Just a few more pictures

Leblebi (as described in a previous entry). Perfect for a cold, rainy day.















A camel we discovered right near the beach. His legs are tried loosely so he can't get too far. We figured this started because tying a camel to anything in the desert would prove tricky.















The view from the beach at La Marsa. It's really a bummer that I don't live within walking distance. Still, it's a buck's taxi ride from my door... I can't wait till its warm out! The day I took this picture was reasonably warm, but still sweater and scarf weather.















A colorful scene down the road from my house.















Another view from La Marsa near to Cafe Journal, a very posh spot for amazing hot chocolate (and many other tasty things). Down the street from here is the weekly second-hand clothes souk (market) every Sunday.













The view outside of my window at home. That is neighbor's car outside and the park to the left.















The park / open space behind the glass-covered wall behind my house. I think this area is for lower-income families (though this is simply observation). The kids, chickens, and sheep run around together in the broken tiles, mud, and general trash. Also, as you can see, it's also a popular place to hang wet laundry out to dry. We have a rack in my house instead . It's strangely satisfying to hang wet laundry.

...more pictures to come soon.

...speak in Arabic!

It’s been hard to get another entry up here because I have so much class during the days I am in school at Sidi Bou Said. I have decided to take both the beginning standard Arabic class (beginning Fuus’ha) as well as sit in on as much of the colloquial Tunisian Arabic (called Derja, not to be confused with the island of Djerba). That means that on Mondays I have upwards of our hours of Arabic straight, another four on Wednesday, and six hours on Thursday. I guess we’ll see how long I can possibly keep this up. I simply can’t choose because it is so important that I improve my Derja so I can communicate more than “how are you,” “this is delicious,” and “I am going to school” to my family here. On the other hand though, it is equally important that I start Fuus’ha because I really would like to continue Arabic when I return to the United States; it would be a shame to have to leave everything I learn here and hope to meet Tunisians back home to talk with. I couldn’t talk to Algerians, Egyptians, or Moroccans (definitely not!) with Tunisian Arabic. Oh course the two, colloquial and standard, share much in common but pronunciations, common usages, and idioms are sometimes quite different. Not to mention very place and age-specific slang! You can get pretty far here with a few basic terms. After almost two weeks, I think I am qualified to teach just a few of the basics you hear everywhere. It’s always exciting to start hearing the words you are learning as soon as you walk out of the classroom and onto the street or the crowded bus.

The first words — Asalama (pronounced a salema) and Bisalama (pronounced bi salema)
Meaning hello and good bye, these two are used for all ages and most times of day although a dozen variations of good morning are common place and one for good night.

The next most important — Shwaya-shway(a) (pronounced as written)
This word is incredibly flexible and can be used in practically all situations. It can mean everything from slower, slowly, and slow down to small, a little bit, and little by little. The word gets thrown around a lot in my house, typically in reference to my little six-yea-old nefew, Skander, for whom shway or shwaya-shwaya means “chill out!” Today on this bus the man on the bus who stamps tickets urges us to move towards the front “swaya shwaya!” It’s perfect for explaining that I am learning Arabic little-by-little or that I only know a bit so far.

Shwaya-shwaya fits nicely in a language that seems replete with words that repeat.
Just a few I know so far:
mushmush — “apricot” (not to be confused with mush mushkla which means “no problem” and “your welcome”)
tool tool — “straight” as in “go straight ahead”
kif kif — “the same” or “either way”
There are a bunch more I’ve heard. I’ve been sort of collecting them.
Barsha, Barsha is good too, but we are getting there.

The next makes you sound cool no matter how little Arabic you know — mush normal (pronounced as written)
Mush normal is another wonderful all-purpose word that is just as flexible as shwaya-shwaya. It literally means “not normal” but takes on specific meaning through inflection, tone of voice, hand gestures, and facial expressions, which are extremely important in speaking Arabic in general. If you say your day was mush normal in an exasperated tone, you had a horrible day. If you say your day was mush normal in an upbeat voice, you had an extraordinarily wonderful day. A weird looking, person or fruit might be mush normal, strikingly gorgeous or rotting in the refrigerator. This word needs further exploration I think to see if I can exhaust the possibilities.

