We’re doing something a little different this time. Up until now, we’ve concentrated on staying in the center wherever we are, either hard by or right in the zocalo or Medina. That kind of took its toll in Marrakech, as the Medina was super crowded and jangly.

The sting was supposed to be taken out of that by the light rail system (TGM: Tunis-Goulette-Marsa) that runs literally behind our apartment. The Airbnb reviews were pretty clear that you can hear that lonesome train rumble past, but it’s just not an issue. The train’s relatively smooth Doppler is easy to ignore, as opposed to the random spikes of shouting, fighting, and singing (sometimes all at once) that peppered the air outside our apartment in Marrakech’s Medina. Until all hours.

That red bar below the Khereddine station in the map above is the point past which the trains aren’t running right now. We’re headed southbound for our first trip to the Medina and the train just stops, no announcement, and everyone debarks. We’re not sure what’s happening, so we finally get out when we realize there’s no driver in the train, so it can’t exactly leave without us if it starts back up again. We go to the station agent, who explains to us, largely through gestures, as neither our Arabic or French is up to the task, that we have to walk to the next station.

On the return trip we got picked up by some rando at the Tunis train station who tried to get us on a bus instead of the train. We were having none of it, being seasoned travelers and recognizing a scam when we see one. We’d take the train as far north as we could, and then either walk to the next station or take a taxi. Can’t trick us onto a bus.

Sadly, when I asked for deux billets a Byrsa, I was handed tickets and told to take the bus. That may be the first time I’ve ever taken a bus sheepishly. It’s also the first municipal bus we’ve taken on our travels. We’ve taken coaches to get from one city to the next, but this is the first bus bus we’ve taken. It was… fine. Just what you’d expect: crowded and jouncy.

Thank goodness the taxis are cheap here, and easy to call with their local Uber equivalent, Bolt. We’ll use the TGM for our side of the burbs (the fare is 16¢), but it’s only a $4-5 cab ride to the Medina. We don’t score points for making it harder than necessary, so taxis it is.

Ramadan

So far, our entire experience of Tunisia has been colored by Ramadan, which started the day after we arrived. Or at least it did here. Fun fact about Ramadan: it starts whenever the local religious authorities spot the crescent moon that signifies the new lunar month. In theory, Saudi Arabia’s Majmaah University Astronomical Observatory is supposed to be the official arbiter, but in practice localities often go their own way. Cloudy? Can’t see the moon? I guess Ramadan hasn’t quite started yet.

But it has officially started here, and things seem very slow. We have literally nothing to compare it to, since it coincided with our arrival, but shops aren’t open at all during the day, at least out in the burbs. We visited the Medina, which was its own kind of fail, and it seemed that merchants were largely open for business. Out here the little convenience stores are open, but not much else.

We waited for a late dinner one night, hoping to go out to a restaurant in our neighborhood after sundown. We’d seen a few open on evening walks, but we hadn’t noticed that the people sitting there were only drinking tea. No food was being served.

The narrative we’ve settled on is that breaking fast for Ramadan is a big family deal, so people don’t eat out. After that, gentlemen retire to the cafes for tea and conversation. But whatever the reason, we’ve home cooked all but two meals since we’ve been here. We don’t like eating out all the time like tourists, but never seems like the wrong cadence.

By the way, you can buy alcohol in Tunisia. Not big fans themselves, but they’re happy for you to do you. Except… during Ramadan. So, as if enough insult hadn’t been heaped upon injury, we’re dry for Ramadan, too. One of our goals for travel has been to stay long enough in each place that we had no choice but to fall into the local rhythms and live as much like locals as possible. Done and done for Tunisia.

Despite the tourist attractions, Carthage feels very residential and suburban. We expect that the areas that most cater to tourists are more active. We’ve been told that the Medina comes alive at night during Ramadan, which claim we were forced to check for veracity.

Iftar

Iftar is the evening meal that breaks Ramadan’s day-long fast, and it’s a corker. We went to a luxury hotel in La Marsa for iftar, and it reminded us of nothing so much as the Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach/Little Odessa, where the only choice is what quality of vodka you want. The dishes just arrive, and keep coming. Here, the only option was meat or fish for the main course. Other than that, we were just strapped in for the ride.

