Thursday, November 20!2008

A long night's sleep and we wake to the dark blue Mediterranean (why aren't other seas that colour?) and the repeated crow of a rooster somewhere to the west. Two of the German women outside by the pool are already, stereotypically putting markers on their sun loungers to reserve them for later. Breakfast buffet is quite good and coffee very welcome.

A day of quiet settling in. Exploratory walk along the corniche by the seafront and the streets near the hotel. Some shops seem closed for the season and we don't pass other tourists (most of those at Monastir Centre are turning toast coloured around the pool). We pass the university hospital, a small internet cafe, pizza places, little greengrocers and magasins alimentaires. We buy 2 1.5 litre bottles of water for a Tunisian dinar (88 cents CAD or just over 40 p UK) to take back to the room. Also wash a few clothes and hang them out on our balcony to dry. Make tea using our immersion coil and sample each of 3 books we've brought with us. Two of them, Monica Furlong's biography of Thomas Merton and The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency, are divided into 20 or 21 chapters - exactly right for our 3 week stay. The other, Philip Glazebrook's Journey to Khiva, is an intelligent and sometimes humorous account of a trip to Uzbekistan via Moscow in 1990, shortly before our own trip to Moscow and Leningrad. It looks very interesting.

Not quite as many people at dinner and no overlap with the contents of last night's dinner except for the Tunisian soup. The chef will fry a small fish as you wait. Quite delicious. Not much selection for dessert but what there is is quite good, though the oranges are underripe.