Everything is Bon

It's been a week since our last post, so we decided to splurge and drop the 2 Euros for Internet time here at the Bulldog hotel in Amsterdam, where we've been staying since Saturday.

Tunisia was a blast, and we managed to get by despite speaking little to no French (Wong said Merci every once in a while, that was about it). After arriving in Tunis around 10 p.m., we took up two rooms at the Hotel de Suisse and managed to fit in both beers with drunk locals at Pub Gentleman (a must-see for any visitor to Tunis) and a few hours of sleep before catching a 6 a.m. train south to Gabes.

Once in Gabes, we dined on Tunisian salads and roast chicken, then lucked out and secured a 4-wheel drive vehicle for an overnight journey even further south to the Sahara desert. On our drive down, we stopped in Matmata to see the site of Luke Skywalker's boyhood home in the first Star Wars, then drove to our campsite as the sun set over the desert. We spent the night in a tent under the stars (a bromantic evening), and woke up early to check out the endless sand dunes and then head north through Chenini, Tataouine and Medenine before arriving back in Gabes in the late afternoon.

George Lucas clearly hijacked the traditional garb of southern Tunisian Berbers when outfitting his Jawas, and we were inspired to pick up our own Jawa suits (cool and not-at-all-creepy pictures to follow soon). We decided to take the overnight train back up to Tunis, so we dug our foxholes at a local bar until midnight, then hopped on the train back north.

Arriving in Tunis at 6 a.m., we stored our bags at Hotel de Suisse and then hit up a local Hammam for a good scrubdown because it had been a few days since our last shower. Auggie and I splurged on a massage while Phil reluctantly offered to scrub down a rather bicurious Italian man as he returned the favor. We had a lot of time to kill in Tunis before our late night flight out, so we did some laundry and took a brief train up north to Carthage, which at one point over a thousand years ago was the center of power in the Mediterranean (before the Romans raped it).

Back in Tunis, we headed to the airport around 10 p.m. for a 4 a.m. flight. Once there, I managed to sell my computer to the man working at the post office for US$300 (quite a price for a 2004 Laptop that runs slower than my brother). After an arduous early morning flight, we hit an Amazing Race-esque road block at the Frankfurt airport when we discovered that the round-trip train ticket to Amsterdam would cost more than 200 Euros per person (twice what we anticipated). We ended up renting a car for just under 200 Euros, total, and burned it up the Autobahn in our Ford S-Max for the 450 km drive to Amsterdam. It took us only 3 hours (we love the Autobahn).

Amsterdam has been great, and we're ready to ship back down to Africa for a 5-day visit to Morocco. We're alive, rejuvenated and ready to tread on. Pictures from the last week to follow soon.