I posted a while ago about that I have met a very nice Tunisian man on the net and was hopeing to go and visit him, well I now have my flight booked and am flying on the 30th of this month and cant wait. This will be my first time in Tunisia (infact first time flying!) so any tips/advice would be grateful on anything and everything

CJ.

This phenomenon really deserves a bit more spillage of the ink. It's like a carnal manifestation of the nascent Mediterranean Union, and anecdotal evidence tells me it usually ends in a nasty mess of sex, lies, money and visas.

Groups of old men are always preferable to group of young men.

Just heard a coworker wrap up a telephone conversation in four different languages.

It's so gratifying to see them fail miserably. I sit here in Tunisia having quit my joke of a traineeship. A joke worth $3,925 according to the bill I was sent after arriving. With ties severed, I pieced together a much more productive and satisfying experience. If you're sick of being basted in vague new age blather (see: 'impact') I vigorously recommend CouchSurfing as an antidote. Take AIESEC, subtract all the crusty bullshit and acronymal wankery and add a lean and effective 2.0 infrastructure with a truly international network of people (who, al-hamdulillah, do not refer to themselves as 'change agents'). That's CouchSurfing and it totally slays.

Met my second Bulgarian ever last night, probably the funniest person I've talked to since arriving here. There's an art to making fun of Jews and it's particularly difficult to master as a gentile. Ivo pulled it off like Picasso in his Cubist period. Consider me pro-Bulgaria.

French classes are actually going really well. In my advanced class it's twelve Tunisians and myself, and the debates that go down each afternoon definitely have opened my eyes to the hopes and worries of the Tunisian middle class. It boils down to jobs and marriage with a heavy emphasis on the former. Tunisia has the classic youth bubble and the job market in recent years has become particularly tight. Every time I hop on a computer in the Publinet the 'Desktop' is littered with CVs and cover letters.

I'm (trying) to leave Tunisia at the end of July. 'Trying' because the cost have flying seems to have doubled since May. At fault is a combination of it being the high-season for travel and of course, the price of oil.

Why am I coming back home?

Law school.

According to this survey, one out of five atheist Americans believes in God.

Be forewarned, this is a humorless mind dump. My sole intention is writing down the details of the experience.

Last Friday I went to services at Tunis's only operating synagogue, downtown near the Bourguiba Institute. I arrived at 8:00 pm and gave my passport over to one of the 15 not-so-undercover dudes guarding the place. After a few minutes I was approved and shown to the front entrance. I walked inside and met one of the congregation leaders who was kind of a dick. He looked at my passport as well, somehow confirming my Judaism by looking at my old Cambodian visa, and grunted at me to follow him past the huge chapel and into a fluorescent-light backroom that would better fit the inevitably small congregation. I walked in and lowered the average age of the room by a decade or so to 70 and sat for awhile listening to the old Tunisian dudes breath loudly. Over the course of the next half-hour people trickled in, including the rabbi and his oldest son who sat next to me and did a good job describing to me what was going on. Apparently there are 400 Jews left in Tunis and 1200 in Djerba. He was training to be a rabbi, and I quickly became aware that this was no lai-lai-li-lai Reform bullshit, these people prayed to live and lived to pray.

The second the tenth guy walked in and we had achieved a minyan the prayer began. It consists of non-stop chanting with no organization whatsoever. People, only men though, kept on trickling in and greeting their friends as they prayed. Apparently the thing to do these days is to shake hands and then kiss your index finger. At some point someone passed around some incense which everyone snorted up the nose to induce coughing. WTF. After a half an hour things wound down and the 30 dudes left in the room went around shaking hands again. The entire time I was being stared at as I was one of two people who had no idea what was going on, the other being an old French tourist. The service concluded with the rabbi inviting me back to his place to eat dinner. Not one to turn down free food, I obliged and we snuck out the back door with his four sons and started traisping our way through downtown Tunis back to their apartment. One of the good things about Tunisian public education ignoring their Jewish history is that the young dudes who roam the streets at night don't really make the connection between dudes walking around with yarmulkes and Judaism, so the walk back was thankfully uneventful. The rabbi's oldest son told me that the most he ever gets is an occasional hiss.

OK, time is running out here at the PubliNet so I'll make it quick. We arrive at the apartment. The family is poorer than I thought. Apparently their apartment is paid for by the government because no one in the family makes any income. Nonetheless, the wife and the three daughters have been cooking up a storm while we men have been praying. I get the sense I am not supposed to talk to the women. At this point I have come to the full realization how little we have in common despite our shared religion. These people keep kosher like clocks keep time and I had to lie to them and tell them I was staying the night at a friends place downtown because they wouldn't have bought my story of walking 7 km back to Ariana at 10 PM. I haven't kept kosher a day of my life so the entire time I am tense as hell worrying that the next move I make could desanctify their home and get me kicked out to the street in a flurry of Judao-Arabic shouting. Anyways, the food was spectacular and I ate a fig for the first time in my life. I felt all biblical eating these dishes I last heard about in the Old Testament. I wish I had brought a gift with me to pass onto them, but honestly I didn't even think the synagogue would be open. By the end of the night we had conversed about everything under the sun/moon. I headed out at 10:30 pm to take the very un-kosher TGM back home. It was a positive experience overall and it gave me a lot to think about.

Gimp.