TUNISIA. Praise Allah!

Northern Africa: TUNISIA

I think I may have just had some of the best days of my life. I almost didn’t want to come back from Tunisia…it was as if going back to Rome was painful, as in “Awww I don’t wanna go home yet!” Except home is Rome at the moment. That was one of my strange feelings…flying back to Rome was going back to my normal life. How weird is that? I mean, one thing that freaked me out a bit was that when I got to Tunisia and the waiter handed me food at lunch, I was unconsciously responding “Grazie,” and replying with other Italian as well. It was like we had all become so used to speaking in Italian (even with the little that we know) that we were shocked that we needed to remember that these people didn’t speak it…we needed to say thank you in French and Arabic. Getting back to Rome today was hard to readjust again…I had to remember that I was back to my home tongue…Italiano! Hahhaa.

Just to make it clear to everyone who really is at HOME (the real one), even in Africa, I found myself waking up one night from a dream. My dream was involved HOME. I had this incredible out of body experience, because I was convinced I was in the comforts of my normal life, and then woke to find myself on yet another continent…AFRICA at that. It was surreal. But let it be known, I’m dreaming about you all.

I am going to have to write up my 10 heavenly days one at a time. I made sure to take noted during the trip because we did SO much I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember it all by the end. We traveled across much of the country of Tunisia, which I guess I didn’t realize when I signed up. You’d think we’d hang out in Tunis, the capital. But we started there and worked our way south and circled back up northwest. If we had gone further south, we would have just been in the desert until the border of the country.

Ok here we go. This is your warning to turn back now…it’ll be long, but I think worth it.

Feb 29^th

DAY 1

We arrived in Tunis, and immediately experience our first taste of Tunisia cuisine. Let me say now, that we definitely got to try traditional Tunisian, because we had pretty much the same food at every meal in every city. Cold vegetable salads, potatoes, rice, curry chicken, some red soup, fried thingies, and cous cous. Lots of cous cous. Our desserts sometimes consisted of nothing more than oranges and dates. Those are huge in Tunisia. They love dates…they even had date cream and date cake and date cookies and stuff.

After lunch we visited the US embassy. I also felt out of body being on “US soil” and meeting Americans in Africa. We heard a few speakers and learned a good deal about government and social customs and issues while there. Tunisia is fairly modern in its thinking…more womens’ rights than most other Muslim countries. Apparently though, homosexuality is against the law and you can go to jail if you are caught…yikes. So, the speakers explained that Tunisia was considered more European than African since it’s right on the Mediterranean super close to Italia. I decided that we got the best of all kinds of things by being in this particular country, because it was like experiencing the Middle East, Europe, and Africa all in one little place. It’s got it all.

After dinner at the hotel that night, the entire group went out to a hookah bar in this cute little hilly area, Sidi Bou Said, which apparently overlooks the Gulf of Tunis (according to my itinerary. The place was pretty sweet…the hookah bar had some history…it was 300 years old! So I don’t know if you old folks are familiar with hookah but I can explain a bit. I knew that some kids started going to hookah bars in Chicago, but I thought they sounded gross. Now I enjoy them…I mean this was the real stuff. It’s part of their tradition in Tunisia…there is hookah EVERYWHERE. Like at every restaurant, café, hotel, market, whatever. “Hookah (Hindi: हुक्का, Urdu: حقہ hukka) or shisha (Arabic: شيشة‎, Hebrew: נרגילה) is a single or multi-stemmed (often glass-based) water pipe device for smoking. Originating in India,^[1] it has gained popularity, especially in the Arab World. A hookah operates by water filtration and indirect heat. It can be used for smokingherbalfruits. In the Arab world, social smoking is done with a single or double hose and even more. When the smoker is finished, either the hose is placed back on the table signifying that it is free, or it is handed from one user to the next, folded back on itself so that the mouthpiece does not point at the person receiving it. (Stories tell Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar thought of it as an insult if the mouthpiece pointed at the person, but there are no official facts.) Another tradition is that the receiver taps or slaps the giver on the back of the hand while taking it as a sign of respect or friendship. In cafés and restaurants, however, it is rare for each smoker not to order an individual hookah, as the price is generally low, ranging from $2 to $10. Most cafés (called maqha— Arabic: مقهى, "coffeeshop") in the Middle East have hookahs available. Cafés are very widespread, and are amongst the main social gathering places in the Arab world (similar to the status pubs have in the UK).”

