A very green mint tea welcomes me at a cafe tucked away in

a side nook of Tunis' streets. A quick scan around reveals

the obvious - there are no wireless networks in Tunis to

speak of. This is my first day venturing out solo; Jamil

and Walid have other things to do and I'm glad to be out

of their hair. They've both done so much for me, especially

Jamil, that I've really gotten to feel like a burden. I

slept only about six hours last night but I woke up feeling

more refreshed than I had in a week. I think I'm starting

to adjust.

The sunlight in Tunisia seems bright and clear and...whiter

than in California. It's hard to describe, but I feel like

the sun in California is bluer; this may be due to the

higher latitude there. Here, it's not just brighter but

palpably different, which I remembered from Hawai'i as well.

The Tunisians seem to dislike the French and CensoredText

equally, but tolerate their presence just as well. Maybe

there is some sense of being consigned to a fate.

It makes you realize that however bad Bush is, you don't

have to fear for your life to express your opinion about

him. God bless America.

People here seem to have a high opinion of America and

Americans. Naturally, everyone hates Bush, but Americans are

apparently one of a fairly limited set of tourists that are

friendly and tip well, and many have relatives in the US. I

was expecting a much chillier reception from an Arab country

once my nationality became known. (I seem to have a very good

French accent but limited vocab and very poor ability to

understand others, so I seem like an unusually friendly,

mildly deaf, lightly retarded Frenchman. Yay for losing my

American accent!) Tunisia is keen to up American tourism,

so apparently my American identity is effective immunity.

In a sense I feel spoiled by it, but it's very nice to know

that I have nothing to worry about here. I've not once felt

in danger or even scowled at.

Lebanese (and to a lesser extent Syrian and Egyptian) culture

is dominant here, almost to as high a degree as American.

Apparently the Lebanese got a big leg up on everyone by being

a Christian (and therefore more permissive) society in the

Arab world. There are music videos *everywhere*. Did I mention

there were several dozen Arabic music video channels on

satellite? They've got MTV and VH1 beat handily.

There are french fries in just about everything here. I think

adding fries (and harissa) to wraps is a tradition I'll have

to take home with me. :) Yummay. (That was for you, Marianne.)

I realized why I'm having trouble with change here - there are

literally twice as many common coins as in the US. In the US,

we've got pennies ($1/100), nickels ($1/20), dimes ($1/10),

and quarters ($1/4). In Tunisia, the work with thousandths, not

hundredths - "millimes". The denominations of millimes are 5,

10, 20, 50, 100, 500, and there are 1 and 5 dinar coins, too.

That's eight different common coins in circulation! One very

surprising denomination I found was a 30 dinar bill. Huh? I am

not sure I know of another currency that has a 10, 20, and 30

denomination. That seems just downright strange, but cool in

an obscure-cool kind of way. :)

The Internet cafes are surprisingly even worse than the dialup

here. I think they must be having real issues with local

congestion because even the first hop was seeing 1000+ms ping

times and packet loss. I couldn't access BoingBoing, either;

it's possible that it's on a blocklist. I was able to

access BoingBoing from the dialup connection, so the block is

not nationwide, like it is for porn sites. I tried going to a

porn site on my dialup connection and got back a page designed

to look exactly like the French Internet Explorer error page

when a site could not be found. Nothing in the text tries to

suggest that the page is censored. Of course, when you're

using an English version of Firefox, it's pretty damned clear

when a site is blocked by the government versus just having

problems connecting, since French IE errors are not terribly

common in US English Firefox. :)

The computers don't seem to be a problem in terms of power;

there were very beefy desktops for sale in the mall for D1500,

or around $1200, and they seemed reasonably current with US

desktops, which honestly haven't changed very much in the last

year or two. The stagnation of development in the US PC sector

has the upside that achieving computational parity with the US

is becoming increasingly easy. It's really all about the

network connection now. Interestingly enough, this somewhat

obviates the focus on getting computers into people's hands;

I think that they will get there anyhow through the market...

and if the money is not instead spent on Internet connectivity,

we may find millions of laptops being deployed to students at

great expense who then can do almost nothing useful with them.

As a perhaps obvious sidenote, don't change money at the

airport; the exchange rate in Frankfurt was effectively:

US$1.000 => TND 0.950, while here it's US$1.000 => TND 1.350.

So I took about a 40% hit changing money at the airport. Ow.

I feel dumb now, but hey, that's the way it goes - you live

and you learn.

I'm meeting up with Walid & Jamil at a tasty little place in

the Medina where they have some new and yummy food. I do love

eating my way through Tunisia (but walking plenty to burn it

off!) - and apparently Walid is scared of trying the egg and

harissa sandwiches in the medina; he's worried they'd make him

ill. It cracked pretty much everyone up that an American was

out eating foods in Tunisia that even Tunisians were afraid of.

But boy, that was a yummy sandwich. All the same, it'd probably

be a bad idea to repeat.

Ciao for now!