Carthage is Garbage

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If you can't guess, I went to Carthage today (for the uncultured Carthage is an ancient city that was once one of the most powerful cities in that part of the world - famous associated people include Hannibal the guy who marched on Rome with an army of elephant riding troops over the Italian alps).

Today was my last day in Tunisia, so I left the luxury of the conference hotel and travelled into Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. Tunis is a bit of a hole - nothing much to see except for 2 main sights - Carthage and a beautiful seaside town called Sidi Bou Said.

Carthage was a major disappointment mainly because all that remains is a few crumbling ruins and a dodgy museum. Most of the ruins are spread out across a built up suburb, so you don't got any emotive isolated views - instead you see a few crumbling pillars with a backdrop of big houses belong the the mega rich (the suburb that these ruins are is one of the most expensive in Tunis).

I had quite a bit of time to burn that day (my flight wasn't till 2:40am that night), so I wiled away the time by walking too the various points of interest associated with Carthage - a broken pillar here, then walk 1km to see a bunch of graves, then a few 1.5km to see a big basin (remains of a roman bath), etc. I was so borec so I consoled myself periodically by grabbing a pastry - I figured I would burn the fat off with all the walking.

After Carthage (and about 5 pastries and 6 coffees) I headed up to Sidi Bou Said. This was really beautiful - a little village on a hill my the side of the Mediterranean Sea. All the buildings are a pristine white with window frames and doors painted a gorgeous light blue. It was really pleasant to walk around and enjoy some fabulous views of the water. I grabbed a coffee with some of the locals at a little cafe that looked over the sea - it was calming and relaxing though the conversation was bit difficult because they were a bunch of chain smokers and the wind was blowing in my direction.

At about 6pm, I headed to an Internet Cafe that was the slowest ever - I am convinced that were trying to use a single 28.8kbps modem to service 12 computers - I was getting download speeks of about 382 BYTES per second.

Finally at about 9 I headed to the airport to commence a VERY long wait for my plane at 2:40am. The major highlights of my wait were that on every hour on the hour I would grab another cup of coffee so that the waiters wouldn't kick my out of the comfortable chair I was sitting in.

Finally the plane arrived, and I flew to Frankfurt. There I had to twiddle my thumbs for another 8 hours, so I found a big long bench, tied my backpack to my waist, used it as a pillow and slept for about 4 hours. Then wandered around the airport wishing I was dead until the plane finally arrived.

To my annoyance, the stupid Lufthansa flight didn't have any personal TV screens. Thankfully though the movies they aired were ones I hadn't seen - Oceans 12 and some really dodgy Bollywood movie (which was quite entertaining because it was so bad).

Finally arrived in India at 1:00am in the morning, waited for 1 hour for my luggage to arrive on the baggage carousel and then took 30 mins to get to the hotel that was only 10 minutes from the hotel because the taxi driver got lost.

Thus ended a VERY VERY long day!!

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