Another really important one is Barsha or Barsha Barsha.
Barsha simply means "a lot" but is used all the time in Tunisian dialect. No one uses Barsha besides the Tunisians so it's appreciated when Americans learn and use it. Most commonly I use it as an intenisfier for "benina" (delicious).

That was Tunisian Arabic 101 there. I will add more great words as they come.

My host mom has been really good so far at explaining things super slowly (shwaya-shwaya) for me and pointing at lots of things in the house and telling me their Arabic, and sometimes French, names.

This evening I helped her get started on some sort of fruit drink that we are bringing to Toney and Sarah’s house tomorrow night in celebration of the birth of Sarah’s new baby sister. She was born just three days ago! I am not sure I have ever seen a baby that young before! Sarah was so excite to hear that her mother was about to give birth just a week after she moved in; she is glad to have the baby around and absolutely loves little kids. Anyway, to make this fruit drink we cooked peaches (Khookh), strawberries (fraise), fresh and frozen lemon juice, and sugar in several pots on the stove. Everything came out of frozen bags from the ice chest upstairs. My mom was also heating fresh milk, not from the box, which I think we are adding tomorrow. I sometimes get a little worried about how food seems to sit around here, but I have yet to get sick so I guess all is well. My family keeps most things in Tupperware in the fridge for easy re-heating, but often things are left without lids like pieces of cooked chicken and sometimes salads. The students were originally told not to eat cheeses and fresh fruit but I’ve been eating both since the day we got here and have been fine. I have avoided things I can’t peel and fresh milk so far.

Some day soon my mom is going to teach me how to make Leblebi (another word on repeat) and harissa, which she is overjoyed that I love.

Just a few pictures for now

I am still learning how to post images to this blog. Work with me here...



A street vender making Shapti for us as we watch. The egg goes inside the bread with a good spread of Harissa - stupendus. Apparently this is the favorite food of construction workers.



A typical decoratied door in the Medina. Another section has mainly yellow doors. The six-pointed star is a common motif as well as the crescent moon, an interesting juxtaposition.



Part of the Roman baths in Carthage.



Two head stones from sacrificial victims in Phoenecian / Punic Cathage. The symbol on the left is a woman symbol, and important one in Carthage to be sure. The "losange" to the left is also a common one though the meaning has been a bit lost in translation (and a few millenia).

