Lots of summer bike rides

        

Boat ride with my neighbors

  

Summer Weddings

    

     

Lots of food during Ramadan

   

Early Morning Bike ride

Even at 7am it was still quite hot, yet still my friend and I managed to go a little further than we made it on our last bike ride. It’s so much fun to have a bike riding buddy!

 

That’s so Tun-a-sian!

A new store opened on the other side of town called ZaiZai, direct competition for the popular store ZaZa. Both are very similar to “dollar stores” back home, but the kind where not everything is actually a dollar. I try not to frequent these stores too often because I end up buying lots of cheap stuff that I don’t actually need, and then the video called Story of Stuff pops into my head reminding me that I really don’t need to shop at these places. However, I was in search of a decorative plate stand, and ZaiZai happened to be the only place known to sell them. As to be expected, I left the store with a number of things I later realized I really don’t need. The item I was very excited about while in the store was a small wooded box, inlaid with copper pictures of dice, playing cards and the word Tunisia. Inside there’s a section for dice and another for cards. I bought three of them for gifts. It wasn’t until I got home and showed the box to my roommate that I realized that the word on the front actually says Tunasia and not Tunisia. Then I found out that the spot for the cards is about 1cm too small and a normal deck of cards doesn’t fit! Just one more thing to add to the long list of items I purchased here that don’t actually work or weren’t quite what I expected them to be. I guess that’s what’s to be expected when making a lot of my purchases at the local dollar stores.

 

Couscous from scratch

I went to my friend’s house last Sunday afternoon, as I often do, but this time I was surprised to find many relatives in the house making couscous from scratch. It looked like a couscous factory! I’d been wanting to learn how to make it so I was thrilled and excitedly went on a little tour. The first group of women in the living room mixed the semolina flour with a small amount of salt water, rolled it with their hands to form small pellets, and then sieved it through two different sized sieves making it into even smaller pellets. After that, a group of women in the courtyard steamed the mixture for 15 minutes. Then the hot mixture was put through even smaller sieves by another group of ladies in one of the bedrooms, then put out in the sun to dry on the roof. My friends started at 4am and finished around 6pm; the good news is they will now have enough couscous for the rest of the year!

Trying to fit it all in

Today I went on a Critical Mass bike ride and then quickly headed off to my paint class’s art exposition. I got to the expo a little late but was just in time for group photos!

 

Cultural Stuff

The woman sitting behind me on the louage asked the man next to me to close his window. It seemed a little strange because it was a warm day and it was even warmer inside the crowded public van than outside. But she went on to explain that she was warm from doing house chores and didn’t want the cool air blowing on her. Everyone that heard her instantly knew what she meant, she was referring to the belief that you can get sick and even die if you quickly go from being hot to being cold. The people on the other side of the van hurriedly closed their windows without even being asked, and we all suffered through a warmer than normal trip across town so that nothing bad would happen to the warm woman.