Monday, August 12, 2019

This week Hamza and I won’t be working very much on Lino. Hamza because he is going to marry; I because I am going to attend their feast with my family.

We left Vigala on Saturday noon and went to Riga airport by car, passed the night in a nap zone in Istanbul airport and landed Sunday morning at 9:20 in Tunis.

Today we arrived safely in Tunisia and are having two days of rest in Monastir on our way to Douz where the wedding will be.

We had hired a car from SunWebCars, a rather small local company located an hour away from Tunis. They don’t have their own office in the airport, but organized an agent who waited for us at the airport to hand over the car. As far as I know this was the first time my name was being shown in the arrival hall of an airport.

After getting the car, we returned back into the airport main hall in order to buy a Tunisian phone card. We installed it into Iiris’s phone because mine has no dual SIM. Unfortunately when entering the main hall I had forgotten my own phone at the security checkpoint. And unfortunately I didn’t have the idea of immediately testing our new SIM card by calling Hamza. You see how important it is to test every code change, and how easily we forget this. This might have turned into a bigger problem, but fortunately Hamza discovered my misfortune even before I noticed it. Unfortunately again Ly didn’t hear her phone when Hamza called her to tell me what had happened. Thanks be to God, Hamza, and the car agent who returned back to the airport and stopped us literally in the last minute when we were about to leave the airport parking.

Our day of arrival in Tunisia happened to fall exactly onto Eid al-Adha, the biggest Islamic holiday of the year.

In Monastir we are living in a flat rent by Abdelkader who lives in the same house. Oh, this place is so cool! It is the kind of place you cannot get as a normal tourist without any contact person. We felt at home immediately. Yesterday, after testing the beach, which is at 10 minutes of walk, we did our own meal in the kitchen. I don’t want to imagine us staying in one of those tourist centres along the coast between Sousse and Monastir!