Thanks Wikipedia!

Yes so, Todd Waller, our dean, announced that we were all going to smoke the shisha…and that we did. It’s really not that gross I promise…there are so many people who HATE smoke of all kinds and still enjoy hookah (me included). Even Father Bosco tried it out. They also served us their traditional tea and some little pastries. Our bus played traditional Arabic music whenever we would drive around, and it was awesome. I loved it. We went back to the hotel to close out the night in “the disco” which a lot of hotels have there I guess. Brooke and I were the last ones on the dance floor that evening.

DAY 2

We got up and had a lovely breakfast in the hotel My eye was bugging the crap out of me, and I thought I had gotten something in there, and then thought I jut hadn’t changed my contacts out in a while. Turned out my right contact was torn. I tossed it. And of course I didn’t think to bring spares to Tunisia. SOOO, I began my next 9 days with a day of glasses before switching to wearing only my left contact every day. Yup, I pulled a Richie. Truly, I saw Africa with only one eye for the majority of my trip. But it was alright, I got used to having things look a little funny, and then I got really used to it. We went to lunch in this old historic place that is now a beautiful restaurant with great art, tiles, and an open ceiling. Lunch was special that day though because we got to eat with 40 Tunisian students from the University of Tunis who were mainly studying law. They all spoke English and of course like 6 other languages and were highly accomplished and such. I love that we Americans think we’re so smart. We’re so lame in comparison. Even the little shopkeepers in the Medina (the marketplace) know multiple languages and can greet the shoppers from just about anywhere. They try French, Arabic, Italian, English, German, until they find one that you speak. It’s nuts. Katie and I had our first of MANY market experiences in Tunisia and went around with one of the students, a young man who was incredibly sweet and helped us learn how to work the shopkeepers and protected us from the aggressive ones and translated sometimes, and just patiently shopped with us. I told him that most American men would not have the patience to walk around shopping with two girls for a couple hours. It was good that we had him there apparently, because some other girl from the JFRC got cornered in one of the shops by an overly aggressive shopkeeper, and he struck her in the face with a bag when she tried to get out. A lot of these guys like to block you into a corner in their shops and stand in front of the door. In this case, he blocked her friends from being able to help her out. That was an extreme case though. The most I dealt with was men trying to block my exit and other guys grabbing my arm as I walked by. You can be just as aggressive to them and jerk your arm away and tell them to leave you alone. It’s quite a different shopping experience than at home…I can’t bring myself to be aggressive or rude to people at home, but here you HAD to be a little rude and mean to get through the markets. By the end of the trip, we were pretty fantastic at working the markets. I always hated bartering because it is so NOT my personality. If it were up to me, I’d just agree with whatever they want me to pay because I hate the confrontation. BUT, by the end, I was pretty good. A couple of us found a Catholic mass that night…it was in French though. My first French mass?!

DAY 3

We ate breakfast and were greeted by a beardless Todd (the dean). He told us that he was having one of those midlife crisis moments, but didn’t have the money to buy a Porshe or anything like that so shaved his beard off instead. He then claimed that he had just slipped when shaving and took off a nasty chunk and had to get rid of it all. I think I like both stories. Either way it felt like the day Richie came downstairs after taking off his long lived beard. We headed off to Carthage. We saw some sweet Roman ruins…oh Rome. It’s everywhere. On this day we ended up stopping at these really pretty spots for pictures. One was this place with a view up over the city, and there was a ton of wild yellow flowers growing on the hill. A huge old Catholic church sat up a bit on that hill, basically ignored (Tunisia is about 98 percent Muslim with the other 2 percent being Jewish with a couple Christians thrown in). It was interesting being in such a minority for my religion there! We saw a mosaic museum, ate lunch at a beach restaurant with a beautiful view of the water. The food was Italian believe it or not. We stopped by the US cemetery before driving to Souse, the next town for just that evening. A small group of us walked down the street to a hookah place and sat out until we were freezing. We had a little conversation with a Tunisian who told us not to tell people we were from the US…he was a good guy, and he was being really honest. He and others we met there told us similar things but also said that they don’t judge the American people as a whole…they said they could tell that we (the students they were meeting) were good people. He stuck around a little while to chat, and when he left he shook all of our hands like we were old friends, saying he hoped to see us again. After going back to the hotel, we started up a great card game that Katie taught us involving funny rules such as talking in accents or ignoring other players when they speak to you. That was a fun night of making friends…I feel like that the hookah bar and the card game started to open me up to new people at the Rome center. From that night on, I was meeting more people everyday.

