Tunisian Travels – Day 5: Departing from Sousse
My breakfast, just like the breakfast yesterday, was a hearty one, and I spent almost an hour cramming one item after another in my mouth: an omelette, a vegetable platter, slices of local anise-flavoured bread, yoghurt, dates, and a toast with cheese, figs, and honey. I told myself I would not have time to eat lunch, so I need not worry about having too much. The prolonged breakfast threatened to put me behind schedule, but I was forced to change this schedule anyway as soon as I walked outside: it was cold, windy, and cloudy – a disinviting combination for a stroll around the city.
This was
the second time my plans for my last day in Tunisia had changed. Originally, I
thought I would skip breakfast and take the early morning train to Tunis. This
was the only connection that would have allowed me to make my afternoon flight,
even though the train would arrive at around ten and my plane was scheduled for
half past four. However, the reality on the ground made me change my mind.
Firstly, I found that the train was less reliable than I had expected, and
certainly less frequent than the louage. I could go to the louage station
whenever it suited me and there would always be enough people to fill a van to
Tunis. Secondly, I did not want to miss out on breakfast. My revised plan thus
became to walk around the city, visit the archaeological museum, and take a
taxi to the louage station no later than eleven.
The weather
shortened my itinerary for me: I went directly to the archaeological museum,
and by the time I was finished, not only had the wind become even stronger but
it began to rain. I found the museum fascinating. Sousse has the second largest
collection of mosaics in Tunisia, beaten only by the national museum at Bardo,
and some of the exhibits stumped me entirely. I saw, for instance, a Roman
mosaic that looked exactly – and was labelled as – a Yin and Yang, except it was
not coloured in and lacked the contrasting circles. I also saw a mosaic of a
man with red claws sticking out of his head which reminded me of the Arian Baptistery
in Ravenna. In Ravenna, the figure symbolised the Christian God, but at the
museum he was labelled as a sea god, presumably Oceanus.
One of the
most famous mosaics at the museum is the head of Medusa. It is one of the
mosaics displayed on the floor rather than affixed to a wall. To give visitors
a better view of the face, a mirror hangs suspended above it at an angle, which
I thought was a hilariously appropriate way to view any depiction of the
Gorgon.
The
archaeological museum is located in Sousse’s Citadel, and although the tower
seems to be off limits to tourists, visitors can walk around the courtyard and
up some of the steps to get a better view of the compound itself. There is also
a terrace with a view of the city, but it does not offer the kind of panoramic
views I imagine one can see from the tower. In any case, the weather kept
turning worse and worse, so I left the courtyard after making a perfunctory
round and hailed a taxi to the louage station.
I arrived
at the station a little before ten and was dismayed to see the snaking queue
for the booth selling tickets to Tunis. The day before, the queue could not have
been longer than ten people. Today, it had at least four times if not five
times as many. Wondering whether I should start to regret my decision not to
take the train, I dutifully assumed my spot at the end of the line and began
the long wait. Most Tunisians, I noticed with annoyance, do not make the
slightest fuss about smoking in a queue, even when it is in an enclosed area. I
was fortunate that when the man behind me stopped smoking, the man in front of
me gestured at me to hold his spot in the queue before walking off to light his
cigarette a few metres away. He, however, was clearly not a local, as he did
not seem to speak any Arabic and would not stand in the queue in that ostentatiously
expansive way that keeps other people from cutting the line.
Someone did
indeed try to butt in when I was nearing the front of the queue about half an
hour later, but the old lady he had tried to cut off was having none of it. She
loudly cursed at the young man and drew him into an argument that elicited many
defensive hand gestures and exculpatory tones. Eventually, the man left with
his tail between his legs, with little involvement from anyone in the queue but
surely to their silent approbation. A young man standing behind me tapped me
and the other foreigner in front of me on the shoulder, gesturing at us to
close ranks and make sure not to let anyone into our hard-earned spots.
