Beach, please

Today was a beach day! Given that two of my favorite activities are going to the beach and traveling, I will obviously jump at the chance to combine them into one glorious day of hedonism.

After breakfast at our guesthouse, we went to the grocery's Door of Shame to buy beer to mix with lemon soda to make claras- because it's a law in Spain that any beach day, regardless of location, must be hydrated with claras (it's not a law) (it should be).

At 10am it was already blisteringly hot as we walked to the plage (beach). Plage Hammamet is a white-sand public beach outside the medina, and very popular and crowded. So color us excited to see when we arrived that an entire row of beach palapas (beach umbrellas made with straw and wood) were vacant. We promptly claimed one, but then noticed there were no chairs to rent. A single beachgoer sat in a chair under the only other occupied palapa; so I asked in my shit French how to rent the palapa and chairs. I'm pretty sure he told me the rental place was closed, but just help myself to the chairs stacked behind us. Like I said, I'm fairly certain that was his general message; regardless, this is how we ended up with a prime surfside location for free. Score!

After a lovely day of playing in the surf and napping on the sand, we walked back to our guesthouse to share a bottle of Tunisian wine and watch the sun set from our rooftop. It was gorgeous, but despite the many nearby rooftops, it was only us and the numerous street cats admiring the view.

We hadn't eaten since breakfast, so we decided to have a late dinner at a Tunisian restaurant that is very popular with the locals. Unlike the nice beach restaurants with a view of the sea, this place was a twenty minute walk in the opposite direction, and was packed with locals eating at plastic tables with paper place mats. The menu was a bit inscrutable, given that our French is barely passable and our Arabic is nonexistent- so we ordered a tomato and merguez (spicy Tunisian sausage) stew, a chicken dish, a salad, and a brik (sort of an empanada) to share. The waiter asked us something unintelligible in French, to which I could only respond with a blank stare. He shrugged and walked away, which is when we realized that we had no idea what we just agreed to, or what food would eventually materialize.

To our surprise, the waiter brought soup. Then a basket full of baguettes. Then four different salads. And THEN he began bringing our actual order. We weren't certain if we had ordered incorrectly, if the waiter confused our order, if we were getting rolled, or if the locals were offended by our American-sized food order. But we did notice that many other tables had the same ridiculous amount of food; apparently this is the Tunisian version of the Full Meal Deal. I nearly choked on my couscous when I saw the bill was barely 32 dinars (€11).

After that monster of a meal, we walked back to our guesthouse for our last night in Hammamet. Tomorrow we go south to Sousse!Read more