This is a sidewalk café across the street from AMIDEAST Sousse. Notice anything about the clientele?

They all have Y-chromosomes.

Where are the women? The uneasy feeling I get looking at this reminds me of how I used to get creeped out in Indiana, wondering what they had done with all the black people.

It’s not that Tunisian women are forbidden to go to street cafés. It’s more that they are kept away from such places by culture and habit.

I have seen a few — a very few — women at sidewalk cafés. There are a fair number of women at my favorite café, but it’s not outside on the street. I also see women going shopping, working in shops and stores, and going from place to place. But they don’t hang out at streetside cafés. Are there public places that aren’t quite as visible where women congregate? I don’t know yet.

I live in one of the newer parts of Sousse, a residential area that’s still largely under construction. The houses have clean, spare lines and are well-proportioned. In keeping with the building style and security needs of this and many other parts of the world, walls surround most of the houses. I have mixed feelings about those walls; they provide additional safety to people in their private spaces, but they make the public streets feel less safe. Still, I like the architecture of the place very much. I love walking to work and passing by these elegant buildings.

One consequence of being robbed on the train from Tunis to Sousse last month was a scaling back of my plans for housing. I’d hoped to get a nice new seaside apartment, or maybe something in the medina, but it was not to be. Instead, I opted for a small one-bedroom apartment in the basement of a new house that’s just a ten minute walk to AMIDEAST.

Maybe this will be for the best. The rent is certainly lower than the places I’d been looking at, and the easy walk to work will save me money on taxi and louage fares.

I moved in on Monday and started rearranging, cleaning, shopping, and personalizing my flat.

It’s essentially one medium-sized living/dining/cooking area, a nice bathroom, and a smallish bedroom.

It’s very much a work in progress. I hope to have it looking better eventually. But for now, I am just happy to have a home.

I was walking back to my Sousse hotel at about 8:00 this evening when I saw my first political demonstration in Tunisia.

There were about fifteen cars and trucks proceeding slowly along the road that leads to the sea. Men dangled out windows of the vehicles holding a roughly equal number of Tunisian and Palestinian flags. I also spied one yellow and black “R4BIA” flag of the Muslim Brotherhood. I saw no Hamas flags, however, and no guns.

Two men leaning out of either side of a pickup truck were attempting to hold a crude seven-foot replica of a Palestinian M25 Qassam rocket on the roof of the truck. It teetered and wobbled precipitously but, miraculously, didn’t fall over. The vehicles’ horns were all blowing in rhythmic unison.

There were no posters on the vehicles and the demonstrators weren’t chanting anything intelligible to me, so it was hard for me to understand precisely what was being conveyed, beyond exultant support for the Palestinian cause. Perhaps the recently-announced Gaza cease-fire between Hamas and Israel was being construed as a glorious victory for Palestine.

A miscellanea of photos I took in Sousse last week.

One of the first things I noticed about Sousse was the quality of the light here. The sun reflects off the waters of the Mediterranean and illuminates the sky. The ambient light is brilliant but not harsh. It’s the kind of light that could compel a painter to set up a studio, the kind of light that poets could write about, the kind of light that could drive a man mad. For the first time I understood the irony and the majesty of the title of The Sheltering Sky.

The sky seems unnaturally blue, as if wavelengths here are just a mite shorter. It’s not quite real, like a movie shot on film stock that’s not quite right.

And these shades of blue are recapitulated in the paint used on the doors and windows of Sousse, especially in and around the medina. Call it Tunisian blue.