The Adventures of Frizzhead and German Girl

I don’t feel like I’ve found “my” people yet in Paris, or maybe it’s just that my idea of friends hasn’t quite caught up to the new reality of my life. The close-knit community at St. Mary’s is a far cry from the dynamics of adult city life—it’s funny how being isolated as a school made us much less isolated as individuals. At any rate, I am learning to enjoy my alone time without being lonely. Usually. But then there are nights like Tuesday night, when I decided after an hour of moping that I should leave my room, hop a metro stop up and treat myself to a McFlurry (I know, I know, cliché, but pastry shops close early and I swear MacDo is actually better here). Except that, as soon as I got on the train, who should I run into in my metro car than the German girl from two doors down, Dorothee (the same one I dragged to couscous a few weeks ago).

Dorothee was as chic as all European girls and clearly dressed to go out, and I felt a little dumb in comparison in my sweatshirt and tennis shoes with my lack of itinerary. She asked me where I was headed. “Out to find a crepe,” I said, excusing the white lie with the desire to not further encourage the American stereotype as obese hamburger-lovers. “I have a craving for something sweet.”

“All alone?”

I shrugged.

“It’s not a crepe, but I have some sweet white wine, and I’m going to go meet up with some girlfriends at the Eiffel Tower to pregame before we go to the club. Do you want to come?”

And that was how I ended up unexpectedly staying out until 2am the night before Assia Djebar’s class at Place de Trocadero. Between Dorothee, her friends (another German named Kersten and a Belgian girl) and me, we finished three bottles of wine, watched a break-dancing group go through their routine twice, waved off countless souvenir-sellers hawking their usual jingling rings of Eiffel tower key chains and various glowing night items, staying just long enough to see the tower sparkle a final time before stumbling back to the metro, laughing, to part ways. That night was also the closest I have ever come to pissing my pants—when the 6 line stopped for ten minutes, I laughed, crossing me legs, but once I got to my change at the RER platform only to find the one bathroom “hors service” and the next train ten minutes away, it wasn’t funny any more. I imagined myself standing forlornly in a puddle, encircled by sneering French spectators—can you get arrested for peeing yourself in public? As if taunting me, a nearby drunk man unzipped and pissed on the track. When the train finally pulled up to my stop I burst out, bolted up the escalator and across the street, punched in my keycode, and had my card out and unready to unlock the first-floor bathroom. My plan hit a slight hitch when I realized I let myself into the shower room instead, but—merci Dieu!—the final stall was a toilet.

Although I had planned to have a night-in after yesterday’s tiring Chateau visit, last night ended up being another adventure with Dorothee. Antsy for something to do, she accepted a texted invitation to attend an Erasmus party on a boat on the Seine and, on a whim, I decided to go along for the ride. We finished a bottle of wine together as we primped then ran to catch the metro to get there in time for the before-midnight free entry. We only just made it. We headed downstairs immediately where the dance floor was still relatively empty, with most students crowded around the bar and into booths along the walls. By the time I left the dance floor two hours later to ask the bartender for some water (I never understand why I’m the only one that does this…dancing makes me work up a sweat!) and find the bathroom, I had to squeeze through hoards of people to get there.

However, it turns out that going to the bathroom on a dark, crowded dance boat is a bad idea if you plan on ever rejoining your group. I spent the next hour trying (unsuccessfully) to track down Dorothee downstairs, above deck and outside (we had agreed to leave at 2/3 am and split a taxi). I sat down in a booth to survey the crowded dance floor, but overwhelmed and starting to get tired, I closed my eyes. Mistake number two. I immediately had the handsy attention of several skeezy guys who incorrectly assumed I was wasted (and I guess easy?). I shook them off easily enough but decided that was my cue to make an exit and hope that Dorothee could find her own way home.

I got off the boat and walked up to the main road, shivering in my club attire in the nippy 3am air (Dorothee had my sweater in her purse) and nursing feet that had been rubbed raw from my heels (never again! Flats forever!). After 25 minutes or so I was getting numb and hadn’t succeeded in hailing a single cab, although more than a hundred occupied ones had seemed to pass by. Rather than brave the club boat again with its burly bouncers and crowd of listless boys smoking cigarettes out front, trying to weasel their way on, I went up to the pay-booth in the parking lot and asked the attendant what I was doing wrong about cabs. The man, a Tunisian, welcomed me into the booth through the back door and turned on the heat for me. I sat with him for half an hour (he said that taxis would often pass through later in the night for boat clients), trying Arabic off-an-on between his transactions with clubbers driving home. In the end, he saw I was getting tired and asked a young couple at the window if they wouldn’t mind driving me up somewhere where I might have more success in hailing a cab (I can hear mom wincing as she reads this…I’m fine!). The couple graciously let me into their car, and we talked in a mix of English-Spanish-French (she was Venezuelan, he was French) while they drove me to Champs Elysee and right up to an empty cab. Even the cab ride home was a bit crazy, as the driver was a greasy-haired, blackmetal-head that drove with a guitar in the front seat. I spent the entire drive discussing metal and dissing Marylin Manson and Eminem in a delightfully slangy French, pretending like I knew what I was talking about.

