Cruise Day 6 – Tunis.
For the first time this trip, we were docked in a country that was not a member of the European Union, which meant we needed our passports and something called a “landing card”, which was distributed the night before. We knew that Tunisia was a Muslim country, and therefore there were issues with the dress code. Our cruise pamphlet gave some conflicting information – “cover bare skin” in one place, and “no shorts or tank tops” in another. Did this also mean long sleeve shirts? The front desk was no help. We decided that collared T-shirts and jeans would have to be good enough. Not looking forward to wearing full-length jeans in 90-degree heat.
One thing I did do – I took off my Magen David (Jewish star) necklace that’s always around my neck. Not being sure how this particular Muslim country feels about Jews, I decided not to make myself obvious. Or so I thought.
We did find out what the Haunting of the Hall was all about – the cabin across the hall has a verandah, and apparently when the verandah door is open, it causes the whistling sound like blowing across the top of a bottle. We could not fathom why this was not annoying anybody else besides us, including the people with the whistling door! At any rate, as we walked by that cabin, we saw staff with drills working on the door.
When we got to breakfast, we offered to share a table. The waiter tried to sit another couple with us, but they oddly begged off sitting with us (“We don’t want to intrude”), so they were seated at a different table. Hmmm, do we offend? A few minutes later another couple was seated with them, though they did seem to know them somewhat.
We met the rest of the tour group in the Vista lounge. As we were starting to walk to the gangplank, thankfully Andy realized I had left behind my walking stick. He ran up to the room to retrieve it for me (what a good husband!), getting grief from the tour director for holding up the bus. Turned out we weren’t even the last people to board the bus!
After walking off the gangplank, we walked through a customs building, where the officials took half of our land cards – and we kept the other half with our passports.
Another bit of confusion was the currency situation – the official currency of Tunisia is the Tunisian dinar, which nobody on the bus had. Our ship’s pamphlet said they would take US dollars, so Andy left his Euros behind. But the day’s tour guide (Mohammed) said we should use Euros. Whoops. Turns out that it really didn’t matter – people would take just about any kind of hard currency.
Mohammed’s English was flawless. The first thing we noticed was that A LOT of people had either not read or totally ignored all the instructions about not wearing shorts/tank tops/bare shoulders. Then again, I noticed one woman in our group who had on a long sleeved shirt, in addition to her full-length jeans. Mohammed never said a word about it, and it didn’t seem to matter at all the entire day – if you paid in cash, nobody cared HOW you were dressed.
Mohammed did promise lots of bathroom breaks wherever we went, an issue that is of course close to my heart.
Our first two stops were in Carthage, and Roman ancient city ("Carthage" means "new city"). Our first surprise was that Carthage is still a functioning city – everybody’s impression (including me) is that it’s just a pile of Roman ruins. But it’s quite a normal town, with nice apartment buildings built on top of even more undiscovered Roman ruins.
The first stop in Carthage showed us some headstones from the pre-Roman era. Somehow this is not what we were expecting.
What Mohammed failed to mention is even though there are plenty of bathrooms, most of the time there’s a bathroom attendant who expects some kind of tip. And I had no US coinage and only 1 Euro coins. Therefore, I gave them $1 bills - $1 being cheaper than 1 Euro. I was sure I had probably doubled the attendants’ income for the week with my crummy $1.
The second stop was at the Roman Imperial baths. This was more impressive (at least I thought so, not sure about Andy). We had a little time to wander around on our own and take photos (except we were instructed to NOT take a photo of the white walls we saw above the ruins – that is the wall surrounding the Presidential palace, and it’s forbidden to take a picture of it. Ok, then). Mohammend kinda pushed us along (“If there’s no bathroom emergency, let’s continue on to the Bardo museum, since there are bathrooms right there”), so back onto the bus we went.
