Eid Mubarak - Christmas in Tunisia!

So my mom and I decided to head south for Christmas, to spend a week in Tunisia. Although the trip definitely ended on a decidedly more drama-filled note than I would have liked, overall we had a really great time. My mom was kind enough to share her pictures with me, since my camera was stolen, so that I, in turn, can share them with you all. Without further ado, I bring you Liz and Leslie's Christmas adventure:

La Marsa

This is where my mom and I stayed for our first two nights in Tunis. La Marsa is a pretty wealthy suburb of just north of Tunis, right along the Mediterranean. There are a lot of diplomats and expats living here, and some embassies pretty close by. We were lucky enough to stay in the empty summer apartment of some friends of my mom's, who live in Vancouver but are originally from Tunisia.

Although a little chilly in the winter (no heating or hot water!) its amazing location more than compensated - right on the edge of the Mediterranean. This was the view from about 10 metres from the apartment:

There were a lot of stray cats everywhere we went, but they seemed to especially love populating La Marsa. My mom wanted to feed them all. I made friends with a scraggly cat with a limp that lived right outside our apartment.

Sidi Bou Said

Sidi Bou Said is a town just north of Tunis, known for its spectacular view of the Mediterranean. Everyone we met told us that we absolutely had to go see it, so on our second day, we set off. In the course of our travels, we met a fantastic and hilarious ceramics-seller named Ramsay. After we'd concluded our ceramics-buying business, he gave us a tour of his bosses' private museum and then took the afternoon off to show us all around town. He also offered my mom 6 Ferraris for my hand in marriage, but I'm not holding my breath. (Apparently it's a really old Tunisian joke to offer to trade women for camels. Of course, there are some tourists who actually believe these stories - I think the locals really get a kick out of exploiting gullible foreigners.)

It started raining halfway through our tour, but we still were able to see magnificent views of the ocean, along with all of Tunis. Sadly my mom's camera ran out of batteries and mine has disappeared into the void, so I have no fun visual aids from the top of the town. I can, however, share my mom's pictures from the bottom of Sidi Bou Said:

Sousse

After two cold and rainy days with no hot water, we decided to head a few hours' further south, to the popular beach-side resort city of Sousse. We were hoping for sunshine. Sadly, we only found more rain. So we decided to make lemons into lemonade, and holed up in a fancy-schmancy 5 start hotel (with ridiculously discounted mid-winter rates), to pass the time with spa treatments, hot showers, Tunisian wine and buffet meals. Not a bad way to spend Christmas day which, incidentally, is also my mom's birthday.


We also ventured into Sousse's old walled city, or Medina, to shop in its legendary market. Although as a Canadian, I find it hard to get used to the popular Tunisian sales tactics of arm-grabbing, hand-waving, yelling, begging, and sometimes outright lying, I think my mom and I came out on top. It turns out, we're fabulous hagglers, especially as a mother-daughter team. And I even started to get used to the incessant shouts of 'la gazelle! la gazelle!', which is what Tunisian men call young eligible women.


El Jem

About an hour south of Sousse, El Jem is a tiny little town built right beside the ruins of an ancient Roman Colosseum. You step out of the train station, hang a right on the one main street, and there it is, right in front of you, looking completely incongruous.

But of course, it only looks out of place to my mom and I because we're new around here. Locals walk past like it's no big deal, not even bothering to glance up. Two thousand year old ruins don't phase them at all, maybe because there are so many scattered around the country.

Tunisia was part of the original Roman Byzantine empire, which is why you find Roman ruins all over the place. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the ruins at the historic city of Carthage since our trip got a bit disrupted at the end, but the amphitheatre at El Jem more than made up for this.

It's unbelievably huge, and since it was low tourist season my mom and I practically had the place to ourselves, aside from a handful of other tourists. The whole place is a bit eerie - you can walk around the underground tunnels where they used to keep prisoners, Christians, and the lions to feed them to.

To make our way back north to Tunis my mom and I took a louage, a shared taxi, a private taxi, and then a train. I think the louage was my favourite. They're really common in Tunisia (and many parts of the world, I think) and are, in my opinion, a totally ingenious idea. A louage is essentially a shared long distance taxi, where you pay your money, get in the van, and when it's full, it takes off. We paid about 2.50 dinars each for an hour long ride and waited for about half an hour till fill the louage with the required 8 people, much less than the several hours we would have had to wait for a train. Our driver was an amazing multitasker - he drove like a madman, answered his cell phone every 5 min, bent over to find money in the change tray, swore as other drivers, and didn't even get us killed once!

The last two days

Once back in Tunis, our plan was to stay in a downtown hotel for our last 2 nights. We wanted to see the ruins at Carthage, eat couscous, and be close to the city center. However, our plans were thrown totally off kilter when I got mugged in a train, both our passports are wallets got stolen, and we had to spend our last couple of days going back and forth between the Canadian Embassy and various police stations, trying to get emergency visas to go home. All I can say is, thank god for two wonderful people we met in Tunisia, Sonia and Joe, who helped us out, took us in and yelled at the necessary people in Arabic for us. As the daughter and son-in-law of the friends whose apartment we stayed in, they had already been fantastic hosts; however, this went completely above and beyond.

I seriously heart these people:


And thus concludes this exciting episode of Liz and Leslie's Christmas adventure! Stay tuned for Liz's Italian New Year's adventure - coming soon to a blog site near you.

Much love,
Liz