I’m not entirely certain how to count courses, but I came up with eleven: six appetizer, two main courses, and three dessert. Not a lot of pictures, because the emphasis was on quality and quantity, not plating.

The table was set with starting appetizers (Course 1): Dinner rolls, spiced olives with tuna, and cream cheese stuffed dates. Once we’d sat down we were served Mlewi, hot, delicious traditional Tunisian roasted flatbreads, kind of like chapatis, with an amazing smoky flavor (Course 2). Course 3: Shorbat Frik (Tunisian tomato/beef-based freekeh soup), with a mild but perfect amount of heat from the ras el hanout spices. While we were souping, Course 4 came out: a delicately fried (if that’s a thing) Brik au Thon, a turnover filled with cheese, hard boiled egg, and tuna.

Finally! The main course. Dorothy got pasta with roasted filet of grouper and I got pasta with roasted lamb (Course 7). Unaccountably, we were also served lamb liver in a rich lamb ragout to share for Course 8.

Well, that all needed a palate cleanser, so we were fortunate to get three flights of different desserts.

Post-dinner, we enjoyed a healthy debate as to whether lumber or waddle more accurately described our gait. That was the only healthy outcome. Thankfully, there was room under the porch for both of us when we got home.

Well, we’d been craving a meal out. We just had two weeks worth of eating out calories in a single meal. So we’re even!

The Apartment

Our apartment is great. It’s not fancy, but it may be the most practical apartment we’ve rented since we started this adventure. It’s three full rooms with an eat-in kitchen (which is very well equipped – the only thing we had to buy was a dish drainer), a bedroom with closet and bureau storage, and a living room with a pair of sofas and a separate work desk. The bathroom is at the opposite end of the apartment from the bedroom, which is lovely, and features a nice shower and plenty of hot water. We are living way down at the bottom of Maslow.

It has wifi, for which we’re deliriously grateful after the Marrakech Debacle (that’s the last time I don’t check the Airbnb listing carefully under Amenities), as well as a patio with an awning. Not high style, but everything we could hope for otherwise. And the proximity to the train tracks is fully offset by the proximity to the train station. Even if it doesn’t go to Tunis.

Yep. They revere the father of the social sciences. But we’re no strangers to worshipping our greatest heroes. After all, a new Kobe Bryant statue just went up in LA.

The Neighborhood

The common architectural threads here appear to be whitewash and right angles. It’s true everywhere we’ve been in the burbs, with the exception of Sidi Bou Said, which is whitewash and right angles with blue doors and windows, like Chefchaouen in Morocco or Santorini in Greece. Outside the Old City there’s the occasional nod to Arabic vernacular design, but it’s more garnish than main course.

Signage & Products

Discovering local signage and product design is always a treat for us. There is always both sublime and ridiculous.

Grocery Shopping

There’s a supermarché the equivalent of a few blocks away, a Monoprix, but it’s weird. First, everything isn’t one price, as its name would suggest. Mostly, though, it has weird gaps. It has a gourmet cheese and deli counter and a bakery. But no olive oil. When I asked, I was given not only a non but a finger wag to boot. Not sure what that was about.

But here’s the weirdest: no milk. Dairy products, yes. Yogurt, cheese, butter… But no milk. In this part of the world the milk is pretty exclusively ultra pasteurized in cryopaks, so all that’s necessary is shelf storage. The other supermarché, the Carrefour, carries milk. So… weird. Sadly, the Carrefour is a cab ride away, not a two block walk.

*Update* On our third visit to the Monoprix, milk appeared. A Ramadan-related supply chain shortage that resolved itself? Big Dairy being brought to heel? Elves? Who knows?

We were delighted to find that Tunis has covered markets, like Mexico’s mercados. Morocco had supermarchés and street vendors, but none of what we think of as local markets. That made food shopping awkward. Carthage itself is something of a food desert for both produce and restaurants, other than the Monoprix, which has grocery store quality produce. But La Marsa, the beach town just north, has a lovely small Marché Centrale.