I caught up with Dorothee again this morning. Her face was puffy from crying and a lack of sleep, and she apparently had a nightmare of a night after we lost each other. Her purse was snatched from a booth, putting me out a sweater (darn, I really liked that one) but her out 50 euro, three credit cards, her student/resident cards, her passport and two cell phones (one German, one French). She spent the rest of the night on the phone with some pissed off parents and at the police station filing a formal report. When she finally made it back here around 9 this morning she had to be let into her room by security and then pay to have the lock changed.

And so, faithful readers, the morals of the story: forgo the purse and stick with shoving the essentials into cleavage/undergarments. Heels are evil. Pee before getting on the metro, and not at all on a boat. And speaking of pee, know that Marylin Manson upped the ante from his usual peeing on the crowd technique to trying to infect them with swine flu, because it’ll get you a long way with a crazy cab driver. Whew.

A bizarre and blustery weekend

This past weekend was, in the words of one of my guilty pleasure chick flicks, “surreal but nice.” It was dotted with strange moments and bittersweet overall—not only our last free weekend left in Tunisia, but also the end of any promise of real relaxation until the plane ride. Our schedule is going to really…well…suck…for these last two weeks. Somehow we have to write, memorize and perform a 15 minute skit and take a written test for Tunisian dialect, cover several more chapters of Al-Kitaab for MSA, sit one more regular weekly quiz, a written final, AND an oral evaluation of our language progress (and then, of course, there will be the phone interview we have when we get back to evaluate our fluency based on the standard scale as a reflection on the program and to determine our eligibility for future programs…).

I woke up early Saturday to meet Akira and catch a Louage to Cap Bon. Unfortunately, when I went to leave my room I found that the handle that has been tricky to use the entire time I’ve been here had finally decided to stop working altogether; I was locked in my own room. I tried to use a credit card to slide the lock open, but since the bolt part here is a solid rectangle and not the sleek, easily-manipulated triangle shape we have in the States, there was little I could do. Hearing my cellphone ringing in the other room (Akira, wondering where I was), I knocked on the wall to awake my host dad and tried my best to explain my dilemma through drywall-muffled French. I figured he would rustle up a screwdriver and pop off the plate for the handle, but lo and behold, he opted to just break the door down. I sat as calmly as I could on my bed for several minutes while he used his pent-up mosquito rage to break down the door (whose frame now has a chunk of wood ripped out of the wall near the still-nonfunctional handle...I’m using my bookbag to prop it closed-ish at night). A bizarre start to the day, to be sure.

Akira and I got in a Louage full of elderly veiled women (I love Louages! A new adventure everytime!) heading to El Houaria—a small town that somehow managed to be in the middle of nowhere in spite of its relatively close proximity to some of the most popular tourist beach towns on the Cape. Its one claim to fame is an annual falconry festival that we missed by about a month—outside of that, it’s a pretty sleepy town with its high proportion of falcon regalia as the only thing setting it apart from anywhere else. As was the case with El Kef, though, we enjoyed the chance to go at our own pace and be among “real” Tunisians free from the shadow of the tourist hoard on our program trips. Once there, we got a hotel recommendation from a group of French backpackers—48 dinar for the night, which was more than we’re used to, but it was cute and still a bargain by American standards. The hotel deskman gave us a little tour of the town, walking us to a sandwich café for lunch. We then hiked up to some ancient punic caves on the outskirts of the city, which served as limestone mines for the materials used to build the colosseum at El Jem and the ruins at Dougga that we had seen on early trips. I gave Akira an hour or so to get his geologist fill of the rocks before we went up to explore the cliffs and algae-rick tidal pools left by the angry waves that were smashing against the shore. Continuing trip tradition, we ate a melon and tossed the remains from the cliff face.

Later, after getting my soda snatched by the town crazy woman (bizarre incident #2), we caught a “taxi” (read: sketchy olive-colored car driven by the man who seemed to be generally recognized as the town “taxi guy”—we asked several people and they all referred us to him as if it should be obvious) to the beach. The beach was all Tunisians and not crowded at all. The water was the clearest we’ve seen anywhere so far, allowing us a good view of the little fish right under our feet, although the getting in-and-out part was surprisingly chilly. We missed the part in the guidebook where it told us that “Houaria” means “windy” in Arabic, and on our walk back to the hotel later we were both regretting not having brought jeans and jackets (what a shame, really…it would have been the first opportunity I’ve had to use the several that I brought). (Side note: one big benefit to the wind is that the hilltop turbines provide most of the town’s power). I stopped at a little boutique to buy a scarf to warm up with, and after trying unsuccessfully to rip me off, the woman decided that we were best friends, threw in the free “gift” of a hideously high-waisted pair of lacy underwear and begged for my number (bizarre incident #3). We got back to the hotel at about 8 and planned to rest for a few minutes before heading back out to dinner, but after waking up zombie-like at 10:30 we opted just to munch on some macroo cookies (the original fig newtons!) from the kind front desk man and catch up on some much needed sleep.

Sunday: not much to tell. Had to wait a while for the Louage to fill to head back to Tunis…learned how to make real mint tea from a sketchy table by the Louage station, walked around downtown a bit to find a bookstore for me to scope out French books (failure) and got some tea and shisha before we caught the crowded sweaty Sunday train back to our houses in the ‘burbs.