to head down to Mahdia.  Our little Megane could barely handle all the bags and boxes and tubes of junk, but somehow we made it fit and zoomed out of Tunis on the only freeway in the country (2 lanes each way - it makes Santa Monica blvd look like the 405).  And then...then the highway stops just after Sousse.  And you go village by village, through the only paved road, past goats and butcher shops and small souqs and pedestrians dodging traffic and waiting for the bus.  Somewhere along the way the sky turned sour, and then the sky dumped down buckets of rain, that quickly drowned the flat road.  Soon we were plunging through puddles in the little Megane, trying not to spray pedestrians, but to no avail.  Several puddles later, we arrived at our hotel in Mahdia...much to our dismay.  It's pretty much the Tunisian version of a Sandals resort - huge and gaudy and filled with chubby Germans and Russians taking the cure. Jeff commented, as we waited in the reception, that it looks like one of Saddam's palaces...and it kind of does.  There are two swimming pools, 3 bars, a spa....and lots of native Tunisians forced into horrid condescending outfits.  All of us were ready to find a new hotel, pretty much as soon as we pulled up...but alas...

 

Anyway.  Tomorrow we drive into El Jem with Ahmad, our Tunisian partner, and begin the planning, in detail, for the workshop, and I meet with the hotel manager.  Exciting, la vie tunisienne.