DAY 4

We headed to a huge Roman amphitheatre in El Jem that looked very similar to the Colliseum. We ran around that place for awhile…it would have made a great place to play hide and seek. We were able to go underground where they would keep the animals before letting them loose. We were also able to climb up to the top parts of the structure, and it was quite a view. I ended up buying one of the very popular Tunisian souvenirs, a black and white checked scarf. I bought it after a man there grabbed me as I walked by, and put it on my head, wrapping it in the traditional way. He wanted like 30 dinars, but I got it for 3. I had wanted one anyway, don’t worry. It made it easier when he put it right on me. We moved on to an actual market in another area, more famous for the spices it sold. We heard the call to prayer from the mosque next door, and it was one of those oh- so-cultural moments. The man’s voice sounded like it was saying or singing alien words…it’s hard to describe…not just like a different language, but something completely strange and unheard of before. It was like a jumble of noise to my ear, but to the people there (to the ones who actually practice) it was a daily routine calling them to worship. Afterwards, we visited a troglodyte home. These little homes are like holes in the earth, cave homes. The ceiling is open air, and there are a few small rooms inside. People actually live here, but open their homes to tourists. What a sweet house! There was a baby camel tied up outside, and a little fort-like room high up in the inside wall that required us to climb with a rope. One of the women who lived there weaves rugs and things and sells them to the people who visit. I bought a few things, figuring this was the closest I could come to truly authentic Tunisian gift. I mean, the lady made this stuff with her own hands, living in this cavelike house. Amazing. The house was carved into the side of a nice sized hill and we climbed the hill to see the view, and to look down into the house from the open ceiling. Pretty sweet stuff. From there, we headed to the famous Star Wars bar. We found out that the scene actually filmed there was the one of Luke Skywalker’s house. So I guess you could say we partied in Luke’s house. Todd and Dr. Evers battled with light sabers. Others battled, some danced (Todd demanded that whoever had bought drums at the markets was to bring them into the bar for a jam session). The SLAs surprised us by handing out some pretty awesome JFRC Tunisia shirts, maroon with gold camels on the front, and Arabic writing on the back and Spring 2008 on it. We had a blast, and Todd told us that that was one of the best Star Wars bar parties he had had in all the times he had been on the trip. We headed to this awesome troglodyte hotel, which also looked like it was a cave palace or something. The center of the place was open to the night air. We dined, napped, played cards and went to bed.