The major Marché Centrale is just outside the Old City in Tunis, and boy is it an experience. So far, the Mexico City Central de Abasto is the only one we’ve seen larger. We walked in and felt just like we were home.

There’s also an exceptionally large street market one train stop and about an extra kilometer walk.

Espace Sophonisbe

But it’s not like ancient Roman art is part of the cultural heritage of the current inhabitants of Tunisia. The Phoenicians settled Carthage around 800 BC (led by Dido, so check that off on your bingo card). The Romans finally sacked Carthage and took over in the third Punic War in 146 BC, then hung around until about 439 AD, a pretty good run. Then the Vandals had it, but for less than 100 years. Then it was Byzantine, Ottoman, and French, before finally becoming its very own place in 1956.

And yet.

Mosaics are a thing here.

The only constant, culturally and ethnically, is the Berbers, who were here at least 5,000 years before the Phoenicians, and are the only legitimate locals. At this point, Tunisia’s population is almost completely Berber or Berber/Arab. None of the people who live here now have any connection to ancient Roman mosaic art except physical proximity.

Espace Sophonisbe specializes in modern Roman-style mosaic art. It’s actually really cool. I would love a piece, obviously smaller than their monsters, but the weight. It would be hard to pack a mosaic piece.

I’ve convinced Dorothy that we can find someone who’ll make a custom mosaic portrait of us. I have no idea if it’s true, but the concept somehow terrifies her. If it does turn out to be true, well, do we really have a choice?

Walking Around

We’ve noticed a few interesting things just from being out and about.

Traditional Dress

Unlike Marrakech and Morocco, Tunis is characterized by Western clothes. There are a fair number of head scarves on the women, but that’s religiously traditional, not sartorially traditional. There are fancy caftans for sale in the souks, but they’re clearly not daywear. We expected to see more people dressed in traditional clothes in the Old City, but not so much. I’m guessing that most of the traditional clothes for sale are for the tourists. A surprise after Morocco, where Western-style clothes were much less common.

We haven’t located the Tunis fashion scene, which I suspect is in boutiques scattered about the city, as opposed to concentrated in the Medina, like it was in Marrakech. I promise to document it once we’ve tracked it down.

Money

They do a very strange thing with their money here. They denominate in thousandths, not hundredths. So prices are expressed like this: 5,425, which is not quite 5 1/2 dinars. What’s weird is that the dinar isn’t super valuable, worth about US 32¢. So a dime, or 100 millimes, is about 3¢. Why on earth would you divvy that up into thousandths?

Most prices don’t actually go all the way to three decimals. Prices are more likely to read 5,420 than 5,425. But grocery stores and taxi meters, that we know of, run to the third decimal. I’m sure there are others.

Except, and here’s the thing, there are no three decimal coins in common circulation. They exist. There’s a 5 milim coin, but I haven’t seen it yet. And it’s worth about .15¢. Not 15¢. Point 15 cents. Even more fun, they usually round change to the tenths, not even the hundredths. So if your tab is 14,370 and you give 15, you’ll get 600 millimes in change, not 630. Those pennies add up!

What’s the point? Maybe the currency has been devalued over time, but the current system seems more than a little nutty.

Language

After spending three months in Morocco investing in learning Moroccan Arabic, or Darija, we now find ourselves in Tunisia, with its own brand of Arabic, Tunsi. There’s a lot of overlap, but about half the words in our limited vocabularies are different. Which adds an extra layer of complexity to learning the new words, because we also have to unlearn the old ones. Sadly, we’re falling back on French, which is its own challenge. I frequently find myself assembling sentences from a random assortment of French, English, and Arabic.

On our first visit to the La Marsa Marché Centrale we were speaking to one vendor and I managed to squeeze something out in intelligible French. He was surprised, and asked, in French, if I spoke French. I answered “a little.” In Arabic. It took a second to register, but then he totally cracked up. That appears to be our most consistently amusing trick: speaking badly in multiple languages. We are the dancing bears of tourists.

Sidi Bou Said

Much of Sidi Bou Said is up on a hill, so we walked up towards a Google Maps POI labeled Panorama Méditerranéen, and it did not disappoint.