Leblebi, My home stay, and a Birthday Party

Yesterday was the most beautiful day. In the morning I walk about ten minutes from my house (dar) to the bus stop. I pass two tiny coffee shops on the corner, several fruit souks (shops), a mechanical repair shop with twenty or thirty year-old cars dusty and contorted in the corners, and a construction site on the main drag that stretched from Sidi Bou Said all the way to Tunis. The bus stop is just across the street from the construction site and I get to watch closely as I wait for the bus to Sidi Bou where my classes are at the SIT office. This morning I watched three men and boys, were they boys or where they men, sitting in the claws of a bulldozer being lifted from level to level after the man in the cab had dumped his load of red-orange dirt beside the structure. All of the words for construction and building of any kind are in Italian because most immigrants from Italy came as cheap laborers. When I pass below them, all bundled up in a jacket borrowed from my home-stay sister and wool scarf and sunglasses, I get stares from thirty feet up. It’s taken a week to even start to get used to the constant staring and the changes in socially acceptable physical distance (proxemics). On the bus, I feel like eyes are glued to me. Mounir, our academic director and teacher has assured us that this looking and “scrutinizing” is perfectly normal and that Tunisians do it to each other all the time. We are simply a little more interesting.
Yesterday was a lot of firsts. We had some free time in the afternoon so many of us went into Tunis for lunch. We were advised by Mounir to try Leblebi, a Tunisian specialty during the winter. We ignored the fact that it was the warmest, sunniest day since the day we arrived and headed towards the restaurant. The place turned out to be a hole-in-the-wall sort of place, very popular with the locals, and already crowed when the eight of us arrived. We crowded in and got in line where we were first handed a hand-made clay bowl with a fist-sized piece of baguette and pushed towards the another man who put a ladle of chickpeas and sauce, a smaller spoon of harissa-rich sauce, and a pinch of cumin in. Next, another man on the other side of the room put a dash of olive oil and cracked an egg into the bowl and added some other miscellaneous ingredients. Everything was really quick and pretty much cooked in the bowl. We did as the locals and mixed everything into a delicious mush. It really did warm me up to my core and “stuck to my bones.” I felt like I’d be full for days but walking around the city for the next hour assured me I’d eventually be hungry by dinnertime.
Last night was one of the most enjoyable evenings so far. Lots of the families hosting students in La Marsa (my neighborhood) are related or good friends and seem to spend a fair bit of time together. Yesterday was Bradley Toney’s birthday so his family decided to throw him a sort of surprise party and invite five or six of the other students who were living nearby. I was surprised when I got home to hear from my mother that she knew there was a party going on and that she wanted us to go. We ate a quick dinner, picked up my host sister (Lemya), and went over to Colleen’s house where she was putting the finishing touches on a birthday cake for Toney. Back in North Carolina, Colleen works in a cake shop and gets to work on creative masterpieces like hamburger-shaped cakes, etc. Her frosting job was excellent given the tools she had to work with. Colleen’s family speaks excellent French, as does Colleen, so they seem to be getting along nicely. Eventually we all hopped in the car again and went over the Toney’s where there were already many people to greet and kiss (two or four times). We hung around together chatting and catching up while other families and students arrived. Toney was so appreciative of gifts and good wishes he was receiving. After a few minutes, Toney’s family cranked up the radio full blast in the hall with hip hop from the US. They seem to think that we all love pop music from the US and we suspect that they associate Toney, who is African American with hip hop and rap. Anyway, it was pretty hilarious because Toney started dancing to make them happy and his host grandmother got up and started doing the twist. It was probably one of the most hilarious experiences thus far and was well documented in pictures.
The mix of people was really interesting linguistically and ethnically speaking. My host mother looks very Arab while some of the other host families, many of whom are related as I mentioned, are definitely of African ancestry and seem to speak more French (just a preliminary observation). A tiny electronic plastic candle that played happy birthday in obnoxious shrill pitches was placed in the middle of Colleen’s cake and a few more candles were lit while the group sang a haphazard happy birthday in Arabic complete with clapping. I was able to make an audio recording though it’s hard to tell what was really going on because it was so loud. We drank soda in what we’d call wine glasses (they must simply have a different name here) and later, mint tea in tiny delicate glasses. I have never felt so comfortable laughing and joking with friends I have know for a week, and families that I have only met a few days ago. They have all been so welcoming, considerate, and caring. Toney opened his gifts from the families, mostly various decorative things to put on stands or hang, and thanked them profusely. So far, I’ve found that more things don’t warrant a “thank you” Yaishek in Tunisia. One of my friends got laughed at for thanking her mother for a banana. Most of my thankyou’s that seem to spill from my mouth, especially when other words just aren’t there, are never met with a response of mush mushkla (no problem).
Well, It’s almost time for lunch and my Arabic class (I’ve got three hours this afternoon). Our goal is to learn and start to master the alphabet this week, which seems a daunting task especially since so far we have only gotten through four letters and six vowels. At least we have all of the vowels out of the way.

I will try to write again soon!

A’salama!—Orientation

To risk the cliché, the past few days have been an absolute whirlwind of new people, sounds, smells, tastes, and language. It’s been utterly overwhelming but that was to be assumed. I have met and spent a great deal of time already with the 15 other students and this trip promises to be wonderful much thanks to their diversity in academic background and focus and regional backgrounds in the US. We represent 16 different colleges and universities, which is really quite remarkable.

