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.

Bus Stops, Politics with the Debbabi's and Hairstyles by Zainab.

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had the time to write an entry for a week, which is a year of updates in study abroad time, but since I don't find too much value in sweeping generalizations of what I'm living, feeling and experiencing, I'll just type whatever comes to mind and hope it somehow documents what I'm living for Court 5 and associates: 

My days are mostly punctuated with three things, bus rides, politics with the debbabi's and hairstyles by Zainab. I live in La Marsa, a large suburb of Tunis, and I take the bus daily to Sidi Bou Said, the suburb where I have class. The bus rides are probably my most real and genuine interaction so far with the pulse of urban life in Tunis, which i mean to say its my most frequent contact with a wide range of Tunisians- students, laborers, shopkeepers, shoppers, etc, etc. The bus is always late and always crowded, but no one seems to mind either of those "problems." This is because time does not exist in Tunisia and neither does personal space...two concepts I'm growing to appreciate more and more everyday. My host family doesn't have a clock in the house and a class that was supposed to start at 10 started at 11:20 today and we all just drank mint tea, orange juice and water until everyone got there, which I couldn't love anymore. In terms of personal space, I will say it's mildly off-putting at first when you don't have your 1-foot radius of space, as a security matter, at first. But, in general, it just feels very human and the general understanding of hospitality and affection among strangers here is much stronger than in the states. An illustrative example from the bus stop: While walking up to the crowded bus stop on a rainy morning, I saw an empty chair under the awning, which totally excited me in a way only something like that can, and as I was about to sit down, I felt hands on my back from the women on either side of the chair. When I turned around expecting to find a small child or an imaginary friend, the women were pointing to a puddle and started drying it with their newspapers. That is the Tunisia that I have seen and am living so far, and maybe it's because I'm still heavy into the first weeks euphoria that I'm only seeing the good things that I want to see...but it's as real as anything and I'm as happy as can be. 

After class, I go back to La Marsa to a very charismatic, intellectual, elegant and dynamic host family. They are originally from Niger, but have lived in Tunisia for generations and have more relatives than I have acquaintances and some of their extended family also took students from my program, so many of my friends are also my "cousins." My immediate family is a Mom, a Dad, A 17 year old sister, 13 year old brother and 3 year old sister. We have dinner together every night, which always inevitably turns into cross-cultural exchange and socio-politico comparisons between "Al-Gharb w' Afrikeea Al- Shamaleea ( The West and North Africa.) Today, our conclusions were that Eqypt is the mother of the world, Obama is the president of the world ( not because people love him, but because America's actions affect the entire world, a fact that was said with disdain and rightfully so) and iron and irony have too different of meanings to be one letter apart ( my 13 year old brother had an english test today). After dinner, we sit in the living room and Zainab, my 3 year old sister, does my hair, which hurts a lot, but she loves it and I can't say no to her since she marches around the house spritzing herself with parfum speaking french/arabic while her two little pigtails stick straight up. 

I can't write this entry without mentioning how happy I am to be with the other students in the program. I just feel very lucky to get the next 4 months to get to know them while getting into all sorts of good trouble wandering through the winding roads of the markets here, eating street food, drinking tea, getting colds, getting better and speaking french/arabic/english. 

Also, Lara is planning a trip to Tunis and Tunis is planning quite the trip for Lara. Hope you are readyyyy!

Sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

2-2-09

time of day: non-existent

place: somewhere over the atlantic ocean.

The first thing I want to do when I get to the hotel is shower; I haven't been sleeping on the plane at all and I know I'm going to be exhausted when I get into Tunis, so the kind of refreshing shower that substitutes a night of sleep is in order. I guess I could've been looking forward to sleep, but that's a cardinal expatriette sin on a first day of travel... what's better than a new city by the sea through the lens of hazy eyes? But, since I'm in between Toronto and Paris as I write this, I have a long time before I should think about that. A more pressing and relevant matter comes off the Toronto front. One, never fly transit through Toronto again. Flying transit requires about 8 more steps there, each which happen to be on opposite sides of the airport, I barely made my flight...Two, amidst being flustered and a little dazed from being in transit, when I sat down at my gate to board the second leg of my trip with 5 minutes to spare, a guy came and sat down next to me and we paid little attention to each other- he was reading something, I was talking to some friends whose voices I knew I'd miss, etc. etc. But by the time I had boarded the plane, I had convinced myself that guy was my close (emotionally- but far, globally) friend. For some reason, my instinct was to tell the New Jerseyian turned Parisian man next to me my whole thought process, "How could we have sat next to each other and not recognized each other? Do humans really have such tunnel vision that they only see what the expect to see?" I went on for 10 minutes to him about the non-story (since, i now believe it wasn't)...Anyhow, the man soon after moved when the seatbelt sign was switched off, "Maybe there's more legroom on the other side?" he said politely. The plane was empty and he really could've used more legroom....and even though his move ironically gave me more legroom, I was  the kind of embarrassed  I used to feel in middle school. Rambling to a total stranger-not a good way to start my new chic life in Tunis. You can take the rambler away from loyola, but you can't take the ramble out of the girl? (<--- clearly since i just relayed this story via the webtron) I couldn't pay much attention to it since Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 was on and the Coke I ordered- since I caught Jenna's craving from yesterday, had just gotten here.  

sincerely,

your expatriette in tunis.

P.S. I'm here now and after 2 layovers, I can say confidently, don't wear leather boots without a zipper to the airport- I know they look chic for travel, but it's very un-chic to fumble with them at security for 10 minutes. Eeks.