My First Trip to Town

For the first time, I left the compound in the backseat of a short yellow cab where I sat with my head pressing against the roof. It was mid-morning and the sky was ominously dark with sparse rain drops on the ground. My roommate Jake and I ventured into the city of Monastir with hopes of having our own court for practice. As we approached the town, we passed alongside a series of large vacation homes overlooking the Mediterranean up on a cliff. The only difference between this area and Newport Beach, CA was the chaos of the street we drove on. Garbage, motorcyclists, bicyclists, and pedestrians aimlessly roamed and avoided the automobile traffic. As we approached the city, the buildings became denser with additional traffic and garbage. When we arrived at the tennis club for our practice it immediately started raining, dissolving any hope for a productive tennis session. Slightly discouraged, we asked our taxi driver to pick us up in an hour in hopes of getting into the neighboring stadium for a workout. We trekked around the tennis club onto the streets to the stadium entrance with our tennis bags in the light rain. One gate after the next was locked, however once we found the main entrance we followed a series of side doors ajar to get into the facility. The unmanicured grounds of the soccer stadium appeared abandoned at first but once we made it under the stadium, we saw a youth soccer practice session on the outside practice fields. Jake and I mutually agreed to run half of the stadium if we could access the bleachers. Sure enough, we were able to find our way onto turf where we went for a warmup lap before getting into our workout.

A series of different individuals came out of doors around the stadium to look at us, as if to see what we were doing, however none of them said anything other than, “Bonjour”. We kept our heads down and began training. As we neared the end of our first set of bleachers, a pack of young schoolboys gathered around one of the stadium entrances and started cheering us on in French. We acknowledged them and echoed their words of encouragement, “Allez!” They stayed to watch our next round of bleachers and kept yelling, what I assumed was encouragement. It was exactly what I needed as my lungs burned and legs slowed towards the end of our training. For recovery, we went back down to the turf and ran a cool-down lap to flush out our legs.

Upon our departure from the tennis club, we drove through the heart of Monastir to a café for a coffee as an excuse to hang out for a few more minutes in the city. On the drive through downtown, I noticed a pattern of unfinished buildings throughout the city. In Tunisia apparently, if your property is under construction, you are not required to pay taxes until the property is finished. This has resulted in nearly every residential property being kept with at least one room under construction indefinitely.

Our taxi driver Samir mentioned that Monastir leaned politically left in comparison to the rest of Tunisia, meaning that more women are employed, French was the dominant language, and there is less distain towards the gay community. Women are predominately in head-coverings but clearly have more freedom than in much of the Arab world, as I saw many driving and walking alone.

As a foreigner in this culture, I feel welcome by everyone I’ve met thus far. It very well may be because I’m a white male, however it’s evident that people are considerably nice to you when you show them respect and kindness. I’ve made considerable effort to show interest in the people I’ve met, acknowledging their names and being friendly. Nevertheless, Tunisia is a new culture for me, the first place I’ve been where I am in the minority as a white man.