Bisalaama Tunis!

My last few days in Tunis were a blur. On Friday, Akira, David and I made a solemn pilgrimage to our favorite sandwich shop for the Last Supper of our regular orders—for me, a tuna taboona (with a lot of harissa, of course) and a fruit smoothie “cocktail.” I absolutely rocked my Arabic oral a few hours later, and (much to the apparent surprise of the program director) scored an unbelievable “Advanced” level on the ACTFL scale. Considering my pretty basic level of competence, I’m sure that isn’t accurate and won’t be replicated in my coming phone interview (yuck) but it is flattering nonetheless. I think the key was just comprehension and circumlocution—my first impressive moment was when the testers asked me how long I had been studying Arabic before I came to Tunisia (an odd question considering they knew we were all beginners, and asked quickly and with a weird tense). When I answered right away, the tester turned to his colleague and quickly said something along the lines of “wow, she’s the first one to get that question—she understood,” to which I responded “of course!” After that, it was actually a lot of fun. I fulfilled my worst fear when I accidentally slid into French, and had to literally clap my hand over my mouth, but I was able to explain in Arabic “when you ask me about French literature, I want to talk in French. Can I have the next question?” without any problem. I even talked about DC and Obama, and when asked for my opinion of Michelle I was able to compensate for not knowing “intelligent” by saying “Michelle graduated from the same university as Obama but their teacher said that she was a better student than him.”

After the oral I headed immediately for celebratory gelato with the girls, a quick final hour of beach with Akira and Tyler, and then home to change for the banquet. Kate and I split a bottle of wine and chatted like true “ochette” (sisters) as we got ready; I wore her necklace, she wore my dress, and we made promises to visit each other fi Mustokbol (in the future). We arrived to the banquet on Tunisian time (read: an hour late) and sat at a table with one of our feminist lecturers, who had amusingly disgusted responses to Mustafa’s run-of-the mill misogynist comments. During dessert they showed a little retrospective video that included the performance of my harissa poem from Dougga and my bus acceptance speech, which got a great reception from all of the Tunisian tutors and parents that knew me who hadn’t seen it live. My own parents were shocked to hear that I could actually speak some Arabic (I never really tried at home, because they just made fun of us) and found my class nickname “fil-fil” (Pepper) to be equally hilarious.

I caught a taxi to Marsa Plage Saturday morning and browsed the little shops and open-air book market before getting the train into Tunis for some last-minute souk action. Over the course of 4 hours or so, I managed to speak French, Arabic and English and even Spanish, and by the time I left, my brain was so muddled with code switching that I could hardly communicate at all. It was gratifying how much Arabic I was able to understand, though, especially compared to my previous, jetlagged experience in the souks on the day of our arrival. My best adventure was a shopkeeper who, after trying to help me find Akira in the impossible maze of shops, lead me on a little tour through the shoe-maker’s souk before brining me back to his own perfume store, where he served me mint tea, gave me a perfume-making and testing demonstration, and insisted that I sample almost all of them before settling on a little vial of jasmine oil. That night, Kate and I had our final dinner with the family, which was appropriately delicious and even more awkward, then caught a cab out to the snazzy “Lac de Tunis” area for smoothies and shisha with some students and my teachers. I got home around 2:30am—just enough time to get two hours of sleep before we left for our flight. Sam’s host brother Eshem came to see us off and gave me a Tunisian soccer t-shirt as a parting gift, which was a much-appreciated gesture in light of my own family’s suckage.

