TUNISIA

Cruise photos?  There's more!  I know you're excited, I'm just dying to show them to you.

After Spain, our ship landed in Tunis, Tunisia-

(pause)

-which was such a boring dump, I'm not going to bother posting photos.  Tunis is an entirely Westernized city, not in a particularly nice way, and the people were generally RUDE, rude rude rude.  Keep in mind I love going to Paris, and I live in Miami—two of the rudest populations of people on Earth—yet I find the locals in each place to be warm and delightful.  So I have a high threshold for bad manners.  And Tunis...fuck Tunis, it was the worst.

For instance, allow me to illustrate a scene: T.L. and I are standing on the sidewalk.  A person dressed in some sort of military-ish uniform walks by.  We are not particularly blocking the sidewalk; this person, as he walks by, PUSHES T.L. to the side and keeps going.  As in, plants a hand on him and pushes, T.L. takes a step to catch himself.  This is in broad daylight, on a regular street.

Sales people at the stores? One actually said "I hate Americans," in French, to us.  And the other two people shopping there laughed, and sneered.  It was like a bad propaganda film, created to terrorize Americans with images of evil Arabs who are secretly plotting the downfall of our country.  Or something off of Fox News.  Same thing.

Of course most people were fine, reasonably polite; but there was a minority who were awful, and the rest seemed to tolerate it as a daily occurrence.

We went to Tunis to see the souks, a.k.a. stores, in the historic center of the city.  We had visions of the central market looking like something out Aladdin, with people selling spices and beaded clothes and whatnot.  But it was just booth after booth of the same junk: leather bags made in China (all the same in every booth), ash trays that said "I Love Tunisia," and very dull gold jewelry.  No one bought a thing.

Huge letdown.

Comments

[Glenn D.]

I see you've been blogging a lot lately so I will take the time to comment. I think you were actually lucky as far as the natives were concerned. These countries have a history of HATING Americans. This is why I don't travel abroad accept for maybe the UK, Germany, or Scandinvia. Being gay you cold have had it worse. They could have not only pushed your partner but shoved the two of you into two separate nice dark dingy cramped crowded jail cells for 20 years.

[Leon Koh]

nice to surf into your blog

a hello all the way from Singapore

Leon :)