Sun Garden Hammamet

The name of my hotel in Hammamet was Sun Garden. It was kind of funny seeing some of the signs in Hammamet because of obvious typos in English: "Wellcom to British Bar," "Paradis Palace," etc. I can't criticize the Tunisian people on their language errors, however, because many of them at least speak French fluently in addition to their native Arabic. Then there are the individuals who have worked in the tourism industry a long time and also speak English, Italian, German or Russian, or all of those. Impressive!

My hotel wasn't on the beach, but across the street, so I had to walk through another hotel to get to the beach. The beach was really nice - long and flat with good white sand. Not the kind of beach I'm used to, like the steeper beaches in North Carolina with waves or the rockier beaches of France. The only thing that can be irritating about the beach there are the vendors that walk around trying to sell you stuff. They ask you when you arrived, tell you that it's okay if you don't have money, they'll give you a necklace or a bracelet free. In which case the French respond "gratuit jusqu'à la caisse" (free until the cash register). I'll talk a little more about getting hustled in another post. My hotel and the other hotel, Caribbean World, both had beautiful exterior pools that I never went in. It was really nice outside but not hot enough to make me want to jump into that freezing water. Instead I swam a few times in the interior pool of my hotel and in the ocean, which was chilly but nice once you got in.

The French resort clubs are organized, as I pointed out in the last post, to keep everyone entertained. There are animateurs who organize activities for the kids, or play other games with the older people to make them happy. Axel, Marine, and Caroline (my host siblings) joined the club, so I was left to make friends of my own and find things to do. I played volleyball and soccer with some kids and adults during the week, and led my petanque team to victory on Saturday! While playing ping pong with Philippe (host father) one of the first days, we were challenged by a guy around my age and his younger sister. We beat them 2 games to 1, but it was good because I was able to hang out with the guy, Guillaume, for some of the week. The following night, Tuesday, I ate dinner with Philippe, Laurence (host mother), Guillaume and his mother. Afterwards we went to get some mint tea from the café in our hotel and Guillaume saw a couple girls he had eaten lunch with in the café, so we sat down with them and smoked hookah and talked. Although hookah isn't the healthiest thing for you, drinking mint tea and smoking hookah is something purely North African that I had to try... But the point of the story is that I had a couple French gazelles - as the Tunisians call girls - who I could hang out with when I wasn't going on adventures, which was cool. Tunisia was my first real clubbing experience as well. I had a lot of fun, thinking about how amazing it was that I was clubbing with French girls and the Italian guys they made friends with on the beach, speaking English with the Italians who didn't speak French and drinking Celtia (Arab) beer while dancing to a mix of American, European, and Arabic club music. Hilarious, and something I never thought I would do. Check out the pictures of my new friends!





I will post again later in another sitting, possibly this afternoon. I still need to explain the food and the markets and all, so I hope nobody's getting tired with the blog, but I need to take a little break at least. Chao!

One week and I was missing the cheese!

There's some OK sheep's milk cheese in Tunisia, but it's not like the cheese in France. I actually kind of missed the cheese for the week that I was gone. Imagine what will happen when I get back to the U.S.! No, but really... my trip to Tunisia was awesome! It was really cool to go to another country and set foot on my third continent. Now I'm back with quite possibly the best tan of my life and getting used to my normal life once again. I'm at least lucky to get eased back into the school routine. Today I only had 4 hours of class, tomorrow I'm not going to school because of a student/teacher strike, Wednesday is the normal half day, Thursday is a holiday, and Friday I only have three hours of class.

Anyways, I should start with the last week before I move onto what I'm up to now. I'll give some of the major details now and then make a few supplementary posts so that this one is bearable for you and I. Just make sure you check out the pictures that I put up tonight and tomorrow. Here goes...

