Hello dear readers! It is I once again. I apologize for not having updated in a while, but the places I have been had little in the way of internet access and unexpected shutdowns have dashed any hopes of earlier drafts, because I am writing these on notepad, which is not very conducive to successful file recovery. Nevertheless, I will be sure to thrill you with my many tales which I have from the coast of Tunisia!
We last left off on Sunday, when I was in the city of Kairouan, the religious heart of Tunisia. We headed off early as ever, and made our first visit to the Aghlabid Basins, a pair of thousand year old cisterns, just outside of the medina. They're pretty self explanatory as a whole, so I won't linger on them. After this, we visited the Sidi Sahbi Mausoleum, a place of veneration for Abu Zama' al-Balaui, known colloquially as "Muhammad's Barber." This name is somewhat misleading however, as he was really called this because of his tendancy to carry three of Muhammad's hairs around with him. I can't say what exactly he intended to accomplish with this practice, but it wasn't doing any harm, so to each their own I suppose.
The mausoleum was decorated in the Ottoman style, as the pictures will relate, with intricate tiling, plasterwork and chandeliers, and there were some interesting sights such as a man distributing orange water for purification and an eagle tethered to the exterior for some reason. The most interesting thing, however, were the circumcision rituals, of which there were a couple when we visited. They are performed in such a manner: a whole host of children and their parents form a procession, singing, ululating, beating drums and ringing bells. The guest of honor who is around 2-6 years old, dressed in traditional clothes, and presumably ignorant of what he's in for leads the procession, hand in hand with his proud parents. Once they arrive in the main courtyard of the mosque, an imam gives a short sermon, the nature of which I am not aware, as I don't speak Arabic. Hence, they go inside the mosque, and I am told that just as the sorry bugger is getting clipped, they smash open a jar of candy for the other children, so the clamor of the kids and the general piñatic confusion drowns out the screams of pain, (I can't imagine there would be much candy left for the poor lad himself in any case).
After we finished at the Mausoleum, we turned our attention again to the Great Mosque of Kairouan. Unlike the night before, where we just watched the exterior, this time we were able to go inside. I have to say that I am not overly fond of the mosques here, I find that they are a bit dull. The great stone courtyard, surrounded by columns and arches (the former of which, by the way, were stolen from the Romans and haphazardly place around) completely unadorned by artwork or gardens or anything mildly interesting does not inspire any particular love in me. There is usually some sort of calligraphy surrounding the perimeter, but as it is usually carved from the same unpainted stone, and since I can't read Arabic, neither the words nor the lettering is inspiring. I should think that the interior of the mosque, coated with tapestries, lit by oil chandeliers and with intricate woodwork arching on the ceiling overhead would be more to my taste, but alas, converting to Islam simply to admire the interiors seems a bit excessive to me.
Once we concluded our business in the Great Mosque, we made a short stint down to a rug shop which is a favorite of our professor. When we entered, a huge man, who had christened himself Jabba, brought us past a woman painstakingly weaving a rug on an wooden loom and into a room filled with tapestries. There he served us thé à la menthe, and began to show us his wares. His assistants probably threw at least two score rugs on the floor, while he exclaimed the various designs, sizes, materials and thread counts, all while refusing to discuss price as a good host always does. I always am wary of goods that don't come with a price, as it implies that the people who tend to buy it can afford to not be mindful of price. However much time or effort it took these people to weave their own rugs, I am not overly keen to spend several hundred dollars on something someone's going to walk on, and so I myself left without purchase.
Sunday concluded with a lecture on gender in the country, in the same cells which we had smoked hookah the night before.While it certainly was a chic place for a few friends to spend their time, stuffing 31 people into a single cell was a bit more uncomfortable, especially since this seemed to be a particularly enthralling topic for some, who asked questions with no regard for the sore haunches of their class mates. Such is life I suppose.
The next day we departed from our beloved hotel in Kairouan and made south to Sousse. We stopped early in the morning to trek through its medina, with the same rows of tourist trinkets and bootleg clothes as is in every medina, and visited the Great Mosque of Sousse with the same square minaret which you find in North Africa and the same dull unadorned courtyard. The one highlight of Monday morning was the small fort nearby the mosque, called a Ribat. The fortifications themselves climbed several stories, and there was a tall lookout tower which overlooked the port. The path up this narrow turret was a small, dark spiral staircase, slippery with well worn steps through which simultaneously going in opposite directions was nearly impossible, and our huge group very nearly overburdened it with even just a fifth of our number on top of it at once. Some among us, upon reaching the top had to cling tightly to the columns in the center of the tower and sink below the outer wall to block out the delicate height.
Once we finished with the ribat, having had a brief lecture on the founder of modern Tunisia, Bourguiba, on the dusty floor of the castle's former mosque, we headed further along the city, where the plastered brick apartments and old French-built edifices slowly grew sick with the trappings of tourism. We arrived at our hotel, which I deem to be the ugliest building which I have seen on the trip so far. I will detail this atrocity in all its ignoblility in a moment, but first I will describe out afternoon excursion to Bourgiba's tomb. It is not in Sousse, but rather the city of Monastir directly across from a Casaba where Life of Brian was filmed, which we could not visit on account of some recent earthquake damage. The tomb itself takes up the better part of a cemetary, on land which was rather unceremoniously appropriated from the local dead. The approach is rather like the Taj Mahal, with tall minarets flanking the main mausoleum. it is decorated in fine marbles with gilded engravings. The central hall has the tomb itself, which is just for show (he is buried beneath it in the earth, as is Muslim custom), and behind it was an open quoran on a pedestal with an empty chair for whomever would wish to read it (which, since the entire thing was roped off, amounted to no one). Behind the tomb, there is a small museum with various artifacts from his life, as well as the photos from his state visits. A tomb fit for a good prince, as he is often credited.