Paris a few hours later was pretty chill—literally. After Tunisian heat, the 70-degree days felt almost like winter, and I spent the two days I was there wrapped up in jeans, tennis shoes and a jacket. With the flurry of finals during my last few days in Tunis I wasn’t successful in setting up appointments to see apartments, so I just relaxed and enjoyed the all-is-well-with-the-world feeling of being in France once again. I got a cheap hotel room with another boy from the program, Anthony, who is waiting to meet up with his sister for a backpacking Eurotrip. (Ah, the good ol’ days…). He doesn’t speak any French, and might have the worst sense of direction of anyone I’ve travelled with, so I felt very useful (Inch’allah his sister has a better internal compass than he does). He didn’t have to wait long to speak a language he knows, though—we were on the RER from the airport to the city when we had our first Arabic conversation, thanks to the t-shirt from Eshem that had a little Arabic on it. Our hotel was in an Arab part of Bastille, too, so we spent our evening browsing Arab butchers and bakeries, looking for telltale Tunisian foods as an invitation to try our “Asalaama. Le bess?” on for size.

We spent a good chunk of yesterday in the Centre Pompidou, Paris’ relatively new modern art museum, housed in a controversially odd building that has exposed, color-coded pipes on one side (blue for air, red for elevators, green for water, yellow for electricity) and six floors of inclining hamster tubes of escalators on the other. Somehow I had managed to never visit this particular museum, but after this trip it will always make my list. The hamster’s-eye view as you go to the top is a great panorama of Paris, and the two special exhibits were completely my style. The first was a Kandinsky collection, arranged by time and space to track the influences of his time spent in Germany, Paris and Russia on his work. Rufus Wainwright provided a great soundtrack as I freed my eyes to move along the dark lines between splotches of color—such happy paintings! I’m totally going to make a habit of music-and-painting visits when I’m living there…it’s like do-it-yourself Fantasia. The second exhibit was called “elles”—a Guerilla Girls-inspired exhibit that “might be taken as a manifesto: women artists are now numerous, and in their radical, complex and cross-disciplinary work they are writing a new history of art to challenge the old, tackling head-on the great issues of the day. Yet the new hang is neither female nor feminist in point of view, being primarily intended to show and to pay tribute to their work.” Bottom line? Super cool WGSXy heaven, organized into sections that celebrated/challenged the body, domestic space, domestic arts (sewing, cooking, interior design), etc. complimented by great feminist literary quotes on the walls. Highly recommended if you find yourself in Paris anytime soon (and if you’re reading this blog, you’ll have an excuse to come to Paris starting Sept. 7th. My couch calls…)

Linguistic reflections

Test #2 was Friday. I got the exact same score I did last week, not best, not bad, so I’m still feeling okay. Almost all the points I got off were for the writing section, though, so I’m supposed to talk to the program coordinator on Monday about how to improve my spelling. Judging by people that didn’t do so hot last week, I think that probably translates to a private spelling tutor, which, although it just means MORE work, should be very helpful considering my current frustrations with class time.

I have two teachers each day. One is incredible—enthusiastic, jolly, and great at not getting exasperated at incompetent Americans. The other—not so much. I don’t think she’s had much teaching experience, which doesn’t help, but she also just doesn’t seem to have a good concept of the efficient use of class time, or pace, and her version of “helping” is to rewrite your sentence for you or impatiently supply you with the word you’re in the process of sounding out. It’s frustrating, and in a program like this where speed and intensity are the name of the game, it feels like a major handicap. I’ve tried to refrain from snapping at her, but I have very little patience for bad teachers (or anyone wasting my time, really), especially because St. Mary’s really spoiled me in the teacher department.

It has been a lot more difficult than I imagined to learn Tunisian and FosHa side by side. In case anyone doesn’t know, Arabic takes very different forms in the different countries it’s spoken in. FosHa, or Modern Standard, is the “universal” form that is supposedly understood by all (it’s the language of academics, printing, news, etc) but spoken by none. The way I visualize the structure of Arabic in my head is like the dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park—the basic structure, taken from the mosquitoes in amber, was dino, but they filled in the gaps with amphibian. FosHa acts as this ancient structure, but local dialects fill in the holes to create new and individual languages. With Tunisian, French filled a good number of those holes and so did Italian (ex. Pen= “steeloo”, like the French “stylo”; OK=“dack-wher-doo” like Italian “Dacuerdo”). Tunisians appropriate French so naturally that half the time they can’t remember the Arabic word for some things that they’re used to referring to in French. The longer I’m here, the more I just want to learn Tunisian, as it’s more the talking to people than the grammar that inspires me. Unfortunately, we only get about 30 mins of Tunisian a day, compared to 4 hours of FosHa.