I left France on a flight from Marseille at 2:30 on Sunday afternoon, April 20th. The plane passed over Corsica and Italy before landing in Tunis, Tunisia's capital which touches the water. I didn't get to see much of Tunis leaving the airport, as our representative from Lookéa Voyages was there at the airport to receive us and the other passengers coming on the same plane. We were put on a bus and drove about an hour down to our hotel in Hammamet, which was an interesting ride. Setting my foot in Africa for the first time was an amazing experience. Driving from the airport to our hotel was kind of eye-opening for me to see the real social conditions of the country. Even for a country which is well-off for Africa, it is easy to see how much more poor it is than the United States or France. Of course I've been in certain small places in both of those countries where the social conditions might not be too terrific, but realizing that most or all of many other countries are like that is.... I don't know quite how to describe it... difficult? A couple quick things along the same lines that surprised my immediate sight of Tunisia:

• The amount of people I saw just sitting around. One person, two people, etc. just sitting around in no particularly important places doing nothing or just talking. At first I thought this might because I was arriving on a Sunday and they may not be working but then I learned that the weekly holiday is Friday rather than Sunday in Muslim countries for religious reasons. Tunisia's listed unemployment rate in travel guides is about 12%, while it's probably something more like 20-25%.
• Sheep. It's not quite the fact that I saw sheep as the fact that I saw sheep everywhere. No real herding boundaries or anything; they could have been grazing on a soccer field in between two housing complexes or on a field more in the country.
• Other small things you notice about the state of wealth of another country: the conditions of buildings, the trash easily overflowing the single dumpster, and the bottom halves of trees painted white as warning poles.

When I got to my hotel I realized that people came to the country and went to resort hotels like this so they wouldn't have to see those exact things. I've never been to a real "resorty" place like this, so it was quite a different experience. For one things, I had already paid for the plane tickets, bus from and to the airport, the hotel, and all my meals I took at the hotel. All I had to pay for was when I wanted to really leave the hotel or buy a souvenir. The hotel has a crew of young people working for it whose job is just to take care of the guests, including things like coordinating soccer, volleyball, petanque and other sports, putting on a show every night, and leading "clubs" for kids from 3-11 years and 12-17 years old. So it was immediately a little different for me in the area of family time. For one thing my French family spends much more time together than my family does, which is mainly because of the differences in the places we live and the ease of getting around in Columbia. So my vacations have always been family vacations, not vacations where people tend to get away from each other a little more than normal.

So that's a basic rundown on my first impression of the hotel and the country. I want to go to sleep now, but I'll try to post again tomorrow a little more in depth. I hope everyone is good, and keep reading!

Shalom!

I hope everyone is passing an excellent Passover! Or my Jewish readers at least.... Pretty soon you're all going to sit down to your seders, which I will definitely miss.

Tomorrow morning I leave for Tunisia, which I am PUMPED about! I think it will be amazing to experience a country with a completely different culture, religion, and basic environment. I am going to chill out on the beach and get rid of my cycling-cause mid-bicep tan lines, meet French tourists, visit the cities and the souks, and eat as much couscous and other Mahgreb specialties as I can.

I also wanted to post a little more about food. I know I write about food and cooking too often and I probably sound like a fatty, but I guess it's just France affecting me. I'm now reading a book with a self-explanatory title, called A Cook's Tour, by Anthony Bourdain. That book and the fact that I've now become addicted to a French TV-show called "Un Dîner Presque Parfait," where five people take turns during the week cooking dinner for (and getting judged by) the other four. There's a prize of a thousand bucks for the winner as well. So the moral of the story is that I'm looking forward to cooking more, even if I'm no Iron Chef. I'll cook for you sometime. You don't have to pay me a thousand bucks, either.

Anyways, I just wanted to get in a quick blog before I scramble tomorrow. Caio

A milennium of architecture in two days....

