The Capacious Hold-All

Although I have a long list of things to do this weekend I’ve got no further than throwing open the shutters – the air is chilly and very fresh, but the sun is out – and am now lying on my bed contemplating how long it will take me to stir myself to make the short walk to the bakery and get my usual pain au chocolat. They may be among the best pain au chocolat I’ve ever had, but they still don’t make me jump out of bed on a Sunday morning!

It has been a slightly long week as well as a very short one; it’s gone quickly even if part of this has been due to wishing it done. I’ve remembered most of my students’ names and haven’t had any major disasters, although being tired and a little bit achy, especially with the changes in the weather in the second half of the week, meant I wasn’t as patient with the kids’ inability to concentrate for two hours straight as I normally am – but by next week we’ll all have forgotten.

The weather changed from boiling hot on Wednesday to hail by Friday afternoon, and with it a new round of aches and pains that I haven’t felt in a while. It hasn’t helped the sleeping, but I don’t feel like this is going to upgrade itself to a flare. Although feeling just a little wrung out doesn’t make me any more inclined to mop the floors, and do other little jobs. I shall lie in the sunshine and recharge for a little while yet.

I came in yesterday from the shops and caught a glimpse of fiery sunset behind my house. Leaning out of the window and looking down the railway line towards the mosque made the view even better: a complete strip of orange fading upwards to yellow, with a little trail of shadow-dark clouds strung across the line in the sky where sunset colours faded to blue once more. And I thought, that will help.

I scrambled eggs and ate cake and watched downloaded TV and pretended not to notice where I’d dumped some things out of my bag and right onto the floor. After twenty-four hours with the heating back on again the house is now cosy and warm again and so I have no problems settling down once more. Sleeping isn’t coming quite so readily, but I suspect a couple of days of work will cure me of 5am wakeups and hiding behind the shutters eating chocolate far too early in the morning to be sane or even sensible. Perhaps it is just January. The first few days of the year always require warming up to. Hopefully this year it will be days rather than months.

I have had a lazy weekend. On Saturday I decided I deserved some R&R, so took myself down to the outdoor pool of a five star hotel not far away, and had it almost to myself for the nearly three hours I spent there. Luxury! I asked at reception if non-residents were allowed to use the pool, to which the reply was ‘yes, pay when you get up there’. Upstairs, I could find no-one at the pool, so I popped in to the restaurant next to it and asked a steward. ‘Oh, just go in,’ he said.

So I did.

On Sunday I was a little more adventurous, and navigated the metro – which is the Tunis tram system – across Tunis and out the other side to the Bardo museum, which houses a myriad of Roman mosaics: Gods, Naiads, hunting parties, gladiators, ships, blacksmiths, wine-bearers; also lots of tour groups. For a while I thought they were all going to be Italian, but after a while two Czech groups came through and one Polish one. I attached myself to a Czech group, and went around with them for a while, but otherwise I just drifted from room to room, too much to take in.

Tomorrow I am moving, so might be internetless for a while.

Of course I can’t manage a week without incident: this morning I flooded the bathroom floor. Not content to stop there, the flood continued halfway out into my room, and even more impressively, under the door and into the corridor. I managed to stem the tide just as it reached my suitcase, and ended up running late.

I’ve had to start leaving a few extra minutes as the little world around me has quickly caught on to the fact that I’m trying to acquire a few words of Tunisian Arabic, and has gone overboard with trying to be helpful. I have to get past the receptionist at the hotel, the little lady halfway up the street, cross the main road (which doesn’t require any language skills, but does require car-dodging skills) and then make it past the policeman – nothing like a loaded rifle in the morning – the security men, and the receptionists. Once I make it into the office, there’s then the general greetings to everyone – merely saying hello is virtually unheard of.

A few minutes make no difference at the moment, and it’s nice to not be in a hurry; slow is definitely good. However, I shall have to remember never to arrive late when I have a class!

I also had my first road incident, when the taxi I was in ended up being shunted into the car in front by the car behind failing to stop for the lights quite in time. There was a sharp jolt, everyone shrugged, the lights changed and we all drove on. Clearly this is normal.

Tunis is very quiet. It’s particularly quiet at iftar, when there’s only perhaps one or two cars that drive down the street for a full hour. My hotel is one block away from a fairly main thoroughfare, but the loudest sound is the occasional upset screech from a cat, lurking in the nearby park.

It’s a nice time to sit out on the balcony, in the slightly cooler gentle evening breeze, and watch the sky get dark and the stars come out. It’s a little hard to go out at the moment, as the days are hot – and in any case, I’m busy at school – after which I’m ready for a rest, and then comes iftar. It gets a little livelier later, but by then I’m ready for bed.  I’m still in this state of tired energy, but it is far better than no energy!

I’m making plans for the weekend, however. It makes sense to try and do some sightseeing while I’m in town, as hopefully next week I’ll be moving out to the coast. Fingers crossed.

I got miscategorised somewhere; I often feel more like a reptile. That is to say, I like the heat. I feel more energetic when it’s hot, I uncrease a bit. It’s not that I become pain-free, but the pain is certainly more bearable.

I was walking downtown today, about the only person out in the sun and not sticking to the shade. I do have an advantage in that I can drink water, unlike the majority of the people around me who are fasting for Ramadan, and there wasn’t any hurry or rush. I couldn’t have stayed out in the heat indefinitely – although short bursts of air-con in shops were more than enough respite. So far, the inconvenient side-effect that sulfasalazine can have of turning my sweat orange  doesn’t seem to have materialised, although I’ve been sticking to darker colour clothes just in case. Of course, there are far worse and more dangerous side-effects, but sometimes it’s nicer – and easier – to concentrate on the smaller things!

I’ve been trying to keep the air-con off in my hotel room as my eyes are already a little dry; this clearly hasn’t impressed the cleaners, as when I came back to my room this afternoon I found the air-con jammed on. This is a neat trick, and one I shall attempt to replicate tomorrow morning, but for now I’m happy to have the windows wide open, listening to the evening prayer recital from the mosque down the street, keeping as warm as I can.

I haven’t been feeling terribly energetic, but so far I’ve been able to get around and do everything I need to do, even if I haven’t managed to do anything else on top of that. And that’s a good start.

“It is too hot.”

I feel like I am the only person here who hasn’t said that so far today. I’m just so relieved to be in the sunshine, that even a 40C day like today – that is according to the electronic sign we drove past, a little closer into town – feels only blissful.

I arrived last night, landing late into a sea of sparkling strung-out lights that mark out the coastlines and causeways, fell asleep listening to the recitation from the mosque across the street, and woke up today feeling somehow tiredly energised. Most of the day has been spent in air-conditioned places: hotel, school, car, but the short spaces of time inbetween all this I’ve spent soaking up what sun I can. It’s about all I have taken in: meeting too many people, trying to make sense of a mixture of languages, being shown all over the place.

About three o-clock we were down by the seaside, the liveliest place I’d seen all day. Three days into Ramadan, the first working day, and everyone else is just about as out of it as I am, albeit for different reasons, but I feel in good company. The sea is a brilliant turquoise, the sand golden, the houses white and the bougainvillea splashed around the place a quite violent pink; everything quite saturated with sunshine.

I’ve missed blogging. It’s good to feel that finally, I have something worth blogging about again. It’s worth starting over, somewhere new and fresh. Let’s see how it goes.