DAY 5

The itinerary says “Departure to the desert oasis town of Douz that borders the Sahara Desert.” We made a little rest stop outside of Douz and Katie and I bartered for some sunglasses to protect our eyes not only from the sun, but the fine sand that blows through the air. Then was one of my favorite parts. We arrived at the sight for our CAMEL TREK! Almost one hundred people were dressed in robes and headdresses and helped onto camels. The camels sit on the ground all crosslegged while you climb on…so when they get up, you go lean forward then way back as they untuck their legs before straightening out. We learned the names of all the camels near us, which I decided the men leading the camels were just making up as we asked them, “And what about that one’s name? And that one?” Apparently mine’s name was Booby. He was two years old, baby of the camel right next to mine. Most of the camels were roped into groups of 4 or 5, and kept near their family members. If you’ve never been around a camel before, let’s just say they make funny noises. Their tummies gurgle and they foam a lot at the mouth. It sounds like they are sick to their stomachs. A couple of camels in front of our group got into a bit of a scuffle and one girl came close to falling off. Luckily, no camels or people were harmed. The men who lead the camels were funny though…a few girls basically received marriage proposals from these guys. One guy told my friend Kate that she could bring his camel back home with her as a present. She laughed and politely said she didn’t think a camel would fit in the plane. After lunch, we went to another market. I got a couple things, including a rug to use as a blanket in the desert that night. I went in the first round of 4 wheel drive vehicles into the desert to our campsite that evening and we all cleaned and baby proofed the camp area. Out tents were for 8 people, with three sides, the front open to the wild. There were mats to sleep on an a single blanket provided. We were able to go sit on a little dune and watch the sunset which was beautiful, although there was literally not a cloud in the sky and so the colors were not thrown around as much as usual. It got dark pretty quickly after and we all sat to eat dinner prepared by the three Tunisian men who lived at the campsite. We sat at short tables, crosslegged in the sand. Ask anyone there…we decided that the food we ate that night was the best meal we ate in Tunisia, even though we were in different 4 and 5 star hotels everyday for lunch and dinner. The best part was the soup they made us. We could barely see it, but we knew it was the red sorta spicy soup that we had eaten before…but these guys made the best bowl we had tasted. We also had the bread with the REALLY hot sauce, lamb and cous cous, and red wine. Quite a desert feast. During dinner three men with drums and that crazy middle eastern flute thing that reminds you of snake charming came out to entertain us. They were awesome. They played all through and after dinner, and belly dancers came out too. After dinner, we all danced around our huge bonfire with the Tunisians. After a while, my friend Melissa and I wanted to go star gaze. The stars in the Sahara are like nothing you can imagine. I did not know it was possible to see that many stars. To Richie and Mikey and anyone else who went to Appalachia, think of the stargazing there and multiply the awesomeness by like 5. They covered the sky, and they were so bright and incredible. They looked 3D and we kept trying to reach up and grab them. I saw constellations I’ve never seen and multiple shooting stars. The darkness out there is overwhelming too. You were literally groping in the pitch black if you didn’t have a flashlight. All these Chicago kids were experiencing quite a difference from the nights in the city….nights that hardly get dark enough for you to sleep what with all the streetlamps and neon signs. We went to listen to Todd and some kids tell some ghost stories that were super lame, and then headed off to bed. I was layered in jeans and sweatpants and a longsleeved shirt, flannel shirt, and sweatshirt with my scarf and the hood pulled up over my head. I got under the blanket and my newly purchased rug from the market. I fell asleep warm but did wake up early in the morning pretty cold. My backpack was my pillow that night.

DAY 6

We awoke at 5:30 when a man walked through the tents calling, “Morgan. Morgan.” And I was thinking, “Who is Morgan? We don’t have a Morgan here.” The second call I heard was Dr. Evers cheery, “Buongiorno!” He later told us that the first man calling for Morgan was German, and was using the German good morning…Guten Morgen I believe? That was pretty funny. Anyway it was still pitch black out and we dragged ourselves to get the coffee and bread they were handing out. The first group left in the 4 wheel drives, and I was with the second group who stayed shivering, waiting for the sunrise. We waited…and it got lighter…but we never go to see the sun due to clouds that had appeared since we went to bed. It was slightly anticlimactic. But the ride back out of the desert was extremely bumpy and fun. We got back to the buses and had about 5 minutes to pee and throw on clean clothes or brush our teeth (while the first group had about an hour to do all that and eat a nice breakfast). Mind you, we still smelled like camel from the afternoon before and had just arisen from a night in the Sahara. We did not smell good. We had to get on the bus early that morning to make the Red Lizard train, a historic train that takes you through gorges and canyons and stuff. I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, but I decided the sights we saw probably looked very similar to it. We played games and watched the scenery on the train. There is one game we had been playing on the busrides that we played on the train. It’s called, “Who am I?” and you have to write a person’s name on paper, trade papers, and stick the paper you receive to your forehead so others can see it and you can’t. Then you have to guess who you are by asking yes or no questions. I got very good at the game and kept getting the most ridiculous people and still guessing correctly in a fairly short amount of time. I got people like Samuel L. Jackson, Enrique Iglesias, Bloody Mary, St. Ignatius Loyola, and then my favorite…someone wrote one that said “Me (my name).” I guessed myself after roughly 5 questions and people flipped out. It was awesome. Here’s my observation about the game. I used my psych major skills without even realizing it. If someone revealed that they wrote the person you were guessing (which was allowed), I would think about the personality of that person (like I kept getting Katie Cushwa’s papers and I know her well enough to know what she would think up). Also, if you watch and listen to what people say when everyone first sticks the papers to their heads, you can gain valuable clues. People got really excited and even took a picture of me with the final paper stuck to my forehead, the one that simply said, “Me” on it. So everyone, we’ll play when I get home. Practice for now.

