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!