Once we got to the Bardo museum, we saw the placed was mobbed. Once again Mohammed wanted to hurry us along (“Are there any bathroom emergencies? No?-good-let’s go!”) giving me no time to interject. And since I had skipped the bathroom break in Carthage, and it was a 25-minute drive to the museum, it was now essential that I make a pit stop. I was annoyed that I was being pressured to skip this stop as well. But no matter, I had to go, so I asked Mohammed where the bathroom was. It was easy to find, but Mohammed said I would have to catch up to the group. Nice, thank you for your kind consideration.
I was in a bit of a hurry as I scooted passed the shops on the way to the WC, and right past the attendant lady who had her hand out stretched. However, I made up for my rudeness on my way out – when I gave her a $1 bill, her face lit up and she blew me a kiss! Oy, kinda sad that $1 should make such a difference. On the other hand, I’m glad I gave her $1, if it helped her make a living.
It took Andy and I a couple of minutes to find our group in the crowd inside the museum.
The Bardo museum is amazing - by far the best part of the day. It contains Roman mosaics from all over Tunisia. Unfortunately, some of the galleries were being renovated, so we were only able to see a part of what we were supposed visit. Andy went all the way up to the third floor to see the mosaics up there and take photos.
Even though it was already close to noon, we were not yet going to lunch. One thing about Mohammed – he said the same thing over and over again, but it seemed that it was slightly different with each repetition, leaving us in total confusion as to exactly what was going on – what was the sequence and time frame of the course of the day. So we actually had NO idea when lunch would be. Or where, either, for that matter.
As the bus rolled along, Mohammed gave us the “Tunis is the most wonderful country on earth” lecture – the equality of women (high percentage of women in the universities and in parliament, the banning of the chador and burqa), free university (for those who qualify), the high literacy rate, free health care – on and on – except there’s 14% unemployment (with a significant number of people trying to enter Italy illegally to get jobs), and a lot of people who live in unfinished houses because they can’t afford the material to finish them (it can take upwards of 20 years to finish a house). And lots of women in the streets with covered faces.
Oh and their president, Mr Ben Ali (who’s photo is anywhere and everywhere, with his arms in odd poses and a beneficent smile on his face – and (as we read in a book before we left - who took over from his predecessor in a bloodless coup about 15 years ago) keeps getting re-elected with 95% of the vote, because the people would rather vote for people they know than anybody from the obscure 6 other political parties (who probably never get elected to anything). Of course, Mohammed failed to mention that people who speak out against Mr Ben Ali manage to find themselves in prison.
And oh yes, though Tunisia may be a Muslim country, Christians and Jews live there in perfect harmony – apparently there’s 365,000 Jews in Tunisia and the world’s oldest functional synagogue is located there (not anywhere near where we were headed, though), dating from several hundred years BCE. Now THAT would have been really interesting to see.
So we headed towards the town of Medina and its market place. Mohammed told us about haggling (you have to haggle for Every. Single. Item.), but don’t buy gold, because there’s not enough time to have the gold item certified by the government that it is what the vendor says it is.
Mohammed lead us through the souk (“shuk”), directly to a carpet vendor. After seeing a couple of weavers working away at their looms, and an explanation about the wonderful quality of all the carpets in this particular store, we are corralled into a nicely air conditioned room and served sweet tea with mint. And then the parade of carpets begins – gorgeous, gorgeous carpets, of never-ending variety of colors, patterns and sizes. And so, so, so soft….Within a few minutes the first one is sold without a whole lot of haggling. One of the carpets is described as having the design of the mosaic displayed in the ancient synagogue. For some reason the sales guy is looking straight at me when he says this. Hmmmm….