After the train, we made a quick roadside stop at this natural salt lake. The area looked snowy because of the salt spread out everywhere. We tasted it. Definitely salt. Definitely. Later that afternoon after lunch, the 4 wheel drives took a group of us out to hike a bit in this canyon and mountainy area. The views were nuts. We were able to look over and see Algeria. At dinner, I ended up at a table with two of the SLAs who bought a nice bottle of Tunisian red wine for us which that was pretty nice. That night the power went out in the hotel but everyone was basically just going to bed early anyway for the first time on the trip. Katie came into the room last that night to find Brooke and I passed out in bed with the door open and all the lights on. The power had gone back on after we fell asleep, and apparently the doors all swung open and the lights all shot back on. It just looked kinda weird to Katie when she got back…we must have been pretty dead.

DAY 7

After a breakfast which included sugar crepes (oh yes), we went back in the 4 wheel drive vehicles for an extra non-planned trip to these dunes an hour and a half into the desert as well as some more filming sites from Star Wars. This little adventure was added extra by one of our two Tunisian tour guides who were with us the whole trip. The guy said that our group was one of the best he could remember (I guess they do this every year with the JFRC) and thought that this year was going so well that he added this extra little excursion just for us. Todd confirmed that he had never been to this place before. Our ride out was so incredible…we were off road so much and our drivers drove us up and over these dunes so that we were riding down these huge dips like we were on a rollercoaster. My new plan in life is to design a rollercoaster based on the Saharan experience. Because this was like more intense that a rollercoaster. Wow. You’ll have to see the pictures I took of the cars riding down the dunes to understand…

We ended up at a 60 meter tall rocky dune thinger that we got to climb. The top was really windy and FREEZING and we climbed back down pretty quickly. Next was the little village of Star Wars stuff…gosh I wish I knew anything about Star wars but I don’t and can’t tell you what scene this stuff was from. But anyway, it was still cool. The lunch we ate was at this famous and beautiful Oriental palace hotel. The market we ended up at that afternoon was obnoxious because the guys were extra pushy and pretty unwilling to lower their prices to your price. So I didn’t get anything there. We saw more Roman ruins briefly, but it was pretty cold. We all wondered how we could be so cold in Africa (the first couple of days were sunny and warm). The hotel that night was gorgeous, and the rooms had beautiful Tunisian tiles covering the walls and bathroom (tiling is huge and a main form of art in Tunisia). The dinner was one of the best and Todd sat at our little table that evening, telling us that we would buy the wine that night. What a nice guy. He floats between tables constantly, trying to eat with different students everyday (not just on the trip, but at school in the cafeteria too). That hotel had a little spa, and me and a couple of girls went in to try out Hammam, a Turkish bath type of thing…basically just an intense steam room. It was cheap and felt great after being so dirty from the desert the night before. The people working there were really funny and gave us their traditional citron-almond flavored juice drink when we were done in the steam room. One of the men said I looked like an Arab woman…I was confused and amused.

DAY 8

We went to Kairouan (“Tunisia’s holiest city and one of the most important sites for Islamic pilgrimages in North Africa”), and visited the Great Mosque and then checked out this special rug store that explained how the different Tunisian rugs were made. We saw a woman weaving right there in the store, and were told that that rug she was working on takes 6 months to complete. Some of the rugs were so complex and intricate…let’s just say the rugs were not cheap. The most expensive one was 10,000 dollars. We checked out a nearby market where I almost fought a man to the death for a souvenir for someone. I walked out of his shop when he didn’t want to give me his price, and he tricked me by saying ok, only to try to give me something smaller. I said no and attempted to leave, but he insisted I stay and tried to make deals with me, but I was looking for a specific price and would not leave without reaching it. In the end, I did win, and it felt like quite the victory. He tried to latch onto my arm and block me into the shop. He was a fighter. They honestly just try to annoy the heck out of you so that you will just buy something to be able to leave their shops. But he didn’t count on my stubbornness. Mahahahaa. That night we headed to our final city of Hammamet and stayed at the sweetest resort hotel, the Hotel Paradis. It had crazy hude outdoor pools with bridges over it at some parts, as well as a kids playground with a trampoline, horsebackriding, archery, volleyball, and an indoor heated pool. Man it was intense. We swam inside the first day and took a couple daring dashes outside to jump into the big fancy pool even thought it was cold and the water was ICE, before running back inside to jump into the warm pool again. That night Todd organized a night on the town for us. He got us to this Cuban club for dancing, and it was a blast. We danced like fools.

