Night in Tunisia

Foundations...

Yesterday, as I was lugging fifty kilos of concrete from the quincaillerie (hardware store) the half-kilometre to our house, I had an interesting thought. At least, I thought it was interesting - and still d0 :-)

Tiara and I have been in Tunis now for around six weeks. That's not very long at all. And in that time, we have settled-ish into our respective employs, we have set up our extracurriculars (art, writing, weights, craft and violin), we have a house, we are making it *our* house, we are setting up a daily routine... Pretty quick for a country where we barely speak the less common language and for a culture into which we are almost but not quite getting comfortable.

And then there is the Arabic Learning that's going on. We can now veeerrrryyy sllloooowwwly sound out arabic words and not totally botch it. We have a sense for some of the more common words in the Tunisian dialect. Within a few months we'll be flying.

And then the fifty kilos of cement brought me back to the present. That's the smallest bag that they sell, apparently. Did I mention it was fifty kilos. That's really heavy. A lot heavier than fifty pounds. About 2.2 times heavier. so around 110 pounds. And no handles or wheels. (For Jodes - our bags were around 32 kilos...)

Anyhow, I dragged it, uphill and up three flights of stairs to my appartment. Gah.

My back is still a little wonky from it, but now I'm building the foundation for a table top which I'll be tyling this weekend :-) Tiara thinks I'm totally off my rocker...

More thoughts a little later - bye for now.

posted by Loren @ 4:03 p.m.