the past week

i'm becoming increasingly bad about updating this, but my schedule has been a little hectic since my last post. A couple SIT directors and several study abroad advisers from various schools have been visiting all week. on sunday two of them came to my house for lunch which was really fun. one of them was the cutest little old man who teaches food anthropology at Spelman University. and it turns out he lives in the suburb of atlanta that my host family's oldest daughter and her husband live in. her husband is a portrait artist and my family gave this man the address of the studio so he can visit and be like "hey! i met your entire tunisian family!" small world.

on saturday i cooked my family a mexican (a la tunisian) meal. I made guacamole with some harissa (delicious!) and fajitas with chicken, peppers, and corn. There was a lot of improvising because you can't find tortillas or tortilla chips here. so instead we used big pitas for the fajitas, and cut them up into strips and baked them to make chips for the guacamole. i was pretty impressed with myself considering i've never really cooked a whole mexican meal for six people before. i thought it tasted pretty good, and my family seemed to like it, especially the guacamole. although they have a really hard time pronouncing it. that night my host brother took me, my host sister, and his wife to hammamet which is a really touristy town about an hour from here. it was pretty empty because it was cold and dark. there are tons of massive hotels with various themes (like one that looked like a legit sand castle). Then there is also a fake medina with a bunch of tourist shops and a hotel on top. this is situated next to a theme park called Carthage Land. it was really strange and so fake, but my host siblings couldn't understand why i thought so. then they took me to hammamet nord which is just a normal town but they kept saying that it was boring and that they like hammamet sud better. then on the drive home we had a mini-discotheque in the car with my host brother flashing the lights like a strobe.

the weather this week has finally gotten warmer. it's sooooo beautiful! i think its been around 65 degrees and sunny with a slight breeze. today after class i walked around in the sidi bou said park for a while and just listened to music. i also read a french cosmopolitan magazine which was interesting, but not nearly as racy as the american one.

i can't really think of anything else exciting that's happened in the last week. i think on friday mounir's son is going to take us out to a bar/restaurant/club called boeuf sur la toile (which literally features a giant cow sculpture sipping a martini on the roof). apparently they have live music which should be fun. i think that's all...