Blogs from Tunis, Tunisia, Africa - page 5

We arrived in Tunis, capital of Tunisia, late on Tuesday night because of dreadful weather at Heathrow. Though only a few hours behind schedule it gave us no time to orientate ourselves. Instead we just took a taxi from Tunis Carthage airport to the Hotel Ariha , unpacked a few things and turned in for the night. Our French isn’t up to much so far and we ended up speaking Spanish to the taxi driver and broken English at the hotel!! On Wednesday morning we got our first taste of croissants for breakfast with some cheese and turkey salami. There was to be little variety over the 4 days we stayed in Tunis! Afterwards it was time to go and meet our new employers, Amideast, an American NGO with whom Russ will be teaching at regional ... read more

Having failed to receive our Iranian visas and recognizing that it was winter in most of the Middle East, we did some serious re-thinking of where to go from Bahrain. Originally, we had planned to travel overland from Pakistan to Iran, Turkey and from there to Syria, Lebannon, Jordan, Egypt and across North Africa to Morocco. We also confirmed that overland travel in North Africa was going to be unlikely across the Egypt/Libya and Libya/Tunisia borders and impossible across the Tunisia/Algeria and Algeria/Morocco borders. Libya and Algeria also require that we book tours in advance in order to get visas. In a nutshell: visiting all of these countries would necessitate a whole series of flights and special (read: expensive) arrangements to make it happen. So, we decided to cut our losses and head for the warmest ... read more

I woke up around 830am and I took a shower. Celine and I went all over the medina. When we started out we were a little hungry and Celine introduced me to fruit cocktails. It is quite similar to a smoothie, the one that we had was a made from banana and I think they put dates and crushed cashew and almond as well and they top it up with a few banana slices and honey. It tasted fantastic and it cost less than a dinar. I think I can just live on them. By the time we had that it was quite filling you don’t need to eat anything else. We went to a market and I bought some lentils and desiccated coconut powder. I was planning on making a Sri Lankan meal for everyone. ... read more

It is officially the last day of my foolhardy North African adventure (volume I). It has been packed. Did I actually say that I would be able to relax in Tunis? I vaguely remember using the words 'chill out'. Today I went to my first and second legit museums of my entire 6 week trip. I am so le cultured. I visited mostly all the old Carthaginian ruins near Tunis in the 35 degree, humid weather. Able to look at the crystal clear blue Meditarranean but never close enough to go in! I shopped for souvenirs, bargaining with shopkeepers, trying to maintain some dignity in miniscule souq-marketplace change rooms, and navigating the little boutique lined roads (with century old cobblestones and massive crowds- not easy!). And all amid the ubiquitous cries of 'japanese? chino? ...married?' -as ... read more

...never again will I complain about the Greek alphabet! First of all, apologies for the long silence. I am alive, in Africa, specifically in Tunis, and just starting to recover from the biggest bout of culture shock ever. I am functionally only semi-literate. Tunisia is a francophone country so in theory, although arabic is an incredibly difficult language and I have only a few phrases and cant read the alphabet, I technically have that and the signs in latin alphabet in French to fall back on. In practice, arabic french is incredibly accented. I only realised how much when, in Sousse, I was struggling with a local (more on that later) to communicate and feeling incredibly dense (like, I thought I was ok at French, I never had this much trouble in France, has my brain ... read more