The Sousse Medina doesn’t give up its secrets easily. I’ve spent dozens of hours there. After each visit, I walk away telling myself that now, at last, I know the place, know its byways and cool spots. Then on a subsequent visit I discover something new and amazing and wonder how in the world I missed it before. It’s like one of those dreams where you discover a hidden room in your house that you were only dimly aware of before.

My new friend Sheima and I had planned to go to Tiziri (a/k/a the Berber café), a place I have written about before. But when we got there this morning, we were told it was closed. A kid hanging out near the entrance to Tizieri said there was another café just around the next alley. This was news to me, but we stepped our way down a muddy path til we came to the Café El Kasbah.

Set into the ancient walls of the Medina, the café was chock-full of antiques. At times, the displays crossed the line into kitsch, but Arab kitsch still looks pretty good to this American.

We traded the camera back and forth taking photos of each other.

From a patio up on the roof, we could had a nice view of the medina. And at our feet, the floor was made of wildly mismatched tile shards.

Even as my time in Sousse draws, unfortunately, to a close, I am delighted to find that the town can still surprise me. I hope I can discover still more before I leave.

One of Sousse’s minor weirdnesses is that souk samedi actually starts on vendredi. I’ve been there several times, but always felt too self-conscious to take a camera. Today I got over that.

The souk sprouts up every week inside and around a walled market complex in Hammam Sousse. Generally, if you can wear it or eat it, you can find it at souk samedi. It’s not a picturesque touristy souk; it’s a place where the natives go to shop. Me too.

It was another unseasonably warm day today, so I one again wandered the Medina and stopped by the Berber café for a cup of chocolate and a few more photos.

The temperature here in Sousse climbed into the seventies today. I’d been laid low with a cold and had spent the preceding week shivering in my unheated apartment. Today, though, the balmy weather did good things for my health.

I ventured out to a Berber café in the heart of the Sousse Medina. An American friend had introduced me to the Tiziri in the week before Christmas vacation. It was love at first sight then, and so I vowed to return. And so today I did.

The place is a little hard to find, with only this sign on the door to let you know you’ve arrived.

The Medina is a medieval warren of alleys and buildings where you could wander lost for days on end, but I lucked out and found it again without much difficulty. The café is built around an open-air courtyard and has several different levels and rooms.

I hung out in the courtyard people-watching and sipping cocoa. The old woman who took my picture for me was so nervous about being asked that her hands shook (which accounts for the slight blurriness of this pic, which I nonetheless like).

Over at another table, a group of people began singing. Then someone pulled out a guitar, someone else pulled out a drum, and soon a group of people mounted the platform at the end of the courtyard and began to make music. It was a beautiful moment.

Couples sat with their arms around each other (not a common sight here). A young woman walked over to me, asked if I spoke French, and then invited me to a Quentin Tarantino film festival there at the cafe.

I’d been feeling a little emotionally abraded recently, but the good weather, the music, and the relaxed friendly vibe at the Tiziri reminded me that there is still a lot of good in the world, recent global events notwithstanding.

Except for the soldiers and armor-clad police standing around with Austrian Steyr Aug assault weapons slung over their shoulders, the Tunisian legislative elections here in Sousse resembled elections back in the States.

I visited two polling places this morning, both of which were located inside gated public schools. The process seemed orderly and peaceful. Posters on the walls explained the voting process.

Voters passed through the gates and consulted lists of names that told them where to vote. They located their voting rooms and checked in with their Tunisian ID cards. They were given paper ballots listing the names, numbers and photographs of each party. They marked their ballots while standing, folded them, and then dropped them in a ballot box. Their index fingers were dipped in indelible purple ink and they were on their way. The whole process took my friend Malek about ten minutes. There were police inside the polling places but my friend Malek who voted there reported that they did not closely observe or interfere with the voting process.

One of my friends, however, reported to me that after she voted, she was approached by a Salafist who asked whom she supported. When she proudly told him that she’d voted for one of the secular parties, the Salafaist demanded her name and phone number. Naturally, she refused to give that information to him. While she is a strong woman, she saw the conversation as an attempt to intimidate her.

Some people came to the polls dressed in the Tunisian national colors of red and white. I saw one little girl carrying a Tunisian flag as she went with her mother to vote. Cars drove by from time to time bedecked with flags. The mood was peaceful and happy, the presence of the gun-toting soldiers and police notwithstanding. I saw no campaigning in the vicinity of either polling place. Some people brought their children to see what a real election was like.

In both places, international election observers were very much in evidence. I talked with some of them from the National Democratic Institute. Some of their team had been here for months monitoring the run-up to today. Others had been in country only a few days. Some planned to stay until the presidential elections next month were complete. Other observers included people from a Tunisian lawyers’ committee and the Carter Institute.

The campaign that preceded the election was also remarkably orderly. I remember being in Bangladesh just after elections there and seeing political posters and graffiti on every available vertical surface in a rhetorical collage of images and words. Here in Tunisia, however, there are designated places for political posters, and every poster must hang in its properly-numbered equally-sized rectangle.

These rules were strictly adhered to, at least here in Sousse. There were also parades and rallies, but even these were relatively quiet affairs: a dozen cars driving down the street with their horns blaring, a lone campaigner passing out literature in a cafe, a rally whose sounds wafted into my neighborhood one night around 10:00.

As I write this, the polls are still open. Some of my students have been hired to work tonight as ballot-counters in a shift that begins at 8 pm and runs to 4 am. I look forward to listening to their stories in the coming week.