Marie Javins's Blog, page 69

Did I Err?

Something awesome happened at work today.

This. Brittany texted me from across the table in a meeting. She had a view of the hallway outside.

"Sergio's here."

She'd spotted the legendary cartoonist at MAD, just outside the meeting room. I stood up without explanation and walked out of the meeting to go find Sergio.

He didn't know who I was at first—fair enough. I last edited Groo in the early nineties. But he still gamely went along with me insisting he come upstairs to see my office door, and when he got there, he was amazed.

And then I showed him the cow he drew for me in 1992, and he knew exactly who I was then.

Journey's End

I had never commuted through Newark Airport before. It's always been an origin or destination, never just a place to go through Customs.

I struggled with not going straight home. With getting on the next plane to Los Angeles instead of on the train to Jersey City.

But it was raining out and my coat was in Burbank, so I had a bit of incentive to return to California.

And when I got home, semi-delirious from time zone changes, I unpacked my bag. No paintings, but at least these little guys made it safely from Tunis to Burbank.

24 Hours in Barcelona

"I shall drown my Tunisian handicraft sorrows in Spanish shoes," I thought.

I had checked into a hotel in the Gracia neighborhood and left my broken painting in a dumpster, all wrapped up in cardboard and bubble wrap. I had a 10-trip metro fare card in spite of only being in town a day--it's just cheaper that way.

I spent my day wandering through Born, seeking shoes and clothing. I stopped in On Land, the last boutique standing of my favorites, and bought a sweater. I managed to buy quite a few articles of clothing before heading back to Gracia for the real reason I'd stopped over in Barcelona.

Hint: Though I found Gracia to have a street full of independent boutiques, I wasn't really there for the shoes.

Casa Vicens recently opened for public tours. Casa Vicens is the first house designed by Gaudi.
I saw the outside when I lived in Barcelona, but this was the first time I went inside.

A Sad Tale

Here is the sad story of a Tunisian painting, now residing in pieces wrapped in cardboard in a Barcelona dumpster.

The painting prior to shipping. I didn't think the glass would make it home, but I'd replace it when I got there.

I wasn't allowed to take the painting as carry-on. It went "Special Luggage" class.  I could feel the glass moving about as I carried the package under my arm from the airport to the Barcelona hotel. I knew the glass had broken, but didn't care about that much. But what I didn't realize was the painting was actually ON the glass. 
Goodbye, little painting. You were awesome. We hardly knew you. 

Leaving Tunisia

For those mornings when you crawl out of bed at 5 a.m. in a stranger’s house in the Tunis Medina, pull the door shut behind you as you run through your list of possessions in your head, walk to Bab Mnara to hail a taxi, and the taxi drives you to the airport through empty streets with every warning light flashing, and then you get to use “special luggage” for your new Noah's Ark painting to travel to Barcelona, you need a pain au chocolate to start the day.

Tunisia is not what people think of when they think of Africa, mostly because Africa is what people associate with lions and Masaai warriors. In my mind, like most people, I associate Tunisia more with Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Algeria...it's just what we do. But is IS Africa, North Africa, like all those other countries I just listed. I wondered, as I sipped my latte, what is the term for my interest in this continent? Like Frankophile or Anglophile, is there a name for the sort of person who likes to take share taxis around the continent? Cape-to-Cairo-o-phile? Bus-ist? And if I'm an Africa-phile, what do we call my various other fascinations? Wallaby-o-phile? Bangkok-o-phile? Bali-o-phile? Yogyakartist?

I'm not even sure it's travel I'm obsessed with. It's really just novelty and an adventurous romp. A good laugh helps.

I had been pretty rusty on this trip, having been chained to a desk for three-and-a-half years aside from my little test trip to Tijuana a few months ago, but I'd warmed up quickly. I was feeling stress now as I prepared to board the plane back to Europe, departing the continent of Africa where I'd been through so much in my other lives, residing in Cairo, Uganda, Namibia, Cape Town...taking public transit up the eastern side and down the western side. Spending time with Herr Marlboro back when I still thought relationships were something I might want to prioritize. I was just dipping a toe in here in Tunisia, but the thought of going back to Burbank and to work kind of broke my heart.

I boarded my flight for Barcelona, just over the Mediterranean. A short flight, less time than I'd spend getting from Burbank to LAX by public transit, but a world away.

Carthage Afternoon

I caught the TGM trolley out to Sidi Bou Said, a little village just north of Carthage. This is a town decked out in white and blue paint, a town that gets a nice breeze off the ocean all year around.

I guess. I was only there briefly one afternoon in March. I'm definitely making a lot of leaps here. I was too impatient after five days of pure touristing, too instantly bored by environment.

