I was on the train from Tunis to Sidi Bou Said when my friend Mey called, in typical Tunisian fashion, to invite me to the seaside town of Sousse, leaving that afternoon. I ummed and arred, unsure if I’d make it back to Tunis in time.
‘See you at 4’, she said and hung up. Decision made.
We travelled by Blablacar which, while not technically legal in Tunisia, is nonetheless one of the most popular forms of transport from city to city. The journey from Tunis to Sousse took just a couple of hours and we arrived in the early evening, in time for a coffee in the harbour, where already the air felt fresher and calmer than in the capital.
Having prioritised seeing the punic ports of Carthage over collecting my luggage, I had arrived in Sousse with only the clothes on my back, giving us the perfect excuse to spend the following morning at the fripe, a type of second-hand clothes market which can be found all over Tunisia, where designer clothes are buried like gold nuggets under piles of H&M. I had thought that the prices were cheap in Tunis, with branded clothes often selling for one or two dinars (25-50p) but in Sousse there were heaps of clothes for just 500 millimes (a little over 10p).
Children being the best language teachers, I spent a large part of the day with Mey’s 7-year-old niece, whose unconventional yet effective teaching style mostly consisted of pointing at things and shouting their name in Tunisian until I seemed to gain some kind of understanding. She may be the smallest Arabic teacher I’ve had yet, but she was no less committed to making me repeat new vocabulary until she deemed my pronunciation satisfactory.
After coffee and some delicious homemade sweets at an uncle’s house, we headed to the beach for the evening with an old schoolfriend of Mey’s, on a brief visit home from Germany. Our evening swim was just about the only time I’ve been cold in Tunisia but the water was wonderfully refreshing and still miles warmer than the sea back home in England.
The following morning, Mey took me to the souk where I learned the Tunisian names for several different fruits and vegetables and got the authentic Tunisian souk experience, including picking out the chicken for that week’s couscous while it was still alive and returning, having bought the accompanying vegetables, to be handed a small yet deceptively heavy black bag, the contents of which had been clucking about its cage just half an hour previously.
A visit to the medina to see some of the decorative calligraphy, painted in beautiful shades of blue which lined the town’s white walls rounded off our whirlwind tour of Sousse, a town just a couple of hours out of Tunis and well worth a visit.
