The lightning reflected off the table’s green, empty bottles of Celtia: Tunisian beer. Across the harissa, bread and soft cheese laden table, my new Irish-Tunisian friend Najet was laughing hard, and explaining the joke originally said in Arabic. I was already laughing, it was easy with the company. The storm kept raging outside, I was 6,000 miles from home, next to two chocolatiers and a “fucker.” To my left, Husam, across from me, Malek: two engineers in a local chocolate complex. And to my right, the Fakher, pronounced “faw-Kh-er.” Unless you are Husam, and then it’s definitely “fucker.”
We had met before in the Al Hana, The International Hotel, in downtown Tunis, on the central Avenue Habib Bourguiba. On the tenth floor, The Jamaican is a bar with an unmatched view (so far) of Tunis proper, from Lac de Tunis to the hills in the west. I had arranged to meet Najet at the bar through our mutual friend Susan, and she was a welcome blast of sass and easy laughter. Husam and Malek joined us, and we quickly found out we’re all rock ‘n rollers. I’ve never sang as much as I have since arriving in Tunis; a truly universal language.
We ran through the flash floods of an urban landscape, coats overhead and yelling. Left, right, straight, under, left, left, right. Up the stairs and into warmth, cheap beers, and then, we meet the Fakher. He’s from Sfax, works for a bank, and had brought Najet and I tickets to see Ray Gelato in Gammarth: the opening night of the Carthage Jazz Festival.
We piled into Malek’s hatchback and hit the road, which quickly became a river on the way east on the La Marsa highway. Traffic slowed as the water reached a foot and a half high. As we pulled up to the gates, Fakher called to say there was no more parking in the venue.
“Quick, talk in American,” Najet said as we pulled up to a guard post. Loudly, she and I began talking about the stock market, the subtelties of Tetris, and politics. Malek and Husam in the front were talking in slow, fluid French. The parking guard crouched down, looked at Najet and I and waved us through. Najet leaned in: “They are pretending they are our drivers.”
Ten minutes later I was struggling through an opulent hotel, desperate for a toilette. Relief, a brief study of the German and French tourist families and the exquisitely red and black dressed staff, and then I headed towards the concert. Quincy Jone’s Soul Bossa Nova reminding me of home.
Ray Gelato is a vocalist and saxophone player with good pipes, if a tried style. Husam, Malek and Najet did not want to follow the scene: everyone else was seated politely. After talking to the cute waitstaff, Husam took me to get beers as Gelato’s group bit into a Count Basie tribute. Not cheap, but needed in the smarmy, gelatinous schmooze. I took photos, and we laughed all night long.
The first week at Bourguiba has been rough and expanding. From 8 am to 1 pm, I am surrounded by the world: Adnan the Nigerian, Marion from Strasburg, Ayida the Parisian-Tunisian, the Milanese Valerio, Costanza from Italy, Sung Hi and Rafa from Taiwan, Nora from Wisconsin. Next to school is a cafe named Yasmine where espresso is cheap and sugar plentiful, and a bakery half a block away sells buttery pastries of egg and tuna. Lunches are a polyglot affair where I am grateful for, and also saddened by, the hegemony of my native language. We frequent one of Giorgia’s establishments: a small resturaunt serving a 5 dinar, three course meal with chai binyani on the house. I’ve become quite a fan of French bread, olive oil, and harissa, a paste made with spicy red peppers and scant garlic and onions.
After lunch, Giorgia has organized study sessions at our house in El Omrane. The first day, Valerio and I studied for five hours. And I still didn’t do well in the speaking part of class the following morning. Marion came over the next time and brought dates, meatier and less sugary than their fellows back home. I am amazed by the language abilities of my friends here. Marion, for instance, can switch between Italian, German, French and English with ease while staying sweet.
She, Ayida, and I had decided to try another resturaunt than the 5 dinar caloric rush, and went to a more traditional kitchen. On the way, a bird shit on Ayida’s eyebrow stud, and when I told her it was considered good luck, she might’ve believed me. When our steaming bowls came in the linoleum and tile resturaunt, packed with Tunisian men, Ayida sent back her chicken. It was too small. The next was plump and the same price. Najet explained the practice two days later over the green beers during the thunderstorm.