The last couple days were a lot of fun. Saturday I helped two friends of my host family, Natalie and Christophe, move from our small village (Boissières) to the slightly bigger town of Clarensac. They weren't changing for the village itself, but rather the size and style of the houses. Their house in Boissières, which was built in 1535, is in the center of the village and therefore lacks a garden, a driveway, and generally just more space. The stairs and the floors, which are incredible when you think about how many people have walked on them, are sometimes rather tilted. The only heating is the fireplace, and it's impossible to hang anything on the walls. Fast forward four and a half centuries and you find their new house, which was built in 1976. It has a gate, plenty of lawn and garden space, an awesome view of the Vaunage (our valley) from the upstairs office, and an enormous terrace behind the house. Anyways it's a big change for them and interesting for me to see two completely different houses in a day. So we loaded and unloaded two trucks two times each, and at the end sat around drinking wine and beer and eating paté, summer sausage, bread, and cheese. I think the next youngest after me was 40 years old, but whatever....

Yesterday was another change of scenery. I finally got around to riding to the Pont St. Nicolas, which I've been saying I'd do for a couple months now. The roads on the way there were beautiful and I was riding a little too quickly probably, because at the end of my ride I was dead. I was wondering why a bunch of people were watching the road in a small village, and yelling for me as I rode by, until I got passed by a few French rallye racing cars. So I rode on to the old bridge and stopped and took some pictures. The bridge was built in the beginning of the Romanesque period (end of the 10th century to the 12th century) by the Frères Pontifes, a religious brotherhood of bridge builders. Obviously the architecture of the bridge is completely different than the Pont du Gard, and so is the condition of the bridge... Not to criticize the brotherhood, but their the Roman aqueduct from 2000 years ago is in better condition! The road from the bridge back to Nîmes was very different as well. Many more cars, and I passed an army training ground, with lots of "tank crossing" signs. I rolled through Nîmes, which was busy with people out in the pretty weather, and rode slowly back, tired.

So I saw a century of architecture in a couple days, which was interesting. The weather has been pretty nice, except for a big storm last night and the first thunder I've heard here. I think that's all I have to write for the moment. I'm going to Tunisia on Sunday, so if I don't blog again before then I'll have plenty to write about and plenty of pictures afterwards. Hope everyone's well!

I'm legal!

Let me start off by saying that I am undergoing a recently discovered illness called blog envy. With this idea I think I will be the next Freud... But anyways I'm saying this because I've been reading Michael Charamella's blog and it's so interesting! Of course he's traveling all over the world and seeing so much awesome stuff, so I'll just have to step up the game...

What I just wrote about has nothing to do with the title of this blog. I've been 18 now for a year, 3 months, and 24 days. So I've been legally an adult for a little while, but what I mean by the title is my alien status. For the past seven months I've been living in France, as you all should know if you're reading this blog. However, technically you're supposed to have a residency card here after your first three months, and I didn't have one. Today I finally have my card, and I am no longer an American illegal alien living in France!

Speaking of changes, the time finally changed here last weekend. I'm now really liking seeing the sun in the sky until 8:30, which is something you might all have been used to for a few weeks. It's awesome being able to walk to the bus with plenty of sunlight and still having sun after dinner. The winter is miserable when you have to go to school and come back from school in the dark.

It is now also officially spring here, although it was already ridiculously nice weather here before. I took advantage of the sun Saturday morning and went out riding for almost three and a half hours. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, as was the French countryside, and I shoveled down plenty of pasta afterwards.

I guess the last thing I have to write about is my BAC Blanc French exam that I took the other day. At the end of the junior year, every student takes an exam in French literature called the BAC. The other subjects are taken in the senior year for the most part. Anyways, I went into a room at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon to get tested on some literature that my class had covered since the beginning of the year, and luckily had to cover Figaro's monologue in Act V, Scene 3 of The Marriage of Figaro, which I knew well. So for half an hour I read the monologue and planned my oral essay, delivered it in 10 minutes, and then discussed liberty and equality with the teacher who was questioning with me for a good half an hour. That wasn't on the schedule at all... But it went well, especially since it was my first oral presentation in French, and I got a pretty good grade.

That's all I have for the moment. I hope everyone is good, and I'll try to blog again with something amazingly interesting, unless I suffer from too much blog envy...