Christmas Sweater Challenge

     

With just thirty minutes to search for Christmas sweaters in over one hundred bins of used clothes, this is what we found. Guess who won the prize for the ugliest sweater!? (Mine won the prize for the most Christmassy).

New President!

Beji Caid Essebsi has been confirmed as the winner of Tunisia's first free presidential election. Check out the details.

Christmas Bazaar

Two American friends and I sold our jewelry at two Christmas bazaars, first at the French junior high school and then at the elementary school. I sold a bunch of stuff and I bought a lot of stuff from the other vendors as well!

A Day Trip!

I went on a day trip to the North with a few friends of mine and a bus full of strangers. We spent twelve hours on the road and just over three hours in a few beautiful small towns. We took lots of pictures, bought a lot of souvenirs, had a great picnic lunch, and laughed a lot. It might seem a little extreme to drive so much and come back on the same day, but it’s quite common. My friend is thirty and she’s never spent the night away from home. She’s been to a number of different cities in Tunisia, but she always comes back the same day.    

Happy Thanksgiving!

For Thanksgiving I made myself a stuffed turkey breast, mashed potatoes & gravy and garnished it with dried cranberries. Even though I was all by myself it still felt festive and tasted great. The following day I had a proper Thanksgiving with some Swedish and British friends. I also made some of my Tunisian friends try some pumpkin desserts. The idea of having pumpkin is absolutely disgusting to them but they all ate it politely and most of them said they liked it. (Not sure what they really think though).

My Roommate’s Birthday

For my roommates birthday we decided to go to a small beach town called Nabeul about an hour and a half up north.  Once there we explored the old town, bought some sugar dolls that the city is famous for, tried out numerous restaurants, picked up sea glass and rocks on the beach, and ate some really great desserts.

Everything went very smoothly until we tried to get home. We bought our louagge tickets and waited with roughly eight other people. The small crowd steadily grew and it became obvious that lots of people wanted to return to Sousse but very few people wanted to come to Nabeul on a Sunday afternoon. Part of the problem was that it was a holiday weekend so lots of people who study and work in Sousse had gone home to visit their families but now it was time to get back. During the time we waited only four louagges took people to Sousse; so you can imagine that with over a hundred people waiting and only eight spots on each louagge people started to get very desperate. Even though my roommate and I had a birthday party to get to we weren’t pushy enough to get on any of the louagges. After two hours we made friends with one lady and the three of us got our money back, and went and waited another two hours for a train.

 
(All those people waiting for the train had been waiting for a louagge just like us).

Though we were ninety minutes late for my roommate’s birthday party all the guests graciously waited and seemed very understanding.

Fun Road Trip with Oregonians part 2

 

After a four day excursion to the South, my friends and I spent a day in the Capital and then said our goodbyes.

 
We went to numerous ancient ruins in Carthage where our guide explained the Phoenician, Berber, and Roman history.

We went to a U.S. cemetery in Tunis. There are over two-thousand graves of soldiers who their lives in World War II in military activities ranging from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.  

 We went to the famous blue and white city called Sidi Bou Said and did some last minute shopping.

We said our goodbyes and I headed back to Sousse. About the time they should have been arriving back in Portland I found out that they were still in Tunis. Their airline had gone on strike. Instead of making it home in twenty-four hours it took them about seventy-two hours to get home. They made the best of it though!

It was so much fun to have them visit!

Fun road trip with Oregonians

 

Enough chilies for the whole year!

September seems to be the month when a lot of Tunisian families make enough chili powder for the whole year. They buy somewhere between fifty and one hundred fifty pounds of red hot peppers, depending on their family size.

Then they take the stems off, cut them in half, put them in a sunny place to dry. This process takes an average of 4 days if it’s sunny out but can take longer if the weather changes.
 

Next they take the peppers to a grinding mill shop and return home with very large bags of chili powder. Lastly a lot of people add a little bit of olive oil to the powder to give it a darker color and then start using it.

I got to help my friends family by taking the stems off a large amount of peppers. I was careful not to touch my eyes or face that following afternoon, but it didn’t occur to me that I needed to be careful when pushing my hair back behind my ears. The backs of my ears burned for hours!

Another Lovely Wedding

One of my Level 1 students invited me to her wedding, so I took my roommate along for the cultural experience. We were picked up at 8pm by the bride’s brother who told us all about party life in Dubai as he drove us twenty minutes to the town called Kalaa Kebira. Once there we were escorted into a very large courtyard full of chairs and lovely decorations. The bride sat with us for a little bit and introduced us to her friends and family. They gave us some of the best seats in the place with a great view of the band and the stage where the bride was going to be. Shortly after, we watched the bride sign the marriage contract, then we watched her come out in three different dresses and dance in them, after than she came out in one last dress with the groom, and lastly the groom gave her some very beautiful gold jewelry. After a lot of photos were taken the bride came and chatted with us. She shared how it was the first time the groom had seen her without a head covering and how she was a little scared to be moving to Dubai in just a week. She also expressed how happy she was to marry the man she loved. After a little bit of food and dancing we were taken home by the brother, arriving home at 2:30am!

The bride and her best friend, two of my former students.

The bride signed the wedding contract in front of all the female guests inside the courtyard, while the groom signed the papers in front of the male guests in front of the house.

  
The first dress of the night.

  
Dress number two!

  
Her family escorted her in while wearing the third dress of the night and presented her to the groom.

 
The bride and the groom came into the courtyard together as she wore the fourth and final dress of the night.

  
Then the groom presented the bride with gold jewelry and did his best to put it on her.

 
They had a few pictures taken.

Then we took a few pictures together and said our farewells. The bride has kept in touch with me and is enjoying her new life in Dubai but she says the pace of life is very fast there.