5 words. live tunisian heavy metal scene.

done & done. 

i never thought id be so giggly and light as a part of an audience for such a band. but, i loved it. i am loving more often here than i have in a long time. it makes little sense since i am away from most of the people and the places i readily love. sometimes, i feel very affectionate towards little things and strangers and dirt roads and wooden doors and iron fences and of course towards children and innocent faces and warm hearts. people are very loud here very often and it makes me feel like being very quiet and listening to all the sounds. right now though, it is very quiet in my house and i miss the noise and feel like being very loud. my mom is especially making me jealous, because i miss her and because she is dancing and singing and im watching her through metal and glass. thank you ichat. ichat, youchat, we all chat. some of us, across oceans and some of us are so very fortunate to whisper into each others ears, but i do enjoy new media and the digital age because when i can't do the much preferred latter, i have metal and glass that end up meaning much more than their material value and that is sort of art in a way. im rambling, but whats a girl to do after a night of tunisian metal? mmm, ok. lara is arriving in 16 hours. isn't that the gravy of being part of an eel family?

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i passed by a woman today who smelled heavily of black licorice, fennel and anise seeds. she had many lines on her face from all the faces she seems to have made too many times. i thought they were beautiful, though in many ways im afraid of getting too too much older and so i guess part of me thought they were very ugly. and you know, we've talked about the heavy police presence in tunisia many times, but for the first time i felt it very strongly today and i didnt know if it made me nervous or tranquil. as a foreigner, it makes me feel the latter, but it does remind me of hierarchies and power and hierarchies of power and that all makes me feel nervous. i think i'm very good at expressing being nervous, surprised and excited. being nervously excited to be surprised, but having to pretend to be qool comes up often, but i think im quite good at that too. you might not agree, since im often making the certain faces that give me certain lines on my face, clutching your arm and/or fidgeting with your fingers. last night, i was in kairouan, which is the tunisian tinsel town. it was all lit up and full of saints and stars. we walked around a medina that was far past its closing time, ate sandwiches that weren't meant to be made and saw a light show that wasn't meant for us. i know that's vague and doesn't make much sense, but it was what happened. i walked along side a ram from the bus stop to my house today and felt more like an aries than ever. he was both a saint and a star. it was after i volunteered for the first time at the association for profoundly autistic and handicapped children. it wasn't as i had imagined, but i was very happy to have a friend with me to make eye contact with across the room when i felt the sadness that you would expect to feel in that situation. it was important for me to be there, if for nothing else than my extra set of hands kept clay out of one kids mouth and on my sweater.  next time i will wear a t-shirt.

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i thought about drinking the sea today. i was at the foot of the hill by my house going on a jog when all i wanted was water. my lack of dinars inspired thoughts of a pink straw. i wanted to drink the sea and blow bubbles into it. i had forgotten it was salty and when i remembered, i started to dream about a saltwater film on bronzed skin. today is the prophet's birthday and we ate a lot of doughy puddings in crystal glasses which we scooped up with our fingers. they were covered in honey, sugar, lard and olive oil. one was brown and deceivingly looked like chocolate pudding, the other was white and stretchy like pizza dough. i wasn't fond of either and i went back to eating my favorite geometric treats, makroud. later in the afternoon tomorrow, i'm going into kairouan and hoping to stumble upon some sufi celebrations. its strange to be in the cities here. reading faces comes more naturally than reading the streets signs or ads. mostly its because there are very few words in arabic i recognize without mentally reading each letter and stringing together the sounds, so i always have the choice of whether or not to read billboards, posters and street signs. sometimes i get lazy about the streets & my brain is too busy. thats probably why i get lost so often. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