This first post will have to be brief because we’ve got a light dinner in just a few minutes. We get internet access at both our regular classroom in Sidi Bou Said, a small suburb north of the city of Tunis, and at the CEMAT office where we will be having classes on Fridays near the border of the modern (European) quarter of Tunis and the Medina (the old Arab city, literally “the city”). I might even have internet at my home-stay family where I will be staying for the majority of the semester. Speaking of my family, I met them last night at a casual light dinner at the SIT office here in Sidi Bou Said quite close to the hotel where we are staying during orientation (this first 4 or 5 days). My host mother lives in La Marsa, another northern suburb about 20 minutes away from SIT in Sidi Bou Said. She has a 6 and a half year-old daughter and was so excited to meet me. She presented me with a rose and I had my first opportunity to kiss a Tunisian on the cheeks. Tunisians kiss upwards of four times, left-right-left-right. I was really nervous to meet her with my three of four phrases in Arabic and was hoping, hoping that we would have any way of communicating whatsoever. As it turns out, she speaks very little English, but enough that we managed to introduce ourselves and ask a few questions of each other. I am the first American students she has welcomed into her home and seemed quite surprised that after I told her I did not speak very much Arabic at all, that I did not speak French either. I felt a lot like I had let her down and hadn’t matched her expectations (though I am sure she never would want me to have felt that way). I promised her that I would just have to do my best and that I was working very hard in my Arabic language class which was no lie. We’ve only had two sessions of “survival Arabic” and I have retained quite a bit I figure. She is so nice and I am thrilled to get to know her in what ever capacity I can.

We’ve been kept busy these first few days starting when we arrived at 11:00 am on Tuesday. We got to see the SIT office, had some meetings, went on a driving tour of some of the northern suburbs, and ate dinner at a fabulous pizza place. Yesterday we were up early to visit briefly some of the historic sites of both Punic (Phoenician) Carthage and Roman Carthage. Boy was my Latin-geek side showing! I went nuts. All I could think about was Virgil and the Aeneid—Queen Alyssa (Dido) is on one of the bills as well. We visited old temples, cemeteries, crypts, baths, aqueducts and cisterns, and old Phoenician homes that were buried in dirt by the Roman who cut the entire top of a mountain off to cover the old Phoenician town below. We ate lunch at a corner restaurant in La Marsa closer to the bay and had some delicious fish (Bryn in Arabic) and some small bass (longish and skinny-ish), a fried egg with pureed veggies on top (sort of juevos rancheros style) and fries. As a follow-up to an earlier post, Coke is everywhere though in Arabic most of the time. The glass bottles are wonderful to hold (and drink out of after a long walk). We spent the afternoon in class and the evening with out families chatting it up (or trying to) with our families.

This morning we were up even earlier for a venture finally into the heart of Tunis. We went from the Cathedral in the European quarter to wander the streets of the Medina that radiate in circles out from the central mosque. I don’t feel like I’ve had the time to process even a quarter of what I’ve seen or heard yet. The colors of the rugs, silver plates, yellow and blue decorated doors, minarets, spices, and three-foot-tall barrels and barrels of a dozen kinds of olives (Charlie you would go nuts here!) are still working their way into my brain. We ate couscous and fish near leather and metal shops in the Medina, a classical Tunis dish. Indescribably delicious and surprisingly one of the only things I’ve eaten without harissa. Harissa deserves a blog entry all to itself and an entire Independent Study Project (I will leave that to my friend Lee who is hoping to study street food and harissa for a month). We visited CEMAT, an organization that facilitates research in Tunisia and affiliated with SIT, and got to speak with several helpful folks there. They have a wonderful English language library of work done in Tunisia and the Maghreb (Arab North Africa). I got a letter already! Thank you so much Hannah, I was as excited, or maybe more, as you imagined me. This afternoon we also had the pleasure of meet the Ambassador in the American Embassy. We met his most important employees (who each had about a ten word title) and learned a bit about Tunisian - American relations and some basic political and economic information about Tunisia. It was also a good opportunity to ask questions about everything from safety to blogging.

How do I feel about all of this? Exhausted and excited, nervous and full of ideas. I want to write and talk non-stop but I need to work in time for sleeping and eating (I’d say bummer to the first of those, but thumbs up so far to the second). For now, I am taking everything moment-by-moment, word-by-word, and day-by-day. Give me a few weeks and a routine and I feel Ill be able to make a lot more sense of all of this.

Hope everyone is well
Bi’salama from Sidi Bou Said for now!