It wasn't as atmospheric as Chefchaouen in Morocco, which has a lot more blue than white, but it is probably a really nice place to live. Bet Sidi Bou Said is part of the rent-is-too-damn-high club, though.

I headed to Carthage next, but after the extraordinary Roman ruins at Dougga, I was mostly disappointed, so headed back to Tunis.

When I got off the train, I passed the Jawa sandcrawler again, and stopped at the first sidewalk cafe I saw for a snack. I'd been breaking my own rules a lot on this trip, skipping meals, not staying hydrated, and not eating on a schedule. One of my rules is eat on a schedule, even if you have to eat poorly. This wasn't poorly though...it was a chicken sandwich.

I hunted for souvenirs next, back in the medina, wandering the alleys looking for something I wanted to carry home.

I finished my afternoon up with a visit to my host in her workshop.

"How much is that?" I asked, pointing at a Noah's Ark painting on her workshop wall. It was the equivalent of $63. I paid her in cash after a visit to the ATM, and she packed the painting up for me.

"Can't I roll it up and leave the frame?" I asked.

She looked horrified. "No. We will pack it with...this stuff. I don't know the English for it." She did a popping motion with her fingers.

"Bubble wrap," I offered.

"Yes, bubble wrap. We will pack it well and you can carry it on the plane."

Hmmm. Okay, I'd give it a shot. I didn't expect the glass to make it home. I didn't expect it to even make it past the plane ride, but I'd deal with that on arrival home.

She took the painting back to the guesthouse for me, and I headed to a cafe up over the medina. I'd be heading back to Spain tomorrow, to Barcelona, my spare home away from the US, a stop I try to make at least once a year, a place I've spent months in over the years. I'd repack there and see if I could do something with the frame that would make the painting easier to manage.

A Jawa Sort of Morning

I finally had a chance to sleep in and enjoy a normal breakfast for once in Tunisia.

So who was that person talking loudly downstairs in the guesthouse at six in the morning?

Eventually, I figured out it was the breakfast cook, but she wasn’t talking, she was watching TV while she prepared breakfast.

The guesthouse is amazing—it’s a restored medina house, but there are a few downsides to staying in a beautiful, old place. One is the sounds—they echo throughout the house. The other is the owner refuses to give the guests keys, because she’s “always home.” Which isn’t at all true. But her house was so nice I didn’t have the heart to scold her.

I joined a Chinese group of three for breakfast—it was croissants, omelettes, flavored yogurt, and bread. If you don’t eat bread products, don’t come to Tunisia. Or leave home. One thing about traveling is all the damn bread you end up eating. Bleh. Always bread. I ate a croissant and split.

For my last day in Tunisia, my plan was to visit the ruins of Carthage and to get very lost in the Tunis old town.

I headed out into the medina, where I immediately succeeded in part of my plan. I became lost almost immediately, walking in a long circle before stumbling out at the main gate onto the wide boulevard of the new town. The sidewalks were suddenly level. The streets were orderly. A central walkway divided two roads, one heading in either direction. I was heading to the TGM trolley at the end of the grand boulevard along the Tunis commercial district.

The walk from Place de la Victoire to Tunis Marine for the TGM was 20 minutes long, and ended near a clock tower in the center of a roundabout.

That was my cue. Where was it? The building I was looking for was near the clock tower, reportedly behind the tourist information center.

Ah. There. Hotel du Lac. 

Did I say the Star Wars portion of our trip was over when I left Djerba?

I might have exaggerated.

Art Shopping

"That painting in my room...where did you get it?"

"Of Noah's ark? I made it myself."

Oh.

I was speaking with Khaoula, the owner of El Patio guesthouse. A young Tunisian woman, her passion was historical interior design and restoration.

I loved the painting in my room and what I'd expected Khaoula to say is where she'd gotten it. I'd go to that store and see if I could find a cool painting to take home. But this answer was unexpected.

"Do you sell your paintings?" I inquired as casually as I could, since I suspected I wouldn't be able to afford a piece of original art.

"Yes. My workshop is across the alley. I'll show you tomorrow."

I told her I'd be at Carthage in the morning, but would be sure to get to her workshop in the afternoon. I tried not to get to excited...who knew what would be on offer or what the price would be.

Day at Dougga

The six a.m. iPhone chimes taunted me from my bedside at El Patio, the boutique guesthouse I was staying at deep in the Tunis medina.

Snooze.

It tried again a few minutes later.

Snooze. 

Three consecutive days of super-early rises had gotten the better of me. I barely made it out of bed by 6:30, and I knew I was pushing it as far as the louage time. I slid into my clothes, headed downstairs in the dark, picked up a back of snacks with my name on them from the hostess of El Patio, and as soon as I pulled the door shut behind me, realized I’d forgotten my scarf.

