It's been another huge day today. It's looking like I might actually get some sleep today, hooray for that. I couldn't get to sleep last night; I think this was mainly due to the very tasty and strong coffees that I had; so I just lay in bed unable to sleep for hours and hours. I think I got maybe three hours max of sleep before Jamil came in the room - I was already awake. Maybe I didn't sleep at all? It's hard to tell, actually.

Jamil and I split eggs & capers for breakfast (the eggs are so good here!) and we headed out to the WSIS badging site in a taxi. There was a long queue at the site but it moved relatively quickly; there was a huge variety of nationalities there to check in; a man from the Brunei government (the Sultan, who is actually the world's richest person, will sadly not be making a showing), an Ethiopian UN delegate, a Reuters press agent, and a very attractive Danish delegation were all inside and easily befriended. Security was impressive in show and minimal in reality; people were effectively waved through the gates. It was not at all like an American airport or even nightclub.

After badging, Jamil and I hopped on the free downtown bus and started waiting. I started reading through the conference materials they had given us. Then I started laughing, shocked.

I think it was maybe the quote from a foreign dignitary saying something to the effect that the Internet and the Information Society will help strengthen national sovereignity. And I could help but think that someone to say something like that would have to be really wildly out of touch with reality, like the man at the finacai yesterday who claimed that Tunis was doing just fine with regards to Internet access because there had been so much improvement and so many other countries were so much worse. Let's be honest here, folks - when your rich elite can't even access Yahoo! Mail on their dialup connection unless it's the wee hours of the night, YOU'RE NOT DONE OR CLOSE TO DONE.

It struck me deeply that in fact many of the people who were coming to WSIS, in fact almost all of them, were policy people. And that these were the people who generally did nothing to speed or assist a true information society; at best, policymakers don't get in the way. At worst, like in Ghana, they end up doing everything they can to strangle their nation's economy. Of course, this very large group of incredibly powerful people doesn't want a takeaway that the best thing for them to do is nothing. They know that IT and the Internet are important and want to feel, like Al Gore, that they are critical to it. So they pose and flex and impose and consequently end up destroying most of the value in it.

One thing did make me exceedingly happy was talking with the Indian delegate on the bus to the city center. He's working with a non-profit that's providing Internet kiosks across rural India (3-5 computers, depending on town size) and they found in an extended series of studies that kids from rural India DID JUST AS WELL picking up computer skills as the kids from the affluent urban areas. This is huge. HUGE! It means that given equal access to computers and Internet -- even without equal access to education -- the playing field has become effectively level. It means that there is hope for a meritocratic / technocratic environment, which in my opinion is the best sort, since it means that your boss by definition is smarter than you and that at the point that stops being true you become his peer or boss. I saw that, and was awed by that, at MIT's Lincoln Labs. There is a hope.

Jamil and I strolled through the city center, then the souk (largely empty on a Sunday) with its ridiculously small, windy passageways. The design was supposed to be such that invasion would be exceedingly complicated. I can see why. I got a packet of spices for my friend who told me to talk with old ladies (check), buy spices (check), and ride a camel (not yet!). I ate a spicy egg sandwich that even Jamil seemed scared of. It was about 40 cents US and so...amazingly...delicious. The spice is done with this red sauce used **everywhere* called harissa. We walked through some more parts of the souk and medina and crossed the road to the dirty backwater of the medina. The smell was palpably different - I felt myself stuffing the lovely jasmine flowers we had received at the WSIS registration desk in my nose to mask it. After peering into a turkish bath where Jamil had come many times as a child, we found what looked like barely a crack between two buildings and squeezed in, proceeding into the chasm for maybe 40-50 feet before arriving at three doors. Jamil grabbed a knocker in the shape of a fist and pounded for a few minutes. The door opened and we met Jamil's grandmother and her neighbor. The house was pretty incredible, with a large central opening for light and cooling. Jamil's grandmother turns out to be the youngest of three wives of an Algerian and has amazing blue tattoos on her face. Jamil is her only grandson who visits frequently. Between her teeth and her face she looks otherworldly.

After we hung out on the roof for a bit, we headed out to find Walid - this turns out to be a different friend Walid. We meet up at a hooka joint and lit up as several of Jamil's friends joined us including "original Walid". Now, gentle reader, you should know that I'm not a smoker. I've smoked only at weddings, but it felt like doing an apple hooka (much safer than cigarettes) with friends in Tunis was that kind of very special exception to make about a hard and fast rule about no smoking. So I did some puffs and it was quite nice. I felt like the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

ٌWe drank a little very sweet and delicious mint tea and we grabbed a different kind of spicy harissa egg wrap, this time with Arabic salame and onions. It was very tasty. At this point, Jamil's loud, crude, and mildly insane surrogate father shows up (Jamil's real dad died when he was very young, starting to make it clear just how much Jamil has made it through) and starts dominating the conversation. "How do you find Tunisia?" he asks, "Well, I am enjoying it ver..." and he cuts me off: "YOU CANNOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT TUNISIA UNTIL YOU HAVE SEEN ALL OF IT." It becomes clear that he is a tour guide. He immediately starts trying to explain to me why I need to rent a car for $200 a day to see the desert or how, with a group of people I can split costs and get it down to only a few hundred US dollars and a week to see the best parts of Tunisia with him. I weakly explain that I'm returning on the 21st and have employees and partners who are counting on my return but it becomes increasingly clear that listening is not his strong suit.

We check on back to the house, where we eat a traditional dish of spicy red stew (you guessed it, harissa) served over breadcrumbs (that you make yourself in the bowl) with vinegar, lemon, oil, and (you guessed it again!) egg. It's a good thing that the eggs are so tasty. They're smaller than most American eggs, but their flavor, much like *real* tomatoes vs American supermarket tomatoes, is much more concentrated and intense. It was very spicy - even poor Walid winced (__c'est trop fort!__ = "It's too strong!"), but Jamil was ready for punishment and smeared on the harissa; I swear I almost saw him tear up. Tunisia seems to have foods that are smaller, sweeter, stronger, and cheaper than America. There aren't bland foods.

Tunisian humor has proven challenging to date, even overlooking that the native thick mix of Arabic and French leaves those without a solid command of both in the dust. They employ a subtle form of sarcasm where the stated irony is something that *could* be true, but isn't. It's more like lying with an opposite to make a joke than it is really sarcasm (where the listener understands almost immediate the true statement being made), making separating humor from statement sometimes difficult.

At the same time, even with the supposedly enormous cultural gap that ought to exist between poor Tunisians and American hackers, I feel at once accepted and welcomed and not entirely an outsider. Maybe it was when I made a funny pose that quite by accident managed to produce a scene of uproarious laughter that made me feel more a member. If Tunisia is filled with young, motivated, energetic, and intelligent people like Jamil, I think that the country has a bright future indeed.