Afrika: [Round Two] Tunisia

[Preface: The following journal writing of an eight day holiday in Tunisia, Afrika  July 8th to 15th, 2013, is presented here completely unedited, as it is written directly from my Fifth journal book. It is [11] hand written pages.]

Afrika - Round Two

   Six months later, Summer 2013...(July 8th to 15th) Elin and I spent eight days in North Afrika, in Hammamet, Tunisia on the Mediterranean. We did this trip charter style, it was our first time doing a charter trip and it'll probably be our last. But we did get a real good cheap price for the flight and hotel, but we didn't have all-inclusive. We left Gardermoen - Oslo on a Monday, our flight was scheduled for 2:55PM but ended up getting delayed for almost two hours. It was about a four hour flight to Tunisia. It was pretty late by the time we checked in to our hotel the Residence La Paix. There we had a studio apartment style room. We dropped our bags off in the room and went to find a restaurant for dinner. We walked a few blocks and ended up at a place called L'Aquarium. We ordered a bottle of red wine, I had a plate of grilled vegetables - sun drenched ripe flavorful tomatoes, onions, eggplant, zucchini squash - it reminded me of the grilled vegetable plates I got in Greece and Albania, except here the plate portion amount was smaller. Elin wanted fish - and she thought she ordered fish but the waiter got things mixed up and she ended up with shrimp instead, and the shrimp plate only had five shrimp on it, also which Elin said the shrimp wasn't so good, didn't seem so fresh. The bill was 88 Dinar, which we found out pretty quickly was over priced for a dinner of such small portions and not so good food.

   The next day - Tuesday, we somehow woke up early at around 7:30AM, but we laid in bed - falling back asleep but not for so much longer, maybe another hour or so. We found out it was only about a fifteen minute walk into the city center area of Hammamet, and to the Medina - (market area). On the walk into town we stopped off at a small sidewalk café - Café Queen - that was owned and run by a young boy and his father, we had breakfast there - croissants, coffee, and fresh made orange juice. We walked around the town center area and by the Medina, we found a bakery and bought a couple of loaves of fresh bread, stopped by a small grocery store to buy cheese, pasta - spaghetti, salt, bottles of water and pineapple juice, and we found a small vegetable stand where we bought fresh tomatoes, onions, zucchini squash, green peppers, garlic, and olive oil. We hit up that vegetable stand a few times - almost an average of every other day. Everyday for breakfast we had coffee, juice, and fresh homemade bruschetta from the bread from the bakery - we toasted the bread right on the hot burner plates of the stove - cut up the fresh tomatoes, sliced the garlic, and added the olive oil and sea salt. It happened to be Ramadan during the week we were there - Ramadan is a Muslim tradition when the Muslim people fast for one month during the day, and they eat around dusk/sundown at about 7PM, they go to the Mosques and pray - prayer chants are broadcast on loud speakers from the Mosques and can be heard all over the city - it reminded me of when we were in Albania. Since it was Ramadan, during the days pretty much all of the restaurants or cafes were closed all day long. Most of the markets, the Medina, and other places were open until 7PM, then everything would close down and people would go home to eat. Everything would open back up again around 9PM - restaurants and cafes. So for about two hours - 7PM - 9PM - it was like a ghost town. The streets were dead. Hardly any traffick, everything closed up, no one walking the sidewalks, in a way it was kind of creepy. I thought it was a bit interesting to be there, in Tunisia, an Afrikan - Muslim country, during Ramadan, to experience the culture - but in the same it was also a little frustrating since we were on holiday and wanted to eat out at restaurants more than we got to do so. When we did eat out, we had some late night dinners - usually between 9 and 10PM. So most of our lunches and dinners we cooked at our little studio apartment room at the hotel. And just like how we made fresh bruschetta for breakfast everyday, our lunches and dinners were pasta - spaghetti, with fresh homemade tomato sauce with onion and garlic, we would fry up the fresh zucchini squash, and also have the fresh bread from the bakery. Those were pretty much our meals everyday, yet it didn't seem to get old or boring to eat bruschetta for breakfast and pasta for lunch and dinner - (reminding me of Kerouac's On The Road).

