Month: October 2024 (Page 1 of 2)

The night before we left Tunisia to fly home to the US, we were out with friends doing the round of goodbyes for the season. It wasn’t a crazy amount of drinking, two glasses of wine for a friend’s birthday, dinner was dry (Muslim restaurant) and then two gin and tonics to end the evening. Stepping up onto the boat, I managed to drop my bag and three things fell out……

Trip’s glasses luckily had hooked and were quickly rescued. His wallet hit the water but floated, and was quickly rescued. My phone, however (sans case because it was creating an issue with photo quality), sank quickly, screen side up with the image of Trip and I on the Home Screen waving at us.

Trip put on his dive weights and tried to dive for it, but the murk in the water (ick) and the time of night (1 am) made it impossible to find. So he showered and we caught a few hours of rest before the bus picked us up for the ride to the airport.

At the airport I had a sudden thought – to hire one of the marineros at the marina to dive for the phone. We knew they dove (one had rescued a fellow cruiser’s bike that went swimming a few weeks earlier) and were not crazy expensive (50 dinar – $17. We contacted a friend at the marina and asked him to make arrangements.

By the time we had landed in Istanbul for our layover, we had received a picture from another cruiser of Mohannet, one of the marineros, holding my phone. The Home Screen was still lit – it still worked after 12 hours in the gross marina saltwater!

Our friend Mark got hold of the phone and managed to download all of my photos (none of which I had taken that season were backed up) before the phone died. Then the next bit of drama commenced.

I do a presentation for our local Historical Society about our travels each season, so we needed to get those pictures. The Tunisian postal system is notorious for either delivering outrageously late or not at all.

Fellow cruisers were off to France for a holiday from Tunisia, so Mark put the photos on a USB stick and sent it off with them. Chris and Christine messaged us to say they had not been able to send the package from Paris (grumpy postal employees), but that they were successful later in their trip.

Unfortunately at that point we started getting suspicious text messages stating that our package could not be delivered. It turns out postal workers sell legitimate data to scammers who try to trick you into clicking on counterfeit links (special place in hell for you folks). Our local post office was no help whatsoever, simply telling us that the package was in the system somewhere between France and the US with no further detail.

We arranged for a second USB stick to be sent with another fellow cruiser leaving for the US. Luckily, the first USB stick arrived a few days later, we edited the pictures, I was able to do my presentation, and all was right in the world again.

Thank you Mohannet! Thank you Mark! Thank you Chris & Christine!

Our friend Kay invited us and a few others out to a local restaurant to celebrate her birthday. The restaurant, Oriento (Syrian or Turkish depending on who you ask), had a dish called the Oriento Royale for 8 people that we decided to try. It was a mixture of beef kabobs and chicken layered over cashew rice and baked in a flatbread. The server brings it out and cuts the top layer of bread, rolling it back as he goes. The presentation was totally worthy of a birthday dinner!

The Hammam, or public baths, are an important tradition in the Muslim world. A few of us decided to treat ourselves to a private one that was offering a special deal via social media. Janine, Christine, and I went off to check it out.

You strip down to bikini bottoms and are given a towel or pareo. They lead you into the steam room where you sit and socialize and bathe yourself. It’s segregated – women at one time and men at others. A woman comes in and one by one we’re taken for the scrub down of a lifetime. I consider myself pretty clean, but am horrified at the amount of dead skin she sloughs off my body.

A quick rinse down, and then it’s up to the second floor for a 45 minute dreamy massage. I could get used to this – and all for only 60 dinar ($20 US).

Madhia was another day trip for us. We jumped on the train with fellow cruisers Chris, Christine, and Vero, and took the train south. It was market day, and we maneuvered our way past the usual spices, produce, and clothes, before we saw something a bit more unusual. One area under the town arch is reserved for women selling traditional garb for weddings.

It was windy but we had a lovely walk out along the water.

There was a cemetary at the water’s edge.

Google translate is sophisticated enough to translate Arabic script. This one tells you the name of the person, birth and death dates in the modern calendar as well as the Muslim calendar, and ends with a blessing.

I never get enough of Mediterranean doorways.

The murals in Tunisia are a great way of decorating the sides of buildings, walls, even trash cans.

We stopped for tea and cake at one point, and I tried my first ‘the au pignons’, mint tea with pine nuts. Lovely, lovely flavor, and the cake wasn’t bad either.

On our way back after tea we came upon a silk store. On the first floor, you could watch artisans at work on their looms. The second floor was a showroom of all the scarves and blankets. Of course I couldn’t resist and bought a scarf.

In between boat projects, we managed to sneak in a few day trips to explore Tunisia. Sousse is only an hour away by train and includes an incredible viewing of the flamingoes in the salt marsh.

The Medina in Sousse is bigger and more impressive than Monastir. The first vender we came across had snails for sale. With unemployment so high in the country, young Tunisian men are taking to harvesting and selling snails. They’re plentiful and much cheaper per kilogram than other proteins, even chicken.

Though I swore I wouldn’t do it, we found a small store on the outskirts of the Medina with a no-pressure sales pitch, and we wound up with a small rug for the house.

