"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing people together."
As no taxi driver wanted to take us the apparently tiny distance from our hotel to the Tunis bus station, we set out on foot in more or less the right direction. As it turns out, what should have been a 30-minute stroll turned into a sweltering 90-minute hike with our big packs on our backs and our daypacks on our stomachs. It was just as well really, and we ended up with a pedestrian’s view of the city — gleaned through the sweat streaming down our foreheads and into our eyes but nonetheless beautiful. Weighed down by too many water bottles, we gave a bottle and P’s Orangina to some kids playing soccer in a park. They were happy with the water, but you’d have thought the Orangina was gold by the way they chased the kid with the bottle.
Eventually we made our way to the station, bought ourselves three tickets for the 7-hour bus ride across Tunisia to the small city of Tozeur, a popular launching point for Saharan excursions and a hell of a lot hotter than Tunis.
By the time the bus leaves three hours later, we have found seats at the back — or rather, we’ve found padded pieces of plywood that were surely bolted down at some point, but that now shift erratically with every other bump in the road. The bus took us through rural Tunisia — where *real* Tunisians live — and gave as a look at both the extreme poverty and the incredible beauty of the countryside.
A passenger named Hafsa makes conversation with P, but his patchy Arabic and her almost complete lack of English and French make the conversation a little difficult. At a rest stop about 3 1/2 hours into the ride, she helps us order spicy chicken sandwiches and buys us a big box of pastries as a welcome gift to Tunisia. I have to admit, my Western alarm bells started ringing a little at this point, and I don’t quite know what to make of her ultra-liberal clothes, but she seemed sincere, and didn’t seem too adamant about her requests for us to visit her tourist shop in Tozeur…
Hafsa tells us she’s from Tunis, and that (amazingly for this part of the world) she lives with her boyfriend — and at the tender age of 21, no less. She and her sister moved to Tozeur to open up a tourist trap and sell fake Lacoste polo shirts, attracted by low rental costs and competition for tourists that’s apparently nowhere near what it is in Tunis.
She escorts us to our hotel and won’t take a dime for the cab ride over before she hops back in and heads home, with promises to show us around, help us haggle and keep us out of trouble. We go to bed hoping she doesn’t cause us more trouble than she promises to help us avoid.
June 25
The next day, we head dutifully to Hafsa’s shop — still wary of tourist-trappery but happy to have a guide just the same. We make plans to have coffee at a hotel down the road that evening, and set out to explore Tozeur.
The town is an oasis in the desert — all dust and palm trees and conservative-minded people who look like they work as hard as is possible in this blinding heat. On the two main tourist roads, we’re assailed by caleche-drivers and headscarf merchants, but everywhere else it’s just friendly “bonjours” from everyone under 25 that we pass on the street, as we’re quietly ignored by everyone else. Even more than in rural India, the women seem kept out of sight — aside from the occasional woman riding in a taxi or working in a restaurant, you might think that every inhabitant of Tozeur is male.
Later that evening, we meet up for coffee with Hafsa and her sister Zainab at the Oasis hotel, a chic-looking place with a poolside cafe and a fully stocked bar — another rarity for a very conservative town in this part of the world. Both girls are dressed to the nines, Western-style, and when Zainab’s phone rings, I’m amazed to see her pull a $700 Samsung out of her designer purse. My lack of Arabic keeps me out of the conversation for the most part, but the gist I get from R is that both girls have vacationed in Lebanon and the Ivory Coast, have more money than they know what to do with, and apparently haven’t accepted a nickel from their family… The three of us exchange looks as we wonder how exactly they can afford their lifestyle, but happily accept their offer to show us around tomorrow…
That’s all for now — more on our 4X4 excursion into the Sahara later. BTW, I’ve still got no way to upload photos to this site, but those of you who know me can find some new ones on Facebook…
So we landed in Tunis around 10am, surrounded by French, German and Italian vacationers. The very few clothes they were wearing were all Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, and I got the distinct feeling they were headed straight for one of Tunisia’s many coastal resort towns, which was just fine with us.
We’re just 80km from Sicily, and many Tunisians complain mildly about the tourist influx (we later saw signs forbidding tourists from entering some residential neighbourhoods). This place, though, is magnificent — Tunisians in jaw-dropping traditional robes mingle freely with Euro-minded local women whose clothes make your jaw drop for entirely different reasons… After overpaying only slightly for our taxi from the airport, we drop our bags at the hotel and R falls asleep pretty much immediately, jet-lagged and exhausted. Little kid that I am though, I head out to give her an hour’s nap and explore Tunis’s Ville Nouvelle on my own.