6:30 a.m. is a bad time to knock on a door, so I just went without, hoping not to get caught in the sun or rain. I walked down a narrow stone alley out of the medina, to the nearest modern road.

“Bab Sadoun, s’il vous plait,” I said to the taxi driver who’d picked me up by Bab Mnara. Bab Sadoun is where the gare routiere is located for the buses and louages I needed to get myself to Dougga.

So many questions, I know. What’s a gare routiere? What’s a bab? What’s a louage? What’s a Dougga?

A Dougga is a UNESCO World Heritage site, the ruins of a Roman city in…you guessed it. Dougga. That’s a town in Tunisia. It’s about an hour-and-a-half east of Tunis.

The taxi from Bab Mnara to Bab Sadoun zipped me right over, stopping just a few times to pick up or drop off other passengers. That’s normal here. It's like that option in Uber where other people share your taxi, only this happens organically without needing tech to make people share nicely. It’s just part of normal life in some countries.

At Bab Sadoun, I got out of the taxi, paid my paltry 3 dinar, and wandered around looking for someone who seemed interested in helping me. “Teboursouk? Teboursouk?” That’s the town I needed to get to if I wanted to end up at Dougga.

Several men pointed me to the back of the lot, where my heart sank when I saw the minibus was completely empty. Had I just missed a full one? How long would it be until this filled up?

So far, I’d had pretty good luck with filling up taxis in Tunisia. I’d run into a problem in Luke Skywalker’s hometown, and had to buy the whole taxi there. Fortunately, it was only 8 dinar. Here, this would be a lot more than that, and I was saving my dinar for the private taxi from Teboursouk to Dougga.

How long can you wait, you might ask. How long until the taxi fills up? Well, those of you who’ve been here a while know that once in a while, the answer to that is HOURS. Which is pretty much the worst. The sheer boredom of waiting to depart and not being able to whip out your iPad and read a book due to that being rude in front of people who do not own iPads is a bummer.

I sat for about 40 minutes waiting for more passengers. One got in, then she got out. I mouthed the word “fuck” and put my head back, ready for a nap.

“Madam! Madam!” What? What?

A driver from a full minibus was motioning to me. There was one seat left and he wanted me to sit in it. I assumed this meant the van was ready to go and had accepted putting me in the empty seat and dropping me off en route to somewhere else rather than waiting for another passenger. I jumped in and we were off.

Was I right? Who knew? This is the trick to this sort of travel…you have to have faith other people are taking care of you and are a bit more competent than you would expect people to be back home. And since I don’t speak much Arabic or French, there was only one way to find out, which is get in the car and see where it went. Well, there is another way. I could have badgered the driver. “Teboursouk? Do you understand? Are we going to Teboursouk?” That’s obnoxious, so I just assumed he had it all sorted out, and off we went, choked in the Tunis traffic, which eventually thinned after the bathroom-fixture part of town. The scenery became green and rural, and eventually, we were indeed in Teboursouk. The driver pulled up in the center of town on market day. I was evicted from the minibus, which went on without me. “Dougga?” A driver of a different minibus asked me. “Nam.” (Yes.)

“Francais? Anglais?”

“Anglais.”

“Twenty dinar, to Dougga and return.”

“That’s kind of expensive.”

It is, but in my research, I’d read this trip was 25 dinar, so I was doing okay.

“Ah, all right. 20 dinar.”

Two other passengers rushed over to take advantage of the departing taxi, both older people, one a grizzled man in a Jedi robe and the other a squat older woman in a long black coat and headscarf. We drove down the hill out of town, dropped them off, then turned onto a small road back up a hill to the ruins.

The Dougga ticket booth was closed, though the posted hours said the site opened at 8:30 a.m. and it was already ten. My driver had some animated words with the security guard, then turned to me. “Deux minutes.”

Okay. He agreed to come back for me at noon. I stood there with the bag of treats from my hotel, wondering what to do with the two stale cakes and one orange, and awaited the ticket seller.

When he wandered up about 10 minutes later, he turned out to have a wastebasket in his hutch. Great. I dumped my treats. I didn’t want to carry them all over the ruins.

I bought my ticket for 8 dinar and 1 more for my camera and headed up the hill into the massive, sprawling ruined complex. There was a Forum, a central meeting place with a large columned temple, many smaller temples, underground baths, residences, an amphitheater, mosaics, all kind of things. The morning was gray and overcast, so I couldn’t get great photos, but on the plus side, no sunburn.