Arabic itself is a mix of familiar and unfamiliar elements, and although the completely foreign writing system and sounds and lack of cognates make it harder to absorb/retain, the structure is actually much simpler than the languages I’m used to in many ways. Like romance languages, there are masculine and feminine nouns, although like Spanish (and unlike French) it is usually relatively easy to tell which is which from the sound/appearance of the word. There is no subject for formal address like the French “vous” or the Spanish “usted,” thank God, so it’s not quite so easy to offend someone by using the wrong one (although, interestingly enough, the Spanish “usted” comes from Arabic, where it is a title of respect for a teacher). Verbs are conjugated from BOTH sides, with a first person, second person and third person prefix and a suffix for plural. THERE ARE ONLY THREE IRREGULAR VERBS(!) (come, eat, and take) but there are oddly no infinitives—the base form is the imperative. Nouns are altered with suffixes to allow possession (walidy = mother, walidity = my mother) and, like romance languages, usually precede their adjectives.

I had a great lazy Saturday yesterday, but I’ll save that until later, because I need to use my precious café Internet to do my homework. Until then, here are the explanations for this post's pictures of the less touristy, less glamorous sides of where I’m living. Tunisia is like the Where’s Waldo of stray cats—they are literally everywhere, and if you stand still long enough you can usually spot several lurking under cars, in trash cans, etc. They’re fairly clean and tame, though, as many families leave out scraps for them (because they’re preferable to rats). Also, Tunis is a very littered city, with new apartment buildings next to piles of rubble and discarded trash, especially as you move into the more middle class areas. Last: the vendors who sell to tourists often use their children to try and boost sales, which is both cute and a little sad. Here are two boys who posed for me, who are selling little bouquets of Full and Jasmine--two wonderful smelling flowers that grow everywhere here, and whose aromas will forever after remind me of Tunisia. These little handmade bouquets are sold on every street corner here for about half a dinar, and are purchased primarily by men (either old men, who wear them behind their ears, or young men, who buy them for their lady friends).

Last but not least: I don't know if he reads this, but if so, here's wishing a very happy Father's Day to the best Dad I know.

One week down...

I'm sure everyone has heard about the Egyptian method of preserving bodies by shoving a red hot poker up a corpse's nose, scrambling the brains, and pulling them back out in a melty mess. My Tunisian education thus far feels pretty similar (Egypt's only one country over, after all...). This week has been outright exhausting. I wake up at about 6:30 to get ready and get to school, which starts at 8:30. We have two two-hour sessions of class, a one-hour dialect lesson, and then hours of homework. However, what with the need for lunch in there somewhere and at least a little bit of down time, plus all of the activities we've had planned in the evenings, I never finish. I inevitably get home around 9, help set up for/clean up dinner, eat, and talk with the family, and by then it's about 10:30 and I have an hour or so to do what work I have the energy left for and get to bed.

We had our first test today, which I totally bombed (due to the time limit and not my Arabic ability). I'm not too concerned--I'm not getting graded after all. I feel pretty good about my progress thus far, regardless of testing. I can now read and write every letter, although I still have problems spelling, obviously, and I read at the pace of an electric company video from Sesame Street (Cuh----Aaaah----Tuhhh....Cuh--Aah--Tuh....CuhAhTuh....CAT!). I can also introduce myself, talk about my family, count money, order food, ask about the bathroom...pretty much do anything I would absolutely NEED to do. I'm also beginning to pick up words here and there in the conversation at home, which makes me sound rather like an idiot when I suddenly interject during dinner to parrot back the words I know (table! chicken! She doesn't want!). My host parents react as encouragingly as real parents would, smiling and repeating it back to me along with a string of other words I don't understand. Lina's five-year-old intellect has finally wrapped itself around the idea that my muteness is due to incomprehension, and she is now on a mission to correct everything I say, not that her choice of vocabulary is always helpful (she spent five minutes last night trying to get me to say something like Gahr-Gah Bool Zed...which turned out to be Dragon Ball Z, her favorite TV show). Asking her "shoowa hedda" (what's this) also has mixed results...I asked about a Tunisian flag and she said "aller aller!" (French for "let's go, let's go") and then started singing a Tunisian futbol chant. Ma'lesh. (Oh well).