Little did I know I would eventually come back for this rug (formerly a Berber bridal shawl called a bakhnoug) for a price so good I’m not allowed to say : )…

Sousse is known for their museums, but we only had time for one, so we picked the Archeological Museum.

Like the Roman villa museum in El Djem, we were blown away by the mosaics.

One of our particular favorites was a highly decorative baptismal font. We were impressed to see that it had been discovered near the ruins of a church and removed and restored.

Every Sunday the cruisers in the Monastir Marina gather for a BBQ. You bring what you’d like to grill and a side dish to share. This means I hit up the Monastir market Sunday morning to see what’s available.

Everything is local – you have your choice of seafood (I particularly like the shrimp and tuna), chicken, beef or lamb (the merguez sausage is quite nice). No pork products are available here, it’s a Muslim country.

I get back to the boat and prep the protein, and then figure out a side dish – some days it’s a salad and other times it’s dessert. Again, you shop at the local market, so everything is local and seasonal – it’s been a good test of how to use product that I’m not familiar with, or are out of practice with. So far my favorites have been an herbed farro with preserved lemon, and ‘Tunisian snickers bars’ (I stuff dates with peanut butter and chocolate).

A few of the cruisers arrive early to get the bbq going and set up tables and chairs.

We pass the hat and collect 1 dinar (30 cents) per person to pay for charcoal.

And then we feast. And drink. And talk.

And then the cats turn up. They know where there are bound to be good leftovers….

To go along with my “Cats of…..” collection. More on this later, as the Tunisian cats have a special place in my heart.

All of us bundle up old clothes and shoes and take them off to bins for recycling, right? Ever wondered what happens to those things? Every year, thousands of containers of discarded clothing and shoes arrive in Tunisia. Some of it are discarded things from individual homes, while some are last season’s cast off having never been sold or worn.

You’ll see table tops filled with items as you walk down the street in town, but for the truly adventurous we head down to Port de Peche on Friday or Saturday, where the tables go on and on and it’s easy to get lost. Some of it can be total junk, but some of it can be an absolute treasure. Trip has new jeans and a cashmere sweater courtesy of one visit, and I’ve scored more than one Italian leather handbag. I don’t do fur for ethical reasons, but if I did this would be the place to shop for vintage pieces! And it’s not just limited to clothing and shoes. There’s plenty of household goods, fruits, vegetables, and even yarn available.

And if the idea of thrifting isn’t your style, there are lots of new options too….

I love the tiles that we see everywhere in the Mediterranean, and I really wanted to either bring some home for the house in NJ, or add them to the boat somehow. Most are much too large to use on the boat, but then I came across some smaller ones in one of the tourist shops in Monastir.

They’d make the perfect backsplash in the galley. I brought home one to test it out, and then went back to the shop to buy the rest of the tiles that he had in stock.

Of course if it had been up to me, I would have slapped the tiles on with whatever glue available and been done with the project. Not so with Mr. Perfectionist, Trip. The surface was carefully measured and cleaned first.

The tiles were then carefully laid out and readjusted till we were both happy with the placement. Then I numbered each tile on the back while Trip prepared the silicone. One by one, the tiles went on. I was extremely happy with the results and the pop of color that we had in the galley now. Of course Trip wasn’t done, and fabricated a small teak cap when we were home, so now it is complete. A souvenir from our time in Tunisia!

We had been scheduled to do a two day tour out into the Sahara, but the tour bus never showed up for a 5 AM departure, ugh. We had no other plans (and I wasn’t in the mood for more boat work), so we rented a car to do a day’s worth of sight seeing.

El Djem is less than two hours away from Monastir. The main attraction of the town is the famous Roman amphitheater built in 238 AD. With a capacity of 35,000 spectators, it’s one of the largest and best preserved buildings of its kind in the world.

Unlike the Colosseum in Rome, but similar to the one in Pula that we visited last season, in this amphitheater there really aren’t crowds in this place, and you have it mostly to yourself. Despite erosion and some destruction, things are well preserved and you can envision the spectator events that were held here.

As with any major structure that has survived thousands of years, it’s had more than one use. Along with hosting events, the amphitheater was believed to have served as a fortress and housed the population during attacks of the Vandals and Arabs in 430 and 647. It was even used for saltpeter manufacturing and grain storage in later years.

In more recent history the amphitheater has been used for movie sets. We had just re-watched Life of Brian, filmed mostly in the Monastir Ribat. A few of the scenes were shot here as well.

Though I watched it at the time, I didn’t remember that an episode of the Amazing Race ended in this very amphitheater.

We had extra time after visiting the ampitheatre, so we headed over to the El Djem Museum. The museum is on the site of one of many Roman villas that existed in the area. As artifacts have been discovered, they have been moved to this central location for preservation and display.

The mosaics of the time were simply exquisite, and were on display everywhere we looked. One particular display showed how the mosaics were preserved and lifted to be displayed in other places (ie. On the wall of a museum rather than the original villa floor).

As the museum is on the site of a former villa, you can move from room to room, getting an idea of life during Roman times.

The museum even includes an archeological park of sorts – the ruins of three additional villas whose footprints you can explore.