I wander around in more-or-less concentric circles around the hotel, and I’m in love with the place already — if France had colonized a desert Cuba, this is what I imagine it would have been like. I’m also pleasantly surprised to find that, even though I’m obviously a tourist, people leave me pretty much alone — despite my white skin, the tourist-trap vendors are less voracious with their sales pitches than in other countries, and a polite “no” or “la, shukran” generally suffices. Also really nice: when someone doesn’t know how to give you directions to where you want to go, it seems like they tell you so — unlike in India, where people seem to just make up directions to save face, often leading you in exactly the wrong direction.
Tunisia’s official language is Arabic, but most people speak French, and English will do in most tourist hot spots. I try hard to sound French (as opposed to Québecois) so that people have at least an outside chance of having some idea what I’m talking about.
The streets of the old town — the city centre before the French built the Ville Nouvelle — look like they’re about to cave in, but this is a beautiful state of disrepair — buildings painted white, grilles and doorframes painted brilliant blue, and a crushing mass of cars, trucks and people going about their business in a crazy maze of winding one-lane streets.
When P’s flight arrives, our band of merry travellers is complete, and we all head out to gorge ourselves on jejj (rotisserie chicken) — 7 dinars (about $6.50) gets you a whole (slightly earthy-tasting) chicken, a rock-hard French baguette, an aluminum foil ball of sketchy-looking salad, and a handful of very yummy zaitoun (olives). Roasted chicken, by the way, is also called “farouj” — my first Arabic word and the namesake of our cat.
June 23
Next day, we get up bright and early, and after a light breakfast of strong Turkish coffee, baguettes and jam (they really like French bread here) we’re on our way to Sidi Bou Said, a quaint hillside town that’s even more blue and white than Tunis, on the way to a real gem (for me at least): the remains of the once-mighty Carthaginian Empire, that at its height controlled much of North Africa, all of Iberia, and a good chunk of Italy, and was probably the single biggest unified threat that Rome ever saw. Though the Romans ultimately won, it really could have gone either way.
At any rate, the ruins are hauntingly glorious. I’m surprised to find out that most of them aren’t actually Carthaginian — apparently the Carthaginians’ cities were razed to the ground by the Romans, whose own buildings were then razed and replaced by those of the Vandals later on. What’s left is a mishmash of styles and architecture — columns, mosaics and fallen-down walls that draw on one or another of these peoples’ styles, and that apparently prove quite a conundrum for modern-day excavators. The result is that only a few genuine Carthaginian sites remain — one of which is the Tophet, where priests sacrificed children to Baal 2,000 years ago in hopes of obtaining good crops or military success from the heavens.
June 24-26
More on these days later — it’s going on midnight, and we’ve got a 4 1/2-hour ride to the centre of the Tunisian Sahara tomorrow morning. Suffice it to say for now that they were very good days, and that we’re in Tozeur, an oasis town 7 hours south of Tunis, far from the coast, the tourists and the skimpy D&G tops. This is a whole other world, and one I’ll leave tomorrow before I can even start to know it. But we’re on a schedule here, even if we have no concrete plans except for a ticket from Tunis to Beirut on July 6. The next sunset I see will be in the middle of the Sahara — and if I can keep my eyes open, the next sunrise too.
BTW, I’ve got no software to crop photos with, no flash or FTP to upload them with on this ancient computer, and no way to get them onto this site in any meaningful way at the moment, so you guys will just have to wait a bit for pictures, or you can check out a tiny smattering of them on Facebook. Also, sorry for any typos — I’m rushing to get all this written and get to bed, and besides, I do enough proofreading at my day-job!
I’d meant to do some fairly frequent posting from Tunisia, but I may have to go for a series of little posts, at least until I can figure out how to type on this thing without finger-pecking at two words per minute. This place is beautiful though, and from what I can tell so far, the people seem warm, helpful, and altogether sincere in their welcomes. Just a gorgeous, gorgeous place.
Those of you who have been following this site for a while know that it tends to turn into a bit of a travel blog when I go globetrotting, so if that’s not your cup of tea, check back in about four weeks.