There’s conflicting information about the origins of the blue and white color scheme that wraps Sidi Bou Said in a fluffy veneer of adorable. A French artist, Rodolph d’Erlanger, is usually credited with introducing the color scheme in the 1920s. However, some sources say the colors predated him, and that his contribution was having the palette recognized as a cultural touchstone, culminating in UNESCO designating it a World Heritage Site in 1979.

I tend to think it predated him, although the brass of showing up, repainting the town, and then loudly proclaiming it cultural patrimony is quintessentially French.

However it happened, the whitewashed walls set off by the blue of the sky, the blue of the Mediterranean, and the blue of the doors makes for a heartbreakingly beautiful sight.

The Beach

Hammams

After falling in love with Morocco’s version of hammams, or Turkish Baths, I promised to visit and report on them in all of the Arabic countries we visit. Crossing Tunisia off the list. After a single visit.

Dar el Marsa is a luxury hotel right near the beach in La Marsa (it’s where we enjoyed our iftar meal). I booked a hammam at their very nicely appointed spa, expecting a sumptuous experience akin to Morocco’s hammams. While the surroundings were lush, the experience left me cold. Well, hot actually. Unimpressed. Let’s go with unimpressed.

It starts with a sauna. I’ve never really liked saunas. I don’t like sitting in hot, wet air and struggling to breathe. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the hot rooms in Morocco’s hammams, and thought, “Well, maybe I like saunas after all.” I don’t.

Turns out the Moroccan hammams use a dry heat, and in Tunisia they use a traditional wet sauna. So, not a good start. After sitting unattended for some indeterminate period while my lungs sweat, I was brought into a cooler room, where a nice lady daubed me briefly with soap. And then sent me back into the sauna. To sit. For awhile. Then she came back and told me to shower off the soap. A little tough with no washcloth. Next step was the exfoliation. Which was done with no particular sense of commitment and over in five minutes. Then I was told to shower off and leave.

All very politely (I think – it’s hard to tell with French) and professionally. But entirely without the time, attention (and rinsing) that’s the calling card of the Moroccan hammams. Holding out for Istanbul…

[UPDATE: During our overnight stay in Tunis in-between Istanbul and Chicago, I gave our hotel spa a shot at a hammam, and they delivered in spades. They nailed the thoroughness and attention I found in Moroccan hammams, so I guess my first experience was just a shitty hammam.

The wet sauna is definitely a Tunisian feature, so it gets dinged for that, but the service was excellent. I think I still prefer the Turkish hammam overall, but they probably have an unfair advantage, having invented it.]

The Medina

Our first trip to the Medina was a fail. We got there all right, despite the train excitement, but we thought our understanding of Marrakech’s Medina would transfer, and we couldn’t have been more wrong.

Marrakech’s Medina is fractal. It doesn’t matter where you enter or which way you turn, you’re going to see pretty much the same thing: ceramics, traditional garments, modern fashion, brass, babouches, woodworking, leather… All of the various crafts repeat in shops in every souk over and over throughout the Medina.

That’s how we thought Medinas worked, so we didn’t bring any particular plan of attack to our visit here. We figured we’d be fine if we just walked to whatever Google Maps identified as Medina. Which is what we did. So our first view of the Medina was of sneakers and manufactured Chinese crap.

We were baffled. It wasn’t that it was shut down for Ramadan. The shops were open and the alleys were jammed. But we didn’t see anything like art or handicrafts. It was super confusing.

It turns out that the Tunis Medina is actually organized. There’s a jewelry district, a textile district, a carpet district, and, among others, a sneaker and Chinese crap district, which is randomly where we happened to enter, coloring our view. For our second visit we were more strategic, and found the kind of artisanal hoohah we were seeking.

Streets & Doors

The Carpet Experience

To be fair, though, he had beautiful rugs. We’re going to Kairouan soon, which is a weaving center, and we want to get a rug closer to the source. But if we don’t find anything we like better, we may come back for the rug on the right.

The shop had a rooftop terrace with crazy tile installation and a stunning view.

