Tunisia, Part 1: Getting There

- She's wearing a black jacket; I'm wearing a white shirt and two backpacks.
- Okay, I'll tell my father.

I hung up. I had been making these quick phone calls to the son of our Tunisian landlord all afternoon. 

I made the first call around 4:00PM, when the airline announced over the intercom that our flight was delayed. "Suite à un mouvement social..." We had planned our trip a couple of months before, and our departure date just happened to coincide with a massive nationwide strike. Trains had been canceled, buses, flights... and we would need to use all of these before the day was out. I was up until after 2:00AM planning alternate routes just in case our simple direct train was canceled. La Rochelle-Poitiers-Tours-Nantes. La Rochelle-Poitiers-Tours-Le Mans-Nantes. At around 2:30 I went to bed. The alarm rang at 5:00. As it turns out, the train and the buses were perfectly on time.

In the airport in Monastir, we bought two bottles of water, and paid in euros. We didn't have any dinars yet. Then we went back to the most obvious spot we could find in the center of the room. After a few minutes, we were approached by a cheerful looking older gentleman with bright eyes. It was probably him. I wasn't sure what to say - we had been communicating with his son in English, but we weren't sure if he knew any English. Fortunately, he broke the ice.

"Are you Rebecca?" he asked me in French.

I wasn't.

"Eu... non, c'est elle," I replied, pointing to Rebecca. She had arranged the apartment and done most of the corresponding. We shook hands, and then we followed him out to his car.

I didn't hear the pilot say exactly when we were taking off. But in the airport they had said 5 'til 9. Ten minutes from now. This was four and a half hours late. Okay. I tuned in to the end of his speech.


"Nobody is more unhappy than me about having to delay you by 5 hours." 

Now it was 5 hours. Okay. Another hour in the plane.

Patches of Tunisia were emerging from the darkness; Gas stations, train-tracks and road signs all floating by in the small, yellowy circles of light cast by the headlights of our landlord's car. The signs were bilingual, with French and Arabic marching across the green signs in opposite directions, saying - one could assume, one DID assume - the same thing. I was enthralled. The earth that I could see was dry, with occasional patches of a low, tough plant clinging to it. It was different. It felt different. We were on the African continent! I suddenly wondered whether this kindly old man was going to drive us somewhere and rob us. You hear stories... And it would have been easy, now that I was thinking about it. Now I feel stupid to have worried. The guy never stopped giving.

It would be charitable to assume that the people who put together the playlists of pre-flight muzak are pretty sure that you won't be waiting very long to take off. There's something endearing about that kind of optimism, even if it does inspire them - whoever - to assemble a collection of the most mediocre shit ever inflicted upon a captive audience. In the hour and a half we waited, we heard the entire collection. And several encores.


Now we know the words to Louie Austen's "Glamour Girl".

We arrived in Sousse a little before midnight, Tunisian time. (Tunisia and France are in the same time zone, but they don't observe daylight savings time here.) Our host gave us a brief driving tour of the city, pointing out the medina as we passed.

I had been wondering about the medina, and whether we would be able to find it. Whether it blended seamlessly into the surrounding neighborhoods. Whether we would know for sure when we were in it.

We would. It's surrounded by high, ancient walls. Hard to miss. We would explore it more closely on Friday, our first full day in Tunisia.

Our apartment was two blocks from the main street that ran along the Mediterranean. Outside, the street was littered with trash and litters of stray cats. After a few days, we would no longer consider it messy.

In the apartment, Rebecca took a shower and I went downstairs to conclude our business with the landlord; sign contracts, exchange money.

I had been exhausted all afternoon. Two and half hours' sleep last night. I had tried to sleep on the waiting room floor in the airport. Now, as the darkish mass of the North African coast materialized below the airplane, I felt my tiredness slide away. We would be landing soon, and meeting our host. We would be landing on a new continent. I couldn't have slept if I wanted to.

A little after midnight, I fell into bed. It had been a long day. Tomorrow the adventure would begin.