   July 10th, that Wednesday in the afternoon we took a taxi to the train station with the plan to take the train (Northwest) to the capitol city of Tunis. When we got to the train station we had the taxi driver wait, the station was dead - no one was around, the taxi driver helped us find and track down someone who worked there - it took some time. There were no more trains that day running to Tunis, so we wanted to buy tickets for the 10AM train on Thursday. The guy working at the station couldn't get the computer to work right so we couldn't pre-order the tickets. We just had to wait until the morning. We woke up early - on time on Thursday morning, we thought - had the idea that maybe the train station would be crowded in the morning and there could be a long line. The taxi got us to the station around 9:15AM, and again it was dead. No long line. We had planned on staying one night at a hotel in Tunis and going back to Hammamet on Friday, so we had packed some clothes in Elin's rugsack backpack. We had forty-five minutes to wait. The train ended up being an hour late. We didn't leave the station until 11AM. It was about an hour train ride to Tunis. When we got to the station in Tunis, we went to the information desk to ask about hotels with swimming pools in the city but it turned out that none of the hotels in the city center had pools. The lady working the desk told us we should go to Hammamet, which was already where we were staying. So we decided not to stay the night in Tunis - just spend the afternoon. The station had baggage lockers, so we rented one and put Elin's rugsack in a locker. Then we realized we needed to go back to the ticket counter to buy return tickets and check the train times back to Hammamet. The last train back was at 3PM. Basically, we ended up having only about two and a half hours of that Friday afternoon in Tunis. We took a taxi straight to the Medina. As we were crossing the street some kind of altercation - argument broke out between a taxi driver and another driver, it was almost a fist fight, lots of yelling, the cops showed up to break it up. The building near the Medina was under some kind of construction, there were fences and razor wire all around, with police and armed guards - military style. It seemed crazy. The Medina was huge, crowded. We walked around, did our shopping. We bought a few ceramic - pottery bowls, a couple of carpets, a nice leather bag, and Elin was trying on some leather sandals - she wasn't sure at first if she really wanted to buy them but then one of the straps on the sandals she was already wearing broke, so she had no choice but to buy new sandals. I only got a chance to shoot a few photos, not as much as I wanted to. Not because I was afraid to take my camera out in the crowded Medina, but because we had kind of a lot of bags to carry from the shopping we had done. We left the Medina and hailed a taxi around 2:40PM and made it back to the train station with just enough time to get the rugsack from the locker and catch the 3PM train back to Hammamet. (Now, I really can't remember if it was on Friday or Saturday...it may have been on Friday.) Anyway - in the evening, sometime between 5 and 6PM we took a taxi to Nabeul. We wanted to check out the town and Medina there. Right after the taxi dropped us off and we started to walk around, we kept getting hit up by other taxi drivers telling us it was not a good time to be in Nabeul because everything would be closing up soon for Ramadan - they kept asking us if we wanted to go somewhere else. We walked around the town center for a little while, it was close to 7PM and everyplace was starting to close up for Ramadan, we found one café that was staying open but they weren't making everything that was on the menu. They were only offering couscous, salad, and brick - which is traditional Muslim - Tunisia, it's almost like a quesadilla type with chicken, veggies, cheese. We ate there. We both had salads, shared a bowl of couscous, and Elin had a brick. The café got crowded with people eating their Ramadan dinner. There was a Mosque a few blocks up on the same street as the café, as we ate we listened to the prayer chants from the Mosque, it was peaceful. After dinner we went to another café for coffee, then we went to the Medina. We ended up buying some more ceramic pottery bowls.

   The remaining few days in Hammamet we just relaxed, sitting at the beach, sunbathing, swimming in the Mediterranean sea, drinking beer. Our last morning at the La Paix we decided to check out the breakfast buffet - (now, as I wrote at the beginning of this story, this was a charter trip but it was not all-inclusive) - of course we knew we would have to pay for the breakfast - which turned out to be not good at all - in the end, we ended up skipping out on the breakfast check - not paying.