My Travel Adventures

On my first day in Tunisia, I visited Carthage. The highlight of my preparation for this trip was the night before when – at my hotel in Tunis – I revisited the Aeneid with its description of the city and Dido’s famous suicide scene. On a practical level, however, I had already done my logistical research several days earlier. The train to Carthage was supposed to run from the eastern end of central Tunis every half an hour, but recent reviews of the station said the train was out of order. Since I did not want to walk all the way to the station only to find out for myself, I decided to call a Bolt cab from my hotel and rode to Carthage directly.

We started our day by returning to the Illinois side of Saint Louis to visit the Cahokia Mounds. The weather was beautiful, and we saw many joggers running around, indeed, even up and down the main mound while sweating profusely. The layout of the area reminded me a lot of the layout of typical pre-Columbian Mesoamerican city centres, with their ceremonial squares and surrounding pyramids. It seems almost indubitable to me that much cultural exchange, or an evolution from a common cultural substrate, must have happened to result in such similar city planning. At some point, I ’ll have to do some research on how much has been written about this already.

We enjoyed the day at a leisurely pace, as we had booked the Domes and Dripstones Tour at Mammoth Cave for ten o’clock. This was the earliest time at which the specific tour would take place, and I felt quite partial to it because of how many stalagmites and stalactites we would see (in fact, the tour guide said that the tour would take us past 70% of the stalagmites and stalactites in the entirety of Mammoth Cave).