I was the only tourist present. There were a few masons at work on a wall, a few freelance guides at the gate, and some landscapers. But no other visitors.

After an hour and a half, I’d seen all I could and was ready to head back. I walked slowly down to the entrance, where the guard excitedly waved his phone at me. “I will call your taxi driver!” And a minute later, the driver pulled up.

We headed back to Teboursouk, where market day had died out and left behind some plant husks and vegetable crates.

“Tunis?”

“Yes, Tunis.”

The driver took his 20 dinar and left me at the louage to Tunis. Again, I had a bit of a wait, about 20 minutes, and then we were off to Tunis. I was squished in the middle for the ride to Tunis, with a sullen heavy woman refusing to move her bag out of the way and squish over. I kept doing that thing where you almost fall asleep—you nod off and then catch your head falling over and jerk awake. Finally, on the outskirts of Tunis, I stayed awake long enough to catch on when we were a few blocks from the Bardo.

The Bardo is a famous museum of Roman mosaics and art. “Je vais au Bardo,” I blurted out at the driver, as I yanked open the door and jumped out of the minibus at a pause in a traffic circle. He smiled and nodded. He’s a proud Tunisian, happy I was interested in his heritage. I wandered down a long boulevard toward the Bardo. The sidewalks were okay here—many times, they are not, and you have to watch your step. I was looking for lunch pre-Bardo, and there were a lot of cafes along this strip, but they almost all sold pizza. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I had two requirements. 1) I didn’t want to go into one of those men-only places where a bunch of men sat smoking and drinking Turkish coffee. 2) I didn’t especially want pizza, but I’d eat it if I had to.

I finally saw a patisserie that served quiche, and went in to order one. Then I had to get a chocolate cake, of course, so maybe eating lunch in a patisserie isn’t the smartest thing for me. The quiche turned out to be full of canned tuna, which is a thing here, so I just kind of picked at it, but I did a great job on the cake before heading on to the Bardo.

The Bardo was the site of a terrorist attack in 2015, similar to the attack at Luxor in 1997. Islamic State militants killed 20 people, mostly European tourists. Today, I had to walk the long way around the barbed wire to get to the only entrance, a secure area with a guard and concrete barriers. I went in through the metal detector after a group of Tunisian schoolchildren.

The Bardo is…holy fuck. It’s amazing. It’s full of exquisite Roman mosaics, just full of them. I spent an hour wandering the halls, and finally headed back to my lodging via the Tunis tram. I bought a ticket, threw myself at the mercy of the crowd in the packed car, which miraculously opened to let one tourist squeeze on. Taxis are cheap here, but I wanted to try the local metro. It’s crowded but efficient.

The line ended at the train station, the same spot I’d disembarked just 24 hours ago on my journey from El Jem. I pushed off the car along with the masses, and melted away into the medina, to walk in deeper and deeper among the increasingly smaller alleys, until finally, around one corner, there was my guesthouse.

Additional photos here.

Priorities

I'd been apprehensive about the guesthouse I'd booked in Tunis. Not because I mistrusted the photos on the booking site, and not because I thought something was wrong with it, but because I generally prefer the anonymity of a hotel to the intimacy of residing in a stranger's habitat. I don't even like staying with friends, for the most part, so bed and breakfast situations can be awkward.

The host—Khaoula—was a smart young Tunisian woman with a background in interior design. Slim with a pixie cut, she seemed too green to be so invested in restoring 18th century architecture in the Tunis medina, but here she was, dedicated to preserving the past and building a community. Tunis was the heart of the Arab Spring. Perhaps I should not have been surprised.

El Patio guesthouse reminded me of a gorgeous riad I'd once stayed at in Fez, though that had ultimately been quirky as I'd been the only inhabitant. (Some other guests had cancelled, I believe.) Every detail had been attended to, every bit of decor carefully considered. I snapped a few photos—the small decorative tiles on the windowsill, the corresponding medallion in the top center of the same window box—these were clever additions.

Khaoula took me from the foyer (where we both removed our shoes as I pretended not to see the holes in my socks) to the parlor, where she provided me with a receipt for my pre-booking and gave me a few details about the medina.

"Where can I get dinner?" My main question was, of course, about food.

She walked me to Bab Menara, the nearest medina gate, and told me to walk up a stone street and take a right.

I did so, immediately taking the wrong right. I ended up in a hotel, where I had some expensive but delicious couscous. After I paid the bill, I asked the doorman for directions.

He escorted me back through the alleys of the medina to El Patio, where he rang the bell. "Khaoula is a friend of mine. I haven't seen her for a while."

They chatted at the door while I went up to my room to collapse from my long day of traveling from Djerba via El Jem.