As the Western world looks for ways to stave off a massive impending nursing shortage, the Czech Republic has come up with a novel way to attract nurses from other, richer countries: free boob jobs for everyone. I’m not sure if this makes the Czech Republic a better place to be a nurse, but it’s clearly not a bad place to be a patient.
Less interestingly, nurses also get free German lessons and five weeks of vacation as part of the enticement package.
The head of one Czech clinic says the cosmetic surgery “helps to improve the morale of both our employees and our patients” — and, incidentally, is a heck of a lot more popular than the language courses.
The nursing shortage is part of a worrying global trend that doctors and nurses say is hurting patient care and potentially risking lives. In Britain, hospitals have been forced to temporarily eliminate dozens of beds because of the dearth of nurses, while in the United States, the government predicts there could be a shortage of one million nurses by 2016. In the Czech Republic, the lack of qualified nurses recently forced a hospital in Brno, the country’s largest city after Prague, to shut its intensive care unit.
[…] Irena Pejznochova, spokeswoman of the Czech Nurses Association, said […] innovative incentives were being introduced because nurses worked 12-hour shifts, were underpaid and could not even prescribe an aspirin without a doctor’s permission. “The problem is that the public still perceives nurses as they were represented in communist-era television shows: as low-level workers who emptied bed pans and cleaned hospital rooms,” she said.
Go on, find Palau on a map without Googling it — I double dog dare you.
Its 21,000 citizens have only had a country for 15 years, but the Pacific mini-state of Palau is already distinguishing itself by welcoming 17 Chinese Guantanamo inmates with open arms, and inviting them to settle wherever they like on its 177 square miles of land. I’m sure the $200 million in U.S. aid dollars they apparently received as part of the deal had nothing to do with it.
Sandra Pierantozzi, Palau’s minister of state, in an interview with VOA, says her nation is glad to have the Uighurs.
“If they want to settle in Palau we would welcome them,” Pierantozzi said. “This is very much in line with the culture of Palau, where people who drift in and who needs settlement and [a place to live] are welcome to our shores and our tradition will take care of them and insert them into our society.”
[…] “We’d like to think it is paradise, but you have to also remember the Uighurs come from a landlocked country in China, and for all intents and purposes, they [may] not like living in a small island surrounded by water,” Pierantozzi said. “So we’re not really sure [whether] they will want to come [or] not.”
The prisoners are Uighurs, Chinese Muslims with an alleged — but apparently unproven — desire to violently break the Xinjiang province away from the rest of China. Obama’s government apparently would have sent them home, if not for China’s nasty record of torturing and killing Uighurs.
As much as Obama deserves praise for shutting down Guantanamo, I can’t help wondering: if they’ve done something wrong, shouldn’t they be charged, rather than sent off to a tropical paradise? And if they’re innocent, shouldn’t we be talking about compensation for their kidnapping and subsequent seven years of imprisonment on a Cuban military base, with no explanations, lawyers or telephone calls?
UPDATE: It turns out that Palau is now only taking 13 of the 17 Uighurs. The other four are off to Bermuda. Seriously, they could do worse…
Smacker: “May I just whack you on the head with this shovel?”
Smackee: “You may.”
A new orange goo called D3O remains soft until you smack it with something (a shovel, say) at which point it becomes extremely rigid — hard enough to protect your head from a tumble over your handlebars, or from a good smack with most gardening tools.
According to the company website, a layer just 7mm thick (about a quarter of an inch) can protect you from some pretty violent impacts, and they’re building some really neat protective clothing for snowboarders, mountain bikers and other people who fall down a lot.
The D3O lab says the protection is provided by molecules that “flow with you as you move but on shock lock together to absorb the impact energy.” It seems to have worked to some extent for the the guy getting smacked in the video, but judging from the way his arms flinch up during that last bonk on his head, falling off your bike still won’t be any fun.
Antarctica is cold, barren, and an expensive place to send a research team. So what’s the best way to track penguins on the frosty bottom of the world? You rig a satellite to look for giant smears of penguin poop. Duh.
Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have used satellite images, created to survey the sea ice around Antarctica’s coast, to identify emperor penguin colonies using the huge tell-tale reddish-brown patches the birds leave behind.
