Monday, December 8/2008

The dining room looks like a series of short stories in the making. There are the four people at the next table, all German, who look like two sisters, the husband of one of them and a friend or possible sister-in-law. They seem on quite friendly terms but appear to be on independent schedules, arriving for meals singly and leaving when finished, regardless of whether they leave a lone person eating. The diets range from that of the one we call Jane (because of her resemblance to Jane McGill), who eats enormous amounts of salad and fruit but little or no meat, to that of the sister-in-law character, a large blonde woman, immaculately dressed, with a cane and a taste for comfort food, who keeps a plastic bag in her handbag to load with pastries at dinner. And the couple at the next table - she middleaged, a plump, wistful redhead who always says good morning in German and he an Arab, German speaking, but possibly a local, a little younger than she - and not always there at meals. She wears no rings, and she's happier when he shows up for meals, which he does more tha half the time, sometimes at breakfast. And the story is?

Out for a walk and the city is utterly deserted and shuttered, apart from the magnificent tomb of former president Bourguiba, where we seem to coincide with some Bourguiba family members. The tomb looks a bit like the Taj mahal, and is at the end of a quarter km walk made of paving stones. On each side of the walk there is a cemetery. Quite interesting, with rectangular white sarcophagi marking each burial spot - the richest of them in white marble, most in white concrete, and the occasional one in white tile. One is actually in chequered blue and white tile. There's no surrounding grass, just earth, butmany of the white coffin sized rectangles have sprigs of green leaf on top. There's the odd tourist and very few locals, but nothing open. Then, at the marina hotel complex, we spot a shop saying closed Sunday-Monday-Tuesday. TUrns out it's Eid, the feast commemorating God's sparing of Ishmael (Isaac in the Judaeo-Christian tradition), celebrated with each family killing a lamb - and we remember that the gutters were, as we set out, running red. We had joked about its being blood. No wonder the sheep I saw Saturday was so reluctant to accompany the woman.

In the evening the bubbly woman in the next room asks if we have heat. Actually, no, and it is starting to get chilly. She speaks 6 words of English to our 6 of German, but she manages to convey an amazing amount with sign language, laughter, and sheer determination and even hugs. They'd better fix it - otherwise she's off to Sousse, good hotels with heat and bigger pools, same price. She writes out 3 names (all this expressed without language in common!) A cheerful young man comes to check the heating and gets results with ours but not, unfortunately, hers.