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.