DAY 9

The final full day, and the only day with no plans. We were free to relax and hang out in this awesome hotel all day long. We woke up and some of us went to the Medina for our final market purchases. I got another beautiful blue silky rug from a man named Abdul who wanted me to give him a kiss and told Katie and I that we couldn’t leave him until we had tea with him (“It’s tradition” he said). We said no way and demanded he bring us our change but he had a little more fun with us and took us to his buddie’s shops to wait while he found us change. Some guys really know how to sell I guess. We avoided a bunch of other annoying guys there…I had another arm grab and some other man kiss my hand repeatedly until I tore it away while walking by. Observations from all the markets: the salespeople will call out, “American!” when they see you. They know who you are. If not, they always ask where you are from. We still said Canada a lot. There is so much chanting coming your way, and after being in so many markets you know how they work and how to buy and how to avoid annoying situations. You gain a lot of confidence after being in so many markets. I felt so accomplished by the time I left! That afternoon we swam more…Brooke and I first took a jump into the Mediterranean which was freezing, but we knew we had to do it. After a couple more dips, we spent the remainder of the afternoon all the way till dinner in the indoor pool. After dinner, a group of us formed in the hotel hookah bar. It was a nice and relaxing evening. There was a little more dancing in the bar after we got kicked out of the hookah bar (stayed until past closing), and we met some people from Portugal. Brooke and I ended up staying up all night with a small group of the guys from Lisbon, and we just discussed culture the entire night on the beach. They told us about Portugal and gave us their opinions of our country and again, told us that we were good and mature girls and they had no problem with us. It was great because I was hearing mentions of human respect and dignity from one guy, as we discussed racism, politics, health care, homosexuality, money, and television and advertising (all the guys were studying advertising). They kept stressing how important it was not to judge people by what country they came from, or what kind of government they had. They said that culture was everything. This all-nighter full of conversation was one of the coolest parts of the trip. It was like a sum up of what this semester is all about. Brooke and I also were impressed with these guys…we never felt uncomfortable or creeped out by them. They were very respectful and we felt completely equal with them…it was rather surprising. A lot of the men we had encountered on the trip were cat calling or making nasty comments about the American girls, but these guys were exceptional. We knew that breakfast was opening extra early for us that next morning because we were leaving at 5:30, so Brooke and I invited the guys to join us for breakfast at 4:30 am. The other students walked in kind of gaping at us, figuring out what we had been up to all night. Todd came in and walked over to introduce himself (I bet he was a little curious about what we were doing with these guys. He really is like our dad. He actually told a shopkeeper that all the girls in the shop with him were his daughters one time). At the end of breakfast, one of the guys ran up and brought down one of the black and white checkered scarfs for Brooke because she had mentioned regretting not buying one. He just handed it over to her. She was so excited. We left them with the double cheek kiss—I really wish we did that in the US.

March 9

DAY 10

We flew home…to Rome. Getting back to the JFRC, the 90 of us who had gone realized how amazing the trip had been and knew that we had this special bond that the other half of the school didn’t. I now feel a lot more comfortable with the kids here, because I literally do know half of the school now. And I can walk down and eat lunch or dinner with any of them and feel comfortable. The guy I sat next to on the plane ride home discussed how the JFRC had been very clique-y, which we were all aware of but hadn’t been able to break. Tunisia kind of broke the ice. I feel like everyone made new friends. Today, my first day back, felt completely different than all the days before spring break. Everyone feels more at home. As home as you can feel in a foreign country…

That was my trip. I realize that this is so long you want to curl up and die (ten pages on Microsoft word to be exact), but I’m sorry. It was ten action packed days. Ten life changing days. I loved Tunisia, and I am so happy I decided to go…I was not originally considering it. I can’t imagine missing such an experience. Whoa baby. WHOA BABY.