Kosher meat and Black Power

This weekend I visited a classmate and his fiancé who live in the resort town Sidi Bou Said. Although this suburb is a mere half-hour train metro ride from Tunis proper, it claims its own identity, beach and municipal board. Were I to write some sort of standardized test on the subject, I would use the analogy: Sidi Bou Said is to Tunis as Santa Monica is to Los Angeles. We walked over to the nearby area La Marsa, peered at the Mediterranean, and consumed pizza and sandwiches by the beach.

Not a bad lifestyle, you might say.

Along the way, I spotted this billboard advertizing the President - one of many such images with which the city (or should I say cities?) teems. There are elections next week, and a taxi driver asked me the other day whether I planned on voting. I wonder - could I just stroll in and do so? Not being able to understand the ballot materials might give me away, however.



The mosque in La Marsa is similar, in style, to Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis, but worshippers cannot hear the waves from the more famous mosque.



This is my third week of classes, and although I have settled into the routine I am not completely satisfied with it. For one thing, there has been little consistency. I tested into level 4, more or less, but the speed of teaching at my school, when compared with Middlebury for instance, caused me to request a higher level. Since there were also three students who wanted level 5 having already completed level 4, my teacher decided to wave her magic wand last week and turn our level 4 into level 5. There was no perceptible change in the class itself other than an increase in dissatisfaction among the people who preferred to be in level 4. Then a huge group of students from China arrived at the end of last week and tested into levels 4 and 5 so that, when I arrived at school this morning, I discovered that there had been created a level 5 (I am not in it) and that 5 new students had been added to our level 4.

As it stands, my class now has in it three Americans (we are all on the same scholarship), one German (although she rarely shows up in class), two Spanish women, one Czech woman, two Italian women, a Taiwanese woman and those aforementioned 5 new Chinese students (only one of whom is male, bringing our class total of men to two).

Although the national breakdown of the class is interesting, the lessons themselves have been rather slower than I might like. We have class from 8 am to 1.10 every day, and in that time the students speak very little, and one teacher in particular (we have two, one for speaking and one for writing) prefers a method of teaching I would characterize as "droning for two hours without stop." When I tried to participate more by asking questions, I was rewarded only with dirty looks. My notebook is full of drawings and a few interesting new vocabulary words; my rear often falls asleep.

Here is the view of the synagogue from my school:
This is a kosher butcher shop across the street from school:


My Tunisian dialect class, on the other hand, is a total riot. We meet three days a week for two hours a go, and that time flies by. The teacher is hilarious and teases members of the class without mercy so that some of the students (me in particular) laugh so hard that they cannot stop without extreme concentration.

The national breakdown of the class is also a treat after years of classes in which my fellow students were all American. The Czech woman and one American from my standard Arabic class are in the class, along with four students from South Korea, a Frenchman, a Tunisian (who grew up in France), and three Irani men. Farsi uses the same alphabet as Arabic, although they include four additional letters and pronounce some of the vowels differently, to occasionally comical results.

Equally comical is the below drink that I purchased at my local grocery store: Black Power Energy Drink. I have yet to sample it, but I find it endlessly entertaining to consider doing so. Did the company not research possible connotations before branding themselves?