L'Arrivée à Tunis

Where to begin.... there's nowhere to begin, but if I start thinking about that I'll end up sitting in our apartment all day with flies buzzing in and out of my open mouth.

We are in Tunis, Ryan and I, and can be reached/visited at the following...

Résidence El Houda
Nord Hilton
Bloc D 3/1
1002 Belvedère. Tunis.
TUNISIE

At the end of three days we had an apartment, jobs, and a social schedule too booked to believe. Granted, the apartment is a little scuzzy, the jobs don't start until June 9, and the social schedule involves constantly wondering who you can trust (no one? everyone?) and scheming how to evade the undesirables. I apologize that this is a ridiculously boring account that doesn't begin to do justice to the past few days. Highlights:

*Haley and Ryan take a 22 hour boat ride from Marseille to Tunis and note remarkable similarities between these two cities. We arrived around 10 Sunday morning and were duped into paying 4 times too much for the taxi from the port to the hotel. Classic wetbacks

*Monday we went to Institut Bourghiba School (of redundancy) and verified we were signed up for Arabic classes in July, etc. There we met Saif and Tarek, who decided to take our apartment search personally. Saif allegedly found an apartment for some Italians last month who never got over this  kindness. 8 hours later we parted ways, still with no apartment. We felt almost guilty about it, but nothing was what we were looking for. We did see a decadent apartment with 3 balconies, 2 living rooms and a view of all of Tunis. But after careful consideration we decided that this was ridiculous and we could certainly find cheaper.

*Tuesday we found cheaper. Andreas the Austrian knows Omer the Macedonian who's married to Machin the Tunisian who's mother has an apartment to rent with no contract for 500 DT a month (417 dollars). Divided by three it's...cheap. And it's not far from A) work B) lots of chicha bars C) downtown D) the Sheradon. Andreas became our flatmate.  

 Chicha bar with Saif and Tarek

*Tuesday I also sprained my foot. And ate a really big sausage.

 
*Wednesday we moved in, observed classes at Amideast where we'll be working teaching English to kids, and went out with Andreas and Omer. At the party I spent most of the time talking to a beautiful French Algerian who is a free lance news correspondant in Iraq when he's not studying Arabic in  Tunis. He looked the part. I felt like he should have been carrying around a mic and a cardboard TV frame. His novel about American soldiers in Iraq came out last week. Bien sur.

*Thursday we went grocery shopping and started the futile process of cleaning the apartment, with the help of Judy the Cleaning Monkey. She does laundry, toilets, surfaces, dishes.... anything you want, JUDY does. (this cleaning product has a picture of a monkey on it and comes in 'Force océan' or 'citron'. We chose 'force océan'.)

 Haley and Judy

Ryan and Dinars

 Ry's room

*Thursday we also decided that the official food of Tunisia is Tuna. Everything you get comes with tuna: pizza, salad of any kind, olive oil and harrissa. Bring on the mercury. Welcome to Tunasia, have a brik à thon.

*Here we are, it's Friday, my foot is entirely healed, and we're about to go to Tarek's for couscous.

*Oh, and it's hot. Go go gadget sunblock.