Tunis and Carthage
Trip Start
Jan 29, 2010
1
4
14
Trip End
Feb 18, 2010
Tunis, Tunisia
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Day 4
I woke up at 7AM. The boat was swaying very badly. No one was walking straight and most of the people had to grab a railing to walk. I started getting a little sick. I looked out the window and the waves were crashing into the boat and splashing onto the deck, which was 50 feet above the water. At 9:00, I asked what time we were going to arrive and they said 10:00. At 10:20, I asked what time we were going to arrive and they said 11-11:30. I don't understand why people are always late. I hate. I'm always on time and don't understand why they have to always be late. We met some people on the boat, who were American and Canadian and we were all staying at the same place. There were two sisters. One had studied in Morocco, so she spoke Arabic, which was quite helpful. Her sister was studying in Malta, which is its own country and it is in between Tunisia and Italy. The men were from US and Canada. I was on a mission to see a lot of things when we got off the boat. We passed through immigration and customs about ten minutes ahead of the others, but when we got out, many Arabs started to hassle us. They wanted $35 for a taxi to our hostel. We decided to wait for the group, so that we could be stronger and not be ripped off. The taxi couldn't actually drive us to our hostel because it was inside city walls and there were no cars inside it, which was kind of nice. The taxi drive was supposed to be 10 minutes, but somehow it ended up being 25 minutes. When we got out, the taxi driver was asking for about quadruple of what he originally said. One of the guys that we were traveling with had been to 104 countries and it was quite clear that he knew a thing or two about how to handle people that try to rip you off. He was yelling quite loud and pulled out his little computer with GPS and said you took us all the way around a lake so that you could charge us more. He asked the taxi driver to go talk to the police with us and he took off like a bat out of hell. The hostel was definitely unique. All the walls were tiled and I haven't seen that before. Each had their own design. We took a taxi to the Bardo museum, which was a museum about ten minutes away. It was a pretty ordinary museum, but with an Arabic style. It had the same statues and artwork that most of the other museums had. After that, we got dropped off by a taxi at the city's only cathedral. This was in the new city, which had all the newest stores. It had a mall and tons of nice restaurants with back alleys that had the same kind of stuff. I real like Tunis. The city has it all. The new city is completely modern and the old city has the markets inside the medina. The medina is probably 1,000 years old. I met somebody on the street named Sif and he wanted to practice his English. I said yes. He followed us to dinner and was really interested in marrying and American woman. He said in Tunisia that if a girl was to get married and she wasn't a virgin and the husband found out, then there must be a divorce. He then asked if I thought Tunisia girls were good looking and I replied by saying that they were not as good looking as my girlfriend. He said "Well of course not, she is your property." I laughed for about five minutes and he didn't understand why. Some of the others around the table explained that you can't say that to American women. He said that when you get married in Tunisia, the girl is the man's property. The others with me joked and asked if you get a receipt or certificate of ownership and he thought we were serious and said no, everyone just knows how it is here. He then went on and on about American girls. I had to break the news to him. I said American girls are not that great. They have a lot of premarital sex. He said that was OK if she was American. He then tried to ask one of the sisters out, but he first asked me if it was alright and was like a little puppy dog because she had blue eyes and he had never seen them. It got to a points where we finally had to lose him because he was somewhat stalking them. I thought it was funny how he asked for an appointment instead of a date. The hostel got cold at night because it was all cement/tile and no carpets.
2/3/10
Day 5
We slept in and walked into the lobby and met with the other American's and told them that we were going to Carthage today and they said they wanted to go with and I thought that might have been a good idea, since two of them spoke Arabic and one of them spoke French, which is Tunisia's second language. We caught a train to Carthage. The train cost about $.50/person, so less than $3 for all of us. Carthage was not the best set of ruins that I have seen, but it was pretty fun. We actually split up from the group and saw the ruins on our own. There are seven different sites of Carthage and they are all split up between about one square mile. We saw them all. The cemetary, villas, amphitheater, theater and baths. Each set of ruins got better. We started out in the cemetary and for some reason babies were sacrificed in Carthage. 20,000 of them. There were little tombstones that had been eroded. It gave the body chills to think of what had happened where I was standing. The theater was used for performances and fit 36,000 people. It wasn't like Ephesus, but still cool. The amphitheater was very eroded and we could barely tell what it was, but going back and studying it on the internet, I could kind of make out what it was used for and that was horse chariot races. The villas were the former houses of the Carthagenians. The bath houses were where the Carthage people bathed. The structures were giant. There were so many rooms. We checked out a picture of what it would have looked like when we left and it was unreal. It probably could have fit 1,000 people. I guess it kind of reminded of me of like a fitness center. It had saunas, hot springs and baths. I don't know why nobody knows about Tunisia. It's a great place. Carthage used to be a major empire. They were almost as big as Rome and at one time, they owned Sardinia and Sicily, which are now owned by Italy. They lost those territories due to bankruptcy and just handed them over to Italy. Many people wanted to go to Carthage. The Romans, Spaniards and Irish all wanted to go there. We took a taxi to Sidi Bou Said after Carthage. It was only two kilometers away. The city had all kinds of shops. Each of them was really unique and had different colored buildings. We ate some pizza/fries for $3, then walked down the hill and caught the train back to Tunis City Center. It took about 30 minutes. We walked down the main strip back to our hostel and Amanda shopped a little bit. She bought some boots $35, which would have been $100 back in the states and then went to bed.
