Night in Tunisia

Walkabout

Well, I wandered about the neighbourhood that is to be our new home
for a little while today to get a feel for the landscape. It's a new
district in Tunis where the oldest building might be 10 years old, and
as I already mentionned, quite bohemian (meaning relatively rich).

The architecture here is strange to me still. All concrete over bick
construction in all sorts of wacky configurations heavily influenced
(not surprisingly) by Arab tradition and the weird building plans of
the old cities (Medinas). Curves are everywhere, as is stone, and as
are arabic accents - detailing but that never has a consistent
presence because that's too expensive. The buildings are all
relatively short - nothing can be built very tall because (or so I've
been told) of the soil composition - clay near the ocean...

But the striking feature through it all is that the buildings are
almost all visually decaying (they look ugly but the structures are
all right). It's truly odd. Our building has huge seams of filler
blotchifying the flaking paint job that adorns its sides. And it's
essentially new.

Anyhow, we're still waiting for our bed and water heater... So it
looks like we'll be imposing on Wifak and Slim some more...

That's it for today - send me emails and I will send replies!

posted by Loren @ 3:29 p.m.