Since he couldn’t sell us a rug, he took us to his family’s shop that made perfume and essential oils. Dorothy got a cactus-derived perfume, both as a consolation prize and because she really liked the scent.

We’re planning trips out to some of the towns where they actually make things, like Nabeul for ceramics and Kairouan for carpets, so we may not buy much in Tunis, but we’re definitely enjoying it. Now that we know how to avoid the sneakers and Chinese crap.

Souk des Chechias

Chechias are Fez-like hats. They’re shorter and less stiff than Fezs, but they’re pretty similar. The souk was built in the 17th century when chechia manufacture was at its peak, with over 15,000 craftsmen producing over a million chechias per year. There’s only a handful left, but the souk itself is a marvel. The shops are incredibly atmospheric, and the non-chechia storefronts are full of wonders. Dorothy bought a felt cloche at a chechia maker who’d branched out into modern shapes, and we spent a wonderful half hour in a ceramics shop. We didn’t buy anything (holding out for when we visit Nabeul), but we got a fascinating history lesson from the shop owner (it’s how we learned about Ibn Khaldoun). He gave us a loaf of bread when we left.

The Call To Prayer

We happened to be in an antique store in the Medina as the afternoon call to prayer kicked off. It was literally next door to the major mosque in the Old City, and the proprietor let us onto his roof deck to take it in.

Our experience with the call to prayer in Marrakech wasn’t great. There were a metric buttload of mosques, all kicking off the call to prayer at more or less the same time, so it kind of bounced around the old city. Plus, it was all recordings. It sounded like 8-track tapes of 20s field recordings fed through an amp made of old sweatsocks. We thought that was just how call to prayer sounded.

Imagine our surprise when we could only hear a couple of mosques, and they both featured live singers. Rather than what seemed like an exhortation to kill our mothers, the Tunisian call to prayer was… sweet. I apologize for the sound of the wind (field recordings, am I right?), but I think it’s worth it to hear a truly beautiful sound.

The Medina At Night

While the city is pretty shut down in the daytime during Ramadan, we’ve been told it comes alive at night. We’d read that the Medina starts perking up at 8:00, so we headed down one evening about two weeks into our stay. We got there at about 7:30, figuring we’d catch it as it sprang to life. We were also desperate for a restaurant meal, and we were under the impression that sundown represented the end of the fast, so we expected restaurants to be open.

What we didn’t know is that “comes to life at 8:00” actually means “it’s still completely dead at 7:59.” And at 7:30 it looked like a morgue. There was no foot traffic, all of the shops in the Medina were closed, and the streets were unlit. Very, very, uninviting.

We figured we’d walk around until 8:00 to see what happened. And sure enough, at 8:00 things started picking up. Foot traffic increased, lights came on, and shops started opening. I’d have bet against it at 7:30, but there it was. We figured we’d follow the people, and joined up as folks started entering the Medina.

Shops were starting to open, but there was absolutely no sign of open restaurants. We walked back out and finally found an open restaurant outside the Old City. It was close to 9:00 by the time we got dinner, and we were more than ready.

It was clear as dinner ended at about 9:30 that what we’d been told was correct. The place was starting to hop. But we just weren’t up for a return trip to see what the Medina was doing. I think the trick is to have dinner at home at a reasonable hour and then head out to get there closer to 10:00. It really is a late night party the entire month of Ramadan. We’ll see if we can shift our sleep schedule to take advantage of the evening wonders.

The other thing this excursion provided was some perspective on venturing out of Tunis. Prior to that evening we’d been thinking of spending two weeks, basically the last part of Ramadan, traveling about. Now, I think we’re going to wait until Ramadan is over. We’ve figured out how to feed ourselves in Carthage, but figuring that out in multiple cities, with no restaurants as a lifeline while we get our bearings, just sounds too hard.

So we’ll stay put until Ramadan passes, and lean into the things that are open here, like museums, parks, and ruins. Then when everything opens back up, we’ll hit the open road and absorb more of Tunisia.

Burying The Lede

The most important part of our trip actually happened before we even left Marrakech. There are cats in the Marrakech airport! So even though there are otherwise no cats in this post (except the ones with saws), we’ve now met our interwebs mandated quota.