Tunisia

Ok, get ready, this is a long one.

For Spring Break I went with about half of my school (100 kids) for 10 days to Tunisia! Talk about another world! Even going to Europe, everything is still so Western and there is a little bit of American influence everywhere, like finding 5 Starbucks in Barcelona. Tunisia was really foreign with a completely different alphabet and the influences of Islam everywhere. Their president pretends to be super liberal and democratic (they call themselves a republic) but he's pretty much a dictator. We were followed around the entire trip by a couple of Tunisian secret service agents, both for our protection because they have a good relationship with America, and also so that they could keep an eye on us and make sure we weren't there to tell Tunisians that their president is a dictator. Last year a journalist said some not so nice things about him and next thing you know he gets thrown in jail for a year.

Their currency is the dinar. 1 dollar=1.25 dinar. Very nice, considering I am used to managing on the very expensive euro. We visited a lot of different medinas, or markets, around the country. Each one was very different, but some things stayed the same: you can barter with the vendors and the vendors love to hassle you.

Tunisia was actually a French colony until I believe 1956 when they declared their independence. As a result, literally everyone speaks French. We met some Tunisian law students for lunch on the second day in the capital of Tunis and one of them said that some people even learn French before they learn Arabic! Their Arabic is a little different than other countries', just like American English differs from Britain's, so "a salaam" is pronounced "aslema". I gave up trying to say thank you and stuck with "merci". My head is so jumbled up with ciao, hola, bonjour, and a salaam that I don't know if I can still speak English properly!

We went out to the Sahara and rode camels, which was really easy except that getting on and off was like an amusement park ride. The camel lays down, folding its legs underneath and you just sit down on top of it. But then the camel guy gives it some kind of symbol and the back legs stand up first so you think you're going to slide off its head. Then the front legs pop up and suddenly you're about 10 feet off the ground! My camel's name was Lasfra. That's probably spelled very wrong, but that's how it sounded.

That night we camped out in open-air tents in the Sahara. We drove out throught the sand in Jeeps, had soup for dinner, watched the sunset, danced and got entertained by gypsies around the fire, and did some serious stargazing. I've never seen so many stars before in my life! It's true about the desert being freezing cold at night though! We woke up a little before sunrise and got back on the rode, going by a salt lake, which was really just salt everywhere with little streams running through it. Some streams were blue, some red and some green! Everything else was just white salt for miles. I couldn't get any desert photos because the sand was so fine it would ruin the camera. Some kids chanced it and brought their cameras anyway, but some of them broke!

A few days later we all piled into jeeps again and went off-roading through the desert, both the rocky parts and the huge sand dunes. It was awesome; roller coasters might seem boring now! At one point we were literally vertical going over a dune. It was like in those crazy SUV commercials when a bunch of them go racing through canyons and whatnot. Anyway, we did that out to the site where they filmed the very first Star Wars movie, I think its Episode IV? That crazy sand land planet is real, I've been there!

The next day we went to Karouan, which is one of the most important holy cities for Islamic pilgrimage. Sure enough, I was woken up at 5am and again at 5:30 by the strangest singing I've ever heard coming over a loudspeaker from the mosque outside my window. It was the Call to Prayer. Once I got over being woken up so early, I realized that it was actually really amazing.

We ended the trip with a day of relaxation in the beach resort town of Hammamet, hanging out at the beach on the Mediterranean.

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