Eventually we can’t resist the pull of the beauty and quality of theses rugs, so the negotiations begin over a small (maybe 4’ by 5’?) silk rug with 1,000,000 knots per square meter. We don’t make rapid progress, since the original price is $1200 and true to standard haggling protocol, Andy counters with a low-ball $500. Since we weren’t even sure which rug we were interested in, we are scooted off to a private room (we know we’re in trouble now) and 5 or 6 more rugs appear, until we find one we can be serious about. Except the price won’t budge below $950, which is still more than we wanted to spend. They go on and on and on about the quality of the work, the hand craft work, the million knots per square meter….yada yada yada, we agree with all of this, we don’t dispute the craftsmanship (or craft-woman-ship, rather), we agree it is beautiful….but we don’t budge either. The salesman then launches into how well Tunisia treats it’s Jews (seriously, DO WE LOOK THAT JEWISH?!?!?!), which we agree is wonderful…but we don’t budge. We know our tour guide and the bus are waiting for us, so we sit tight. Suddenly, salesman’s boss shows up, who indicates that the morning has brought in $4350, so he offers us the rug for $650 to round out his sales for the day at $5,000. Deal!
I go off to pay for it (thank God for VISA), while a guy bundles it up for us. The sales guy tells Andy to tip Mr Wrap-it-up because he’s getting married that weekend (we’re betting Mr Wrap-it-up is constantly in a state of “getting married this weekend” and has been for years). Andy gives Mr Wrap-it-Up $5, but Sales-guy says, “Give him another $5!” Andy says, “Nope, $5 is the standard tip in the US”. They are not happy, but oh well. We just spent $650. Deal with it. Sheesh.
It turned out that the bus is NOT being held up for us – we still have yet another 15 minutes to shop in the souk. Except we don’t, because we’re exhausted from the rug transaction. I personally was in no mood to haggle again, even though I saw some interesting elephants.
Finally we are on our way to lunch back in Carthage. The restaurant has a buffet with chicken, various salads (they looked like Israeli salads, with small chopped pieces of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers) and date cookies and watermelon for dessert. Though not the most exciting fare, it definitely had taste – a vast improvement over the dead lasagna we had in Tuscany. While we ate, we chatted with other people at the table who had also bought a rug. They asked us if we haggled for the carpet, and we said, yes we did, that we got them to come down to almost half the original price. They were astounded. So even though we have NO idea if we got an actual good price for the rug, we know we did a better than everybody else on our trip. All we know is this rug will never touch the floor!
Back on the bus, we head towards Sidi Bou Said (“SEE-dee bah-YOO sah-YEED”), a rather upscale town. Mohammed recommends that we not buy things here, because all the prices are jacked way up, but at the top of the hill is a beautiful view.
So up the hill we go – once again an amazingly steep hill. Every step along the way, a vendor pops out of his door, sees the stupid “Bus #6“ sticker on our shirts that screams “TOURIST!” and starts with his routine: “Hey, number seeeeks, got very good deeeel, special for youuuuuu, fifty percent off! Just for youuuuu, just for youuuuu, come inside, come inside…” A veritable gauntlet, that makes the agonizing climb (in the searing heat while wearing long jeans) just a joy to behold. Basically Sidi Bou Said is just another souk. Maybe a better class souk than the one in Medina, but still a souk.
What is unique about Sidi Bou Said is the way all the houses are painted white, with a brilliant blue trim. On our climb up the hill, we stop a couple of times to take photos of particularly beautiful doors.
The reward for the long climb is a beautiful view of the sea. But we don’t stay long, because we have to run the gauntlet all the way down hill to meet the bus.
Once back on the bus, we are essentially done for the day. Mohammed takes the opportunity to tell us about the rigors of a public education in Tunisia – how all children learn Arabic and French (both are official languages) and now English is being added to the curriculum.
Back at the bus terminal, we walk through the customs building on the way back to the gangplank – there are all sorts of duty-free shops, but we just keep on going, too pooped to pop.
At the bottom of the gangplank, there are camel rides and a folk band. We have no interest in riding a camel, but it sure is fun watching other people doing it!
Back in our cabin, we finally get to cool off. That evening is the second formal night of the week. Our dinner companions were Lillian and Brian from Toronto, and Bette (“bet”) and Stan from New Zealand. Wonderful dinner conversation!
The show that evening was a “Las Vegas Revue” – I don’t remember much of it, because I struggled to stay awake the entire time.
Tomorrow – a day at sea on our way back to Barcelona.
No comments:
Post a Comment