i've felt like walking and writing so much today, certainly not at the same time & i certainly did not feel like bowling and eating too many chickpeas, but it's what i did anyway because it's what our very nice arabic instructor had planned for us. maybe she did it to become our friend and introduce us to her friends or maybe it was all a quiz about conversational dialect in practice...i'm still not sure, but it was very nice of her either way. i bowled the lowest score out of anyone (a respectable 30), but a silly new friend reminded me that barack obama is a terrible bowler, so i was enthusiastic and optimistic about what the numbers meant. we went to a cafe to drink mint tea and smoke mint hookah after and there was a moment where i felt very yellow. im not sure if i can describe to you what that feels like, but holden caufield knows because he has felt it and he has seen people who looked like they felt it and when i read that in catcher in the rye, i didn't quite understand it until i did, but thats how most things are here. I also met a friend earlier today in front of porte de france and we found ourselves a spot to lunch and catch up far into the winding muddy roads of the medina. it was raining on and off and i kept wishing i hadn't left my umbrella in the cab yesterday or my rain boots in chicago. im terrible at packing and i'm worse at dressing myself. i'm always one layer short of feeling warm, one accessory heavy of looking effortless and one practical grippy pair of shoes away from not slipping and sliding all over the slick cobblestone-d steep streets of the towns on the coast of the mediterranean sea. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

oh! and she is very perceptive. if a book is in my hand that she hasnt seen me reading from before, or a trinket is on my desk that wasn't there before, she always asks what it is and touches it and sometimes throws it to see how far it will go...she is curious and curiously capable of getting away with most anything. 

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

yesterday while my 3 year old host sister was running around a house that wasn't ours & while we drank juice and ate patisseries that were cradled in our neighbor's nicest plates and glasses, i looked at her and thought, she is who has inspired me the most since i've been here. zainab always figures out what she wants & she does it. she isn't afraid to change her mind, to sleep at the dinner table or while standing up, to tell you directly what she needs or dance in your lap. she is always painting. she loves to create new things, embellish old things and the wind makes her laugh. she is wildly generous. she once had a single piece of an orange-flavored hard candy and she tried breaking it in two with her baby teeth and puckered smile, just so she could offer me some. it broke into a 1/8 & 7/8 sort of division and she offered me the big one. pink jordanian almonds kill her, really she just loves them, but that's just her. & us? we have all of the books we've read & conversations we've had to shape this intellect and this filter and this process... all of which we put between ourselves and what we want to be and what we want to do and only the intellect is relevant in that system. intellect helps refine and challenge what you want, what you think you want, who you are, who you think you are, etc. but the filter and the process, they're just middle men. of course, i continue to be inspired by wisdom & intellect-- really just downright attracted to them, but zainab's lack of filter and lack of process has been something i've been craving but didn't even know it until she danced in my lap.  

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

the background noises in my life are the biggest change between my chicago life and my life in tunis. the kinds of birds chirps, the sounds of engines, the speed of people's steps, the ubiquitous call to prayer, the music playing in cars that drive by and even the sound of my own thoughts here are all just so different. the language of my dreams is slowly changing. i'm drawn to different aesthetics and the scent of almond blossoms is following me from the groves we passed on our drive through the south of tunisia. yesterday when i took off my jeans, they left perfect imprints of squares and circles from the pockets and the 3 dinar coins inside the right one. this probably means im eating too many deep fried, date filled, honey soaked rhombuses called makrouds. its a small trade off, really. we do walk an awful lot here and sometimes i jog, but most times when i try i just end up standing in front of the sea. the streets of tunis are really cosmopolitan, colorful and alive. most of the people who strut down them wear a lot of black. when we went to the south of tunisia, the landscape was a very specifically windblown antiqued sandy tan, with olive toned shrubbery and delicate hues of yellow and white flowered the rocky formations, but the people who walked those mountain roads and lived in the desert towns wore the most saturated red, pink, blue, purple and floral fabrics. the dichotomy was electric and beautiful. this is mostly a pretty easy place to live. i don't feel overwhelmed or crowded, but that doesn't make it any less complex or interesting. my host family continues to be charming, charismatic and warm. I start volunteering at a wednesday morning arts & crafts workshop with autistic children next week and my african drumming lessons are so much fun...anyone in the chicagoland/505 area wanna start a middle eastern percussion ensemble? 

Sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.