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One Exotic Xmas
Overseas, in North Africa, it’s more than a little odd
by Barry Henderson
Lots of people go someplace for Christmas, either to be with family or just to get away, perhaps to someplace snowy, perhaps to someplace warm. But the old saw that there’s no place like home for the holidays is more true than not.
Going off to some truly foreign clime can be a bad idea, even if the experience turns out to be entertaining.
So, when my wife and I had been in Prague for a year and were really missing family and friends back here and were contemplating a trip home, knowing we were going to spend several more months in the Czech Republic, we were pretty excited. That’s until this opportunity came up to spend two weeks in Tunisia in a special promotion that included airfare, hotel, a couple of meals a day and other bennies, all for the munificent sum of $1,500.
We’d not been to N. Africa and had wanted to go. Egypt was our first choice, but there was no such deal, and we were a little chary about the tourists being murdered there at the time. This was a few years back, and things were more testy in Egypt then. But we’d heard nothing to dissuade us from taking to Tunisia, so we signed up and paid our freight.
The flight down on Czech Air was uneventful, but we got into the Tunis airport late at night, and the shuttle to the hotel was a lengthy drive, ending at a crummy hotel we hadn’t reserved in a city we hadn’t been guaranteed. It took my wife’s tearful call back to the Prague travel agency to get us into a hotel we could accept, and we were conveyed there in the port and beachside city of Sousse, by lunchtime that Saturday.
Christmas wasn’t until the following Wednesday, so we started planning our activities for the two weeks, took in the beach and part of the town, and settled in for the holidays.
By Christmas Eve, we were pretty familiar with Sousse, Tunisia’s third-largest city, and we were well aware that we were the only Americans around that part of the country. Tunisians were startled to the point of disbelief that we were, in fact, U.S. citizens. They insisted we must be Danes or Swedes. No Americans visited Tunisia, they said. Our hotel was, for that matter, full of Europeans. Poles, Germans, Brits, French, a few Czechs and Hungarians and a stray Rumanian or two, we found out.
So Christmas was going to be an international thing, and the hotel staff was prepared for it and for the party that they thought had to go along with the celebration. The dinner the hotel restaurant laid out for us was a reasonable facsimile of a Christmas dinner, though without our traditional turkey. They did serve ham and some of the trimmings, including a relish tray with celery, carrots and shelled nuts, sweet potatoes, and a gelatin salad. The garbanzo beans were a new twist, Christmaswise, but the kitchen staff held off on the national dish, couscous, for the occasion. The decor was Xmas-ed up with red ribbon and pine boughs, and the whole dining/ballroom and the European guests were in a festive mood, especially one British family at a nearby table who were suitably drunk and loud.
Dancing to live music had been arranged, and the band was special. It was a Tunisian all-woman group, versed in a few basic Christmas carols, along with some rock ‘n’ roll and jazz standards, played in a style that was less Euro-pop and more Afro-Mideastern. It was fun, really, and its uniqueness made us forget for a bit that we were desperately missing our family, there on the Mediterranean Shore, a light wind whispering in the palms outside the hotel.
What followed a fairly sedate post-Christmas day was a whirlwind tour of the country, by bus, from the olive groves of the East, to the Sahara and salt flats of the South, through the foothills of the Atlas Mountains and the holy Muslim city of Kairouan. In spite of the obligatory pilgrimage to the Grand Mosque there at Kairouan, fundamentalist Islam is forbidden in Tunisia, and the glowering face of the nation’s president, Zine Ben Ali, glares down from virtually every wall in the country to remind all and sundry that practicing what is forbidden is likely a capital offense.
Ben Ali has been president since 1987 and has been reelected with 95 percent of the vote, leading some observers to think that practicing political opposition is also unhealthy. If it looks like a dictator and acts like a dictator, it may be a “president for life.” The one saving grace of such an arrangement may be that Ben Ali has continued the previous regime’s policy position that resulted in women having more freedom in Tunisia than in any other Islamic state, as evidenced by the makeup of the Christmas party band.
The run-up to New Year’s Eve led us to believe the party the hotel was throwing would be more elaborate and impressive than the one for Christmas. We weren’t wrong. And it was better attended, with many more Europeans, perhaps 300 or more, jamming the ballroom space, eating the buffet dinner and drinking their way toward midnight. The highlight of the evening was either the Elvis impersonator, who sang and gyrated his way through a lengthy, sequined set, or the conga line, which the Germans found particularly appealing, as it ran its own gyrating way though most of the last hour before the clock struck.
We made it to the end, and our next few days were spent on the North coast, seeing the remains of Carthage and the stunning French summer resort of Sidi Bou Said, ending up in a quick tour of Tunis, with its Roman aqueducts, its museums, and its terrific French-African restaurants.
Go there; do those things. Enjoy Tunisia. It’s a wonderfully varied and eclectic country, which welcomes Americans enthusiastically, once it realizes where they’re actually from. The push to sell you carpets will be nearly universal, and the carpets are more nearly irresistible than the carpet dealers and their shills.
But don’t go at Christmas unless you really have no better place to be in that most familial of seasons. You just can’t count on the Elvis impersonator being there until at least New Year.
December 16, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 51
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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