A Place to Go

The NY Times just released its 53 Places to go in 2008, and coming in at #3...

3 TUNISIA

Tunisia is undergoing a Morocco-like luxury makeover. A new wave of stylish boutique hotels, often in historic town houses, has cropped up alongside this North African country's white-sand beaches and age-old medinas, drawing increasing numbers of well-heeled travelers. The Villa Didon (www.villadidon.com) in Carthage, for one, has a restaurant originally run by Alain Ducasse. Indeed, TripAdvisor ranks Jerba, a resort island off Tunisia's southern coast, as the No. 1 emerging spot in 2008.

I'll be honest, often the NY Times travel section is wayyy to bourgeois and trend-conscious for me. Here, you see what they decide to reference, for example. Villa Didon is the see and be seen of Tunis, even more than the Plaza. I always kidn of shiver a bit when I hear references to Jerba in travel articles. Tourism there is supposedly just killing that place, everything from the water quality to the native coral to the traditional way of life and property prices for locals. I have yet to go because it's quite a haul from Tunis and normally I don't have more than 2-3 day off at a time. I'll make sure to get to there and Tozeur this spring, however.

Poor timing on the Times' part for putting in Algeria at #43, considering today's attacks in Algiers. What a sad event.

#49 Goes to Essaouira. Very cool old town far down on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. I went to the summer music festival there back in 2005 and had quite a good time, besides all of the Euro-hippies and pickpockets.

Not bad, there are four references to North Africa - Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Essaouira, Morocco. All of the Maghreb gets a shout-out.

edit: in browsing the Villa Didon's English version of their website, I couldn't help noticing that they have something called the "Gold Dido." I choked on my cafe direct.

Zoo No More

Last night, Sarra came over to pick up Ari the puppy. This was the last of the motley group of animals that we somehow accumulated and then miraculously passed on to other people over the last two months or so. Jihad the cat headed out on Saturday to a cousin of a friend of ours (first reports are good), and all that's left are the random turtles in our yard (there has to be two since there are baby turtles slowly scampering around).

This has all been in preparation for the big move. Since our lease is essentially up, we are moving to another place in Ariana that's still quite close to where we were. It's the first floor of a villa - a "S+3" in French. It has a nice kitchen plus three bedrooms and a living room. There's also a front porch and a lot of greenery including a pomegranate and an orange tree. It's unfurnished, so Alison and I are on a mission to scrounge up furniture. We're going downtown this weekend to buy beds and frames, and then out to a used furniture market on Sunday. It's going to be minimal, but I'm not sacrificing on the bed! Plus, rent for the whole place is 380 Dinars a month, or about $300, so what we save in rent we'll put into some decent meubles.

Overall, I'm happy to be staying around Ariana. I know the shopkeepers and local places, and I've made friendships, plus I'm just all-around comfortable with it. People have been telling me to move to Nasr/Menzah, but I'll be honest- the last thing I need here is a super-bourgeois location, it's not very real. Ariana is a good mix of being a very nice neighborhood while still having an authentic local market and a neighborhoody feel.

To the Top of Africa...

I found this old travel article on Bizerte/Tabarka, etc from 1987 in the NY Times. It mentions Le Petit Mousse, along with the change in power in '87. Interesting reading.

Bizerte from the water

The tallest building is the old French officers' housing. In 1956, after the French had left Tunisia, they maintained a military presence in the city because of its strategic deep water port (it was used by the Allies as a crucial launching point for the invasion of Sicily - check out Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn if you want to learn more). This led to armed conflict between France and Tunisia in 1961 that claimed many Tunisian lives.

Utica

On Saturday, I went out to the Roman/Punic site of Utica. It's located on the drive to Bizerte, and is a small site and museum that you can go through in an hour or two. I'd recommend it if you're passing through, but in a country with so many great Roman sites, it's low on the list.
I went there with my new friend Mehdi, who just returned from his masters in LA as part of the Fulbright Scholarship Program (which we administrate for Tunisians at AMIDEAST). He's a very cool guy with impeccable English, and we had a nice early day in Utica before heading up to Bizerte to visit his family. His family has a beautiful house just outside the city along the water - about 5 minutes past Le Petit Mousse. We hung out there, saw the town a bit, and then had some very tasty wood-fired pizza at a restaurant that doubles as a petting zoo during the summer (that monkey sure looked cold).
Tonight, I'm meeting up with Mehdi to go to a local watering hole, Le Baroque, which is one of the classier and most decent places to get a Celtia around here.