Waiting for the bus

I was in Ennasr today, a part of Tunis that is like, they say, L.A.

This is true in a sense - Ennasr is mostly a long, wide avenue lined with shops and cafés and restaurants (in fact, the delicious Thai restaurant we go to sometimes is there. Almost as good as Thai Namtip, though not quite!). Ennasr has a delicious bread shop (the best I've found so far in Tunis, with special thick breads, made with whole wheat, pretty much like gourmet breads you find elsewhere); several ice cream shops (including one owned by some Italians with probably the best gelato I've ever had); boutique-y store (pricey); specialty stores (pet accessories!); and restaurants from Crêperies to French food to Tunisian fast food to an imitation KFC-looking place ("Southern Fried Chicken" it's called - we haven't tried it but it's on our list, though definitely NOT real KFC - not that KFC is real :P - since no American chains exist in Tunisia).

What I find most puzzling about Ennasr is that they even have some restaurants that look like they belong in the touristy sections of less developed cities in the South of Tunisia.

There is one restaurant called "Tuareg" - which refers to the Berber (original inhabitants of North Africa) Nomadic (moving from one place to another, often here in a relatively set path & according to the seasons) Pastoralists (they raise animals, and so move in part to find good places for them to graze!). There are some such nomadic pastoralists in the South of Tunisia - I met one once while in Douz (South of Tunisia, the "gateway to the Sahara desert") with my mom & Penny. The man I met told me that he and his family stayed in a home near the site where we were and harvested dates for half of the year, while they traveled during the second half with their animals. The local school system was organized, he said, to accommodate this.

Tuaregs are mostly found today in West Africa & in North Africa in Algeria and Libya only. But Tuaregs have been super romanticized, especially by Orientalists (for an explanation of Orientalists - super interesting - see this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism - especially the part about Edward Saïd!). So it's kind of funny that this restaurant exists in a part of Tunis pretty much populated by upwardly-mobile, often fashionable, and often young Tunisians. It is part evidence of the power of Orientalism in shaping the minds of the Orientalized (Joseph Massad's book "Desiring Arabs" is great for this), and it's evidence, as Susan Ossman writes in her book about beauty salons, "Three Faces of Beauty," that symbols that originally had other meanings (such as the harkous I got on my ankle - see below!) can change meaning when people appropriate them and use them in their own way, without knowledge necessarily of the original intent.

Anyway, so I should also mention that there is TONS of traffic in Ennasr. And so I wanted one hour for a bus to come - and it never came. I walked about 15 minutes up a hill and came to another bus stop, where I found, 15 minutes later, another bus which I then took downtown. Woo. It was quite an exhausting trip and I was quite late for my French class, but no matter. Sometimes I do indulge in taxis.

One last note before I go to bed: Today, I was filling out grad applications online. As I was going through editing one of the applications, I read the "religious affiliation" section on page 2. There was an apologetic box that offered to let applicants write in their own faith if they had not found theirs listed in the drop-down box above. In that space, I found written: "Laura Thompson." Thank God I found that. Apparently the application was automatically inserting my name into various blank boxes.

	:)