Now then, as to the hotel. It is a massive structure, and the interior lobby is the height of opulence, coated with marble and glimmering brass chandeliers and littered with tasteful furniture. When you arrive they serve you some beverage which can only be described a melted popsicle. As you fill out your travel information (including, worryingly, your passport information), you begin to notice your fellow guests. They are corpulent individuals, generally, lobster red and wearing far too little over their gaudy swimsuits for anyone's taste. They seem to be Russians and Germans mostly, looking for a little more sun than their pasty white skin can bear. You begin to realize too that these people are only here for the sunny beaches, and care for little else. As you settle in to your room, a dizzying walk from the main lobby, which is hastily built and has all the charm of a Motel 8, you begin to see the fraying seams of the place. Their "all inclusive" policy seems to be lacking in anything exciting or useful, as the spa, most sports, and even the laundry is extra. While they serve free drinks, it is largely vinegar and bathtub gin, and the food there is poorly prepared and devoid of any cuisine which may challenge the delicate palates of the middle-aged middle-class guests who gulp both food and drink down with reckless abandon. In the evening there is an unnerving "cabaret" show (20 dinars extra, of course) for which a few poor sods from the cast were tasked to collect their audience. Over all the experience was that of a modern day lotus-trap, for the weary German middle manager, and I was grateful that the next day was an early morning departure.
We left Sousse at dawn the following morning after a quick breakfast of whatever bread they had bothered to put out at that time of morning. We first visited the Amphitheater at El Jem, which began to flood with tourists even that early in the day. The amphitheater is rather well preserved, and I am sure that I needn't describe it to you in great detail. Among the interesting characters there, however, were a flock of Russians who, with their customary disregard for borders, climbed over the iron fence to make stupid looking poses for the camera on top of the ruins. There was also a rather foul tempered camel owner who would watch for some unsuspecting tourist to take a picture of his beast, before he would rush up and demand of him a dinar for the privilege. The camel, however, was visible from the amphitheater, and so I took several pictures of the animal just to spite him.
After this, we began to make our long trek to the island of Jerba. On the way we visited yet another museum of mosaics, in which I learned a great deal about ants, our guide's university, where we took a picture and then spent half an hour maneuvering our bus out of the miniscule driveway and a ferry which we made use of, much to the amusement of everyone. We arrived to our hotel late that night. It was another tourist trap, the same such as was in Sousse, and while their 15kb/s internet cost 4 dinars to use, it was thankfully devoid of anyone other than our group and a few other token guests, who, being Muslim, were much more sensible about their apparel.
The next day on Jerba was a lazy one, as we had nothing to visit and only a short lecture to attend.
While I myself took the opportunity to do nothing at all (save for vainly writing my first draft of this blog), there was one exciting adventure after dinner. I and three other brave compatriots decided to make a trial of a Turkish bath, known as a Hammam. Many of the girls had gone earlier that day, and had given their approval and we decided to go later in the evening, when the men were bathing. Our guide warned us to go early in the evening, as the baths tend to get a bit too... thorough later at night. So, somewhat wary, we hail a cab and drive into the city, all of us unaware of to where we were going. We are dropped off at a small, sketchy storefront, and we go in. Unfortunately, none of us spoke Arabic, and only one of us spoke French, and so a surly clerk took our money and gave us locker keys directing us to the next room, while several other customers watched incredulously at the gaggle of bewildered Americans strip to their undergarments (of which, foolishly, we only brought a single pair). We were then given heeled sandals, which were too small for all of us directed through a dim, dank labyrinth to the very back of the room, which was hot with steam. There were buckets for water and hot and cold valves, which were as simple as any laundry room faucet, and, as we grew more comfortable with the situation, we began to relax and soak in the steam, splashing and pouring water on ourselves. Soon however, we were called back two at a time and were seated on a raised platform were bathroom attendants, as disrobed as we were and sour from our exceptional ignorance, sat very closely behind us and scrubbed us with coarse rags. We were turned front and back, facing toward them and away from them as they scraped away dead skin, and then they washed us down with soap before directing us to a cold shower to rinse ourselves off. We dried ourselves and waited in the lobby, relieved that all this had been carried out without incident, and then before we were clothed we were given a brief, light massage and rubbed down with olive oil. We returned home, then, our dripping undergarments in bags, happy to have done it and happier still to not do it again.
The following morning we left our underwhelming hotel, and headed into the city in Jerba. Our first stop was the synagogue, the largest in the country and the second most important pilgrimage site after Jerusalem. It was rather unnerving to see armed guards and watchdogs there, but it is probably necessary, what with the truly preposterous amount of antisemitism in Tunisia. I also have to say that it was quite exciting to have to put a yamaka on to enter, as in the mosques only the girls had to put veils on and I felt rather left out. The interior was decorated with beautiful blue tiling and silver work, but I will let the pictures speak for that later.
Once we finished, and stalled in yet another market until lunch, we headed off for the south into Tataouine, which turns out is actually a real place. It was a balmy 105 degrees outside when we arrived in mid afternoon to a beautiful Berber style hotel, which is strikingly similar to the Navajo style ones you would find in the American Southwest. The majority of the day afterwords was spend lounging by the pool, doing laundry (the whole pay per parcel thing took a lot of people off guard, myself included) and generally languishing in the heat. I myself have spent the evening swatting away bugs and watching the half-stray cats run by as I write this, and I now I have nothing more to write. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Tunisia Puns, and I will surely have more updates for you soon enough.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
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