“Everything in Tunisia is negotiable,” she said.
After school one day, Valerio and Giorgia and I headed out to buy some DVDs. I wanted to get the Yacoubian Building after starting it with Kemal, and his advisement to watch Arabic films with English subtitles. We walked down Ave Liberte and found many shops selling pirated DVDs, but nothing that catered to our educational ambitions. Asking around, we found a two-story shop crammed full of cheap reprints of movies. All the Rambos, Michael Jackson concerts, Disney, Steven Seagal, and all the latest movies were on display, their titles a warbled French-Arabic-English. I’ll go back soon, but right now the Hellboy Anime, the Yacoubian Building, and Madagascar are on my room’s que.
Right down the street from the DVD shop, Giorgia took us to another familiar place: a used bookstore. The owner was reading as we entered, black sweater vest under a grey coat. He twitched his grey moustache as he turned on the lights, revealing piles of pages and clouds of dust. I breathed in deep and ran my left hand over a children’s story of Saladin. A loud cranking drew me out of my examinations: the owner was opening a garage door in the back of the shop. Sunlight and heat poured through the opening. As it became warmer and brighter, my eyes adjusted to a welcome scene: an Armageddon stockpile of tomes. Valerio, Giorgia and I smiled at each other with our eyes and plunged in, staining our hands grey with the ages of literal treasures.
Thursday was Martyr’s day, a commemoration of the sacrifices against French rule. For us students, it meant sleeping in and going to new territory. Giorgia, Didier and I left El Omrane around eleven, on a relatively straight line to the old medina. We entered on the north side, walking past people clad in black heading to prayer, merchants selling hardware parts and old electronics. The roads narrowed until stretching one’s arms out would bridge shops, stop traffic and probably earn some light violence. I felt almost like cattle being led down a chute to the slaughter, but soon became overwhelmed by the colors of the merchant’s wares, the styles and variety of the architecture, and the masses.
Everywhere I went, everyone somehow knew I was American. Wonder why.
As we walked, I recognized the face of a man I thought was a student at Bourguiba. Wacel Krir looks like the professor from Tin Tin, wears a top hat and trench coat, speaks Italian, French, Arabic, English, and has a blog in Japanese. He offered to guide us for 5 dinars each, we slowly accepted after he talked about the Zaytouna Mosque for five minutes straight. Zaytouna is an expansive store building with a minaret and a cupola. Pigeons had inhabited the courtyard, which was blocked for us by a mahogany bainster and religious dictate.
“I am assuming you are not Muslim,” Wacel said, diplomatically. “Are you Muslim?”
We followed his top hat down cobble-stone roads to the birthplace of Ibn Khaldoun, a chechia shop where Giorgia donned the goods, and many of the beylical residences of the Mourads. Wacel stopped to talk to a man with a wooden wheel barrow, stocked with vegetables, and at a piece of fennel. The man sliced a cross into it, and traded it for a few millimes. Throughout the day, Wacel would pull the fennel out of his pocket with his long, thin fingers, and chew. We wanted something more substantial, and we followed Wacel to Bab Souka. It was a respite from the crowded alleys of the old medina, with wide lanes and open cafes. We stopped for a meal of round loaves of bread and harrissa, tuna, hard-boiled egg, peppers and onions in a puddle of olive oil. Scrumptious, cheap and quick.
Across the street was the Place de Potiers (I’m checking on this because my notes are garbled). The ceiling was a mathematical pattern of green, blue and black on white, sharp eight-pointed stars and crips Arabic. The main area, with a white cage, was dimly lit by the grey skies filtering in through plate-glass, was empty save two praying women. One wore a hijab and the other a Nike sweater. We gawked at the building's beauty, and left past a candy cart as the storm gathered.
I’m happy to be here, however frustrated with the language barriers. In the long run, it will push my studies, but for now, I’m tired of saying simple sentences and not trading big ideas and rich stories. Cathartic this is, then, my travel account. Tonight, Valerio the Milanese and Didier and I will go to a rock concert near where we live and meet Najet, Malek and Husam. Before that, our Italian chef Giorgia, is trying a Tunisian recipe out. Tomorrow, I get a new cast and doctor, and restart my running here, on the winding paths of Tunis.