Larry's Going-Away Dinner

Last weekend we had a going away dinner for Larry at a restaurant on the top of the hill in Sidi Bou Saïd. Larry was the reason I first came to Tunisia, or at least part of it. He was the director of an American research center from 2006-2009 in downtown Tunis. I was his intern, which meant I worked in the library, fixed his computer (he was minorly computer literate, like many of us), and did some article translation. He was fantastic - the Tunisians loved him and the Americans benefited enormously from his suggestions, his personal contacts, and his knowledge of Tunisia.

Larry first came to Tunisia in the 1960s through the Peace Corps, and has been doing research here ever since. His dissertation, for a PhD in Anthropology at the University of California - Berkeley, won second place at the Annual Meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, right after uber-famous & respected scholar Lila Abu-Lughod. Larry has spent the rest of his life doing interesting stuff - heading a center for Middle Eastern Studies, teaching on the Semester at Sea program (where he gave a cultural anthropology talk on eating - "if you think about it, it's really weird - we are creatures that put things in our mouth and smash them with our teach!" - that made South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu fall on the ground laughing), and being paid to take other cruises with his wife on which he gave talks on the parts of the Middle East or North Africa that they visited.

Here's some of the tasty food we ate:

Several different type of Tunisian salad:

And Jessica's amazing stuffed Calamari:

Then we also amused ourselves by stacking glasses, which the waiters participated in:

After dinner, we went (sans Larry), to Plaza, the only "bar" in Tunis - a real "bar" because you can just order alcohol there, since it is also a "hotel" (not sure how many people actually stay there). It's pretty funny, though, since it has indoor and outdoor seating decorated with strings of lights, pink flamingos, classical statues, etc.

We found a table in the midst of a very crowded patio:

And to keep warm, they have little pits of barely burning coal in between the tables: