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.