Discovery - the key to getting wholemeal bread rather thn baguettes is to get up a little earlier before the German contingent has made sandwixches to be smuggled out for later.
A walk in the non-tourist streets to the south-west of our hotel. They're much more interesting than the touristy medina. It's a residential area with small shops and other businesses, such as a bakery (identifiable by loaves of brfead painted on the outside s well as, one presumes, by the Arabic writing beside the door). It's a windy day and there's plenty of loose rubbish blowing about but there are quite attractive houses, many with shapely pillars and arches, decorative wrought iron work and pretty Islamic tiles. The area doesn't look rich by any means, but there are new buildings under construction as well as those being renovated and extended. A sheet of paper taped to a shop wall is advertising for a 3rd girl to share a furnished flqt with 2 others (and it's a desirable area near the university medical faculty) but at the same time we see a small number of sheep disappearing round the corner near the closest of the mosques that we can see from our window. Later we pass a man with 2 sheep on q long rope. He's letting them graze on a vacant lot full of rubbish and bits of scrub growth - admittedly a better source of vegetation than many of the hills of Israel and Jordan. There is a girl wearing a hijab with an armful of bqguettes, two young men playing football, children coming home from school with their books. Not a great deal of vehicular traffic though. Laundry hangs from the windows and carpets are airing.
We stop at a couple of small shops as I look to buy a comb, mine having unaccountably disappeared in transit leaving us one b etween us. No luck though, although the shops do carry shampoo, styling gel, and even hairbrushes and I have remembered the French for comb. Interestingly there are large bottles (2 litre perhaps) of various colognes filled to varying levels, from which it appears possible to buy 100 ml portions.
Then J back to the hotel and I to the internet. A somewhat frustrating experience for a touch typist as the keyboard is quite different - for example the a and q are reversed, as are the m and the comma. Some characters, such as double quotation marks, I never do find. Sky overcast when I leave, and the sea, which had been green streaked with indigo in the shallows, is now dqrk grey with whitecaps. Huge local interest in a televised football match for an African regional cup. The locals support the team from Sfax, down the coast, rather than the nearby city of Sousse - perhaps too local a rival for their allegiance. Victory greeted with much shouting, singing in the streets, car horns and - we note from our balcony young bloods hanging Sfax's colours from the roof of a tall neighbouring building.
After dinner a farewell drink with John and Sandra, who leave tomorrow. I go back to our room for a pen to give them our email address (John has a card featuring his Zimbabwe wildlife charity). Searching for the pen, I leave the door to the corridor open and then remember our reading of last night. In Journey to Khiva, author Philip Glazebrook recounts his experience stying t the National, a major Moscow Hotel. He had left the window of his room open and lso the door to the corridor in order to get some fresh air. A man armed with a knife rushed into the room and attacked him violently, holdintg a chloroform pad as well as the knife. Glazebrook, who had quite a bit of money with him by Russian standards (in 1990) fought for his life. Suddenly the assailant left, perhaps having heard someone coming. When the author attempted to complain to authorities, both hotel and police, he zas met with incredulity that anyone could have been stupid enough to have left the door of his hotel room open to the corridor.
JAWORSKI TRAVELS