Arabic itself is as fascinating as it is frustrating. I'm looking forward to next week, when we will progress beyond the alphabet and learn more about conjugating verbs and such. Not being able to string together sentences is killing me, as it's always the creative and structural aspects and actual conversation that I'm good at, not the memorization. As per usual, though, I'm still able to find ways to amuse myself, whether by the semi-orgasmic noises that emerge when a room full of students is practicing their "Huhhhh" (mine's getting pretty good, by the way), the fact that "sup?" translates into Tunisian as "penis," or that the Tunisian word for 15 is "mustache."

On the homefront: things are better, slightly. Kate and I are getting better about establishing our boundaries with Lina, and since we've been getting home around 9 we don't spend a whole lot of time with the family. Mustafa's brought up politics a few more times--apparently it's not just America and the Jews he hates, but also the French, the Chinese, the British... I slowly but insistently counter his opinions with "actually"s (actually, in America I have Chinese friends and....actually, I lived in Britain for a semester and...) Even if he's intolerant, he's at least giving me a little space to express myself--I just need to watch what I say, and not be the one to bring things up. On the other hand, I had a perfectly lovely (and long) conversation with Lubna last night about Islam--she was surprised to find out how much I new about her religion, and also surprised to find out that a lot of the Quaranic stories are also in the Bible and Torah. I'd love to pick her brain a little more...she's such a puzzle in my mind (educated and intelligent, but submissive, modern, but religiously traditional). I'm really looking forward to seeing where this friendship goes.

We leave at 8am tomorrow for our first weekend excursion to the Sahel--a central region on the coast. I'll check in again next week with pictures and a summary of how it goes!

Hedda Ohrkti

Hedda Ohrkti: this is my sister. Heya esm ha Lina: her name is Lina. This is about the extent of my Arabic at this point, although being only 5, Lina has yet to realize that I don't understand her constant babbling, so I've been enjoying pleasant (if rather one-sided) conversation. I've discovered that if I speak French to her, she understands me about half of the time but responds only in Tunisan (although French is widely heard here, most Tunisians speak Tunisian in the house and begin to learn French formally when they start school). She calls me ta-ta (auntie) and drags me around everywhere by my forearm (eeejuh! eejuh! shoof!) (come, come, look!). This picture was taken when she discovered my laptop and was insistant on playing with it...rather than have her mess up my documents I opened up photobooth and....voila! Instant distraction.

Also in my family: my father, Mustafa, my mother Lubna, and a three-month-old brother, Amenallah. So far, Mustafa speaks to me of politics in bursts of beginner's English, Lubna speaks of religion, education, and womenhood in French (when her husband is not around), and Amenallah...well...he gurgles in universal baby. I share my family with another girl in the program, Kate, although seeing as how she speaks no French and our parents speak very limited English, communication is largely up to me. The house is small, but clean and sufficient. I'm sleeping in what was clearly Lina's room (and which we still sort of share...it still contains all her toys and we each have a half of the closet) and Kate sleeps in what used to be the study and still holds the family computer (and many sci-fi posters...Mustafa is a self-proclaimed sci-fi fanatic and is seemingly obsessed with Jodie Foster).

The family is traditional Muslim, which is the exception rather than the rule in present-day Tunisia and makes me a little more worried about what is expected of me, but it should be an interesting cultural experience nonetheless. Lubna dons a full veil and robe everytime she leaves the house, as well as each of the five times per day that she lays out her mat for her prayers. I've already had a few enlightening conversations with her...but more to come on that later. It's a little awkward right now as we work out the family schedule and negotiate cultural differences (particularly surrounding meals, and when they should be eaten, and how much we're expected to eat), but I'm sure things will feel more comfortable as we settle in.