He soon
started talking to me under the understandable but mistaken assumption that I
would be conversant in Arabic. I tried to engage him first in French, then in
English, but he was as clueless in those languages as I was in his. Still, the
man persisted, and I slowly learned that he was from Qibli, that he could only
reach Qibli via Tunis, and that Qibli is a popular tourist destination with
lovely sand dunes, which he showed me on his phone. He then took it upon
himself to help me understand what was going on. We had run out of either
drivers or vans to Tunis, so we would have to wait longer. We were
tantalisingly close to the ticket booth – just two spots away – but this meant
we were standing straight in the path of the wind blowing in through the open
gates.
A whole
hour elapsed between my arrival at the louage station and my boarding the van.
My neighbour in the queue sat next to me and assured me that everything was
fine when the driver leaned in to ask us all something I did not understand.
For some reason, the driver had plucked us all out of the queue before we had
bought our tickets and we paid in the car; my neighbour had nervously gestured
at me to put my wallet away when I pulled it out in the queue. After many
unsuccessful attempts to speak Arabic very slowly in the hopes that I would
somehow begin to understand the language, he eventually realised that he could
use Google Translate to talk to me. It did not take much conversation for him
to believe us the best of friends. Still, I could not accept his gift of a
whole pack of dates, as I felt awkward having nothing to give him in return and
did not really know how much a pack of dates might take up of a local’s daily
salary.
It was
pouring when our van left the garage, and the window would not close despite my
new friend’s best efforts. I was immersed in my novel for much of the ride, but
at one point I raised my head and noticed that everyone had drawn a hood over
their head in an effort to stay warm. The driver rode like a maniac. According
to the timetables, a train would have taken two hours and twenty minutes;
according to Google Maps, a car was supposed to take two hours. I had
anticipated that with the occasional stop, we would make it to Tunis in some
three hours, but the driver barely took over an hour and a half.
I was not
sure what to do until my flight. Spending four hours at the airport seemed like
a waste of time, so I walked into the old city to see whether any of the
monuments that had been closed when I first visited would be open. They were
not. The Tourbet el Bey Mausoleum and the Ez-Zitouna Mosque were still closed,
as was the citadel. The only place I found open was the tourist information
centre, which at least had a few panels about the city’s history.
As I
searched for a taxi to take me to the airport, I discovered that I no longer
cared if I stretched out my arm to flag one down and it did not stop. I had
noticed that most locals attract attention in a much more commanding way: by
stretching out an arm and calling “taxi!” at the cars zooming past, neither action
ever raising any eyebrows among onlookers. The real problem, it turned out, was
finding a taxi driver who knew the word “airport” in any other language than
Arabic. The first man I flagged had absolutely no idea and remained in the dark
even after I showed him the airport on a map. The second man actually spoke
decent French but insisted I either arrange the ride on some app or pay him a
sum that seemed just a bit too exorbitant.
Finally, I
snagged a driver who appeared to have some inkling of what I wanted and was
willing to use the taxi meter instead of demanding a sum upfront. I was a bit
anxious, however, that he did not respond to the word “aeroport” and kept
repeating “ateropor” as well as a few words in Arabic I did not understand. As
we rode along, I racked my brain trying to figure out a way I could make sure
we had understood each other. Without internet, I could not translate anything
I wanted to say, nor did I have a picture of an airport or even an aeroplane on
my phone. I did have a picture of an arrival hall, but it occurred to me that
my driver might have no idea what the inside of an airport looks like and
refrained from showing him the picture for fear of further confusing him.
Then, I hit upon an idea. In my app for drawing Chinese characters, I sketched a little picture of a plane and extended my arm over the passenger seat to show it to him. It took a while for him to register it but when he did, he laughed earnestly, flashed me a thumbs up, and said something that I interpreted as praise for my sketching skills. The rest of the ride passed peaceably. A few minutes before the airport, the driver reached for his cigarette and lighter, which he showed to me as a way of asking whether I would mind if he smoked. My expression of perplexity – arched eyebrows and an awkward smile, as though to say “please do not do this to me” – easily transcended the language barrier, as the driver waved the idea off and put the items back in his pocket.
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