BAS mapping expert, Peter Fretwell, said it was a “fortuitous” discovery. He noticed that patches on the ice in a satellite image corresponded with a known colony. The images, which came from the Landsat Image Mosaic Of Antarctica (LIMA), compiled by Nasa, USGS, National Science Foundation (NSF) and BAS, provide a high-resolution satellite view of the Antarctic continent.
Penguins are too small for satellites to see, but the birds are notorious poopers, and penguin colonies can cover large swaths of ice with excrement. The colour of their poo varies widely too, and can tell researchers a lot about penguins’ living conditions. Acres of pink poo mean that krill — the tiny crustaceans that are penguins’ preferred food — are plentiful, and that they’re are eating well. White poo means they’re eating fish, which require more effort (and therefore more burned calories) to catch. And green poo indicates a diet of algae, a last-resort food that usually means other foods are in short supply.
The clip above is from Mr. T’s motivational teen video, awesomely entitled “Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool,” and it’s about as painfully 1984 as it’s possible to be. This segment has Mr. T telling teens to express themselves, “table the label,” write their names on some duct tape, and stick it on their clothes.
I don’t want to publicly advocate drug use or anything, but if you watch this video without the help of a controlled substance, you’re really missing out.
All six parts are on YouTube, and the video covers topics like:
Treating your mother right:
Mr. T: “Remember, when you put down one mother, you’re putting down mothers all over the world!”
Reading:
Mr. T: “The real story is called “Romeo and Juliet, and it was written by this English guy named William Shakespeare.”
Kid: “That English dude? I thought he only wrote old-time stories.”
Mr. T: “No little brother, he wrote a lot of good stuff.”
Rap:
Mr. T: “Rapping is a way of saying ‘knock knock.’”
Kids: “Who’s there?”
Mr. T: “Me. Open the door and listen to what I got to say.”
Being somebody
Mr. T (rapping): “If you don’t wanna be a crazy fool, you better study real hard and stay in school. I pity the fool when there comes a day, when he finds out his only gua-ran-tee, is to make sure that he will be some-bo-dy.”
Incidentally, Mr. T is the worst rapper in the world:
“Say the message is real dude, it’s just like that.
But leaving me, and I’m Mr. T, that’s not where it’s at.”
You can’t blame him entirely though — the lyrics were all written by Ice T, who was 26 at the time and should have known better. (Does anyone else wonder if Ice T is related to Mr. T?)
A new addictive toy from Andre Michelle’s aM laboratory lets you visually create complex, surprisingly catchy tunes in a simple matrix, including bass lines, multiple harmonies and other yummy musical goodness. I could play with this for hours. But then, I’m simple.
On a sidenote, as a Web communications guy, I can really appreciate the brilliance of a tool/toy that’s really quite complex, but that nonetheless requires almost no instruction whatsoever. You just intuitively know how it works. Go ahead, try it.
When I stumbled across a brief history of bartitsu on the Web, I assumed it was a Simpsons joke at best or a ninth-rate Shaq-Fu clone at worst. But as it turns out, bartitsu is a legitimate blend of jiujitsu, sumo wrestling, French kickboxing, stick fighting, and other martial arts. And despite all evidence to the contrary, you don’t have to dress like Doctor Watson to do it.
111 years ago, an Indian-born Brit named Edward William Barton-Wright returned from Japan with an idea for a “New Art of Self Defence” that would help well-to-do men about town lay the smackdown with their fists, feet and high-fashion walking sticks. It was a bit of a fad for a few years — particularly because Barton-Wright seemed to be really good at beating people up — and even earned him an audience with the Prince of Wales, which Barton-Wright missed after falling of his bicycle and injuring himself.
The unorthodox fighting style also caught the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose legendary Sherlock Holmes character employed a little “baritsu” in the smackage of his nemesis, the evil Professor Moriarty:
When I reached the end I stood at bay. He drew no weapon, but he rushed at me and threw his long arms around me. He knew that his own game was up, and was only anxious to revenge himself upon me. We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with both his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went. With my face over the brink I saw him fall for a long way. Then he struck a rock, bounced off, and splashed into the water.
In spite of the fact that Doyle apparently forgot the first “t” — perhaps because he thought the “tits” in “bartitsu” might offend people — bartitsu is enjoying a surprising revival, based mostly on a couple of lines in a Sherlock Holmes novel.
If you’d like to become a cane-wielding bartitsu master, check out bartitsu.org for more information.