Today was also our first day of classes. We have Modern Standard Arabic from 8:30 to 1:00, then lunch, then a few hours of "free" time to take advantage of the school's internet as we do our homework. 5pm is Tunisian dialect lessons every day this week, although they'll drop off in frequency in the coming weeks to be replaced with different "cultural excursions" (I have my fingers crossed for a hammam) and culture clubs (I'm in pottery club).

Off to class again! More to come soon, as well as photos and commentary from the national futbol game I got to see on Saturday night....

Behi behi barsha

Asslema!

Here is my first official blog from o'er the Atlantic. So far, Tunisia has been "behi behi barsha," or very very good, which is a phrase I picked up over lunch at a cafe today (except at that point I was talking about my pasta--I'm still not sure exactly what was in it, but it was barsha nonetheless).

Our schedule has been hectic to say the least. I've yet to get a full eight hours of sleep since I arrived (and at this rate, I won't tonight, either) so I'm still a little jet-lagged. The unflagging enthusiasm of all involved sustains me, however, as does my inexplicably strong love of this country. Really, I absolutely adore it. Never in my travels have I ever felt so immediately taken with and comfortable in a country as I do here. Tunisians are incredibly warm, friendly people, all of my preconceived notions about the limitations of life in an Islamic country have been shattered, and I'm in linguistic heaven. Although I'm soon going to make an effort to avoid using it as I learn more Arabic, my French has been serving me well, and I am more comfortable striking up a conversation in French with a stranger here than I have ever been in France. Arabic is an intriguing and I'm playing with the few phrases I know to begin piecing it together (our formal classes start Monday). In the back of my mind, I'm already plotting ways to get back to the Maghreb after this summer is over...Peace Corps? Fullbright?....

And now, to cheat and use bullet points, because I'm tired.

Things I've done in the last not-quite-three days:
-been lost (and then found) in the bazaar-style marketplace (souks)
-been surprised at how much the main street Avenue Bourgiba and the view of the mediterannean reminds me of Nice
-toured the city extensively and loved my Tevas in the process--until today, when I started hating their still-faint-but-probably-going-to-get-worse-quickly smell
-seen many, many more women without veils than with them. My favorite so far is an elderly mother, completely covered, accompanied by her preteen daughter in booty shorts and a skin-tight, gold-lettered spaghetti strap shirt.
-eaten any authentic Tunisian food I can get my hands(mouth?) on, including an eggy pastry called a Brik El Medina, Harissa (a spicy red pepper garnish), Mechouia (spicy pepper/onion/tomato appetizer), Couscous, Schwarma, and, of course, loads of delicious mint tea
-visited the intensely fortified American embassy and resisted attempts to be recruited for the Foreign Service or the State Deparment
-attended a dressy reception at the ambassador's house and gotten my first glimpse of the GOREGOUS neighborhood I'm soon be living in
-had at least one quadralingual conversation (Arabic, English, French and Spanish)
-played a gambling game with some Tunisian teenagers in an alley near our school, using a combination of gestures and bad Arabic to understand the rules
-been laughed at by the ten-year-old son of a shopkeeper for my butchering of "bu Kaddesh" (how much) due to my inability to pronounce the throaty "K" sound (as well as about 5 others...*sigh*)
-exchanged Arabic for English phrases with one of the restaurant workers at the hotel...and made a "date" to do the same tomorrow
-been grateful to the shopkeepers who have helped me count their unfamiliar currency from my outstretched hand--and slightly irked by the few who have already scammed me into paying a few dinar more than I should through whatever tourist trap method (just you WAIT 'enry 'iggens...I'm learning your language and I'll be BACK for revenge)

That's all for now. I'm moving into my homestay on Sunday and am excited to meet the awesome family, inch'allah (god willing), that I'll be living with for the next two months...