various photos and trip to the beach

Some people have asked about our neighbourhood and I wanted to share some photos of the environment just outside our door. As you can see from the street sign here, we are on the shores of Lac Ontario...

Post-revolution Tunis has some issues with garbage collection and city maintenance. I have since noted that we do have garbage pick up on what we are affectionately calling garbage corner - some guys come by with a tractor and what looks like a hay wagon - we don't know what happens to it after that though.

It seems that stray cats and dogs get the first check at the trash and that helps with maintaining those populations.

In addition, we have noticed many unfinished building projects all over Tunis and we think it has something to do with people being unable to get loans for building materials and paying cash as they can to finish these projects.

We also live quite close to the airport which is great if you need to get to the airport fast and it also means that we can engage in a bit of plane spotting.

We did manage a quick trip to a beach after another trip to the Geant "hypermarket" in Ariana.  The beach is called Raoued Plage -- it seems to stretch for several kilometres across the northern coast of the city -- and the kids had a great time picking up shells and exploring the beach.  We had the beach mostly to ourselves it being winter here....ha! And there were a few fishermen and locals who were visiting that beach too.

Here are some views from the beach back to the houses that surround it.

All the kids were very happy at the beach and worked cooperatively to collect shells that are all now drying on our porch.

 Not sure what we will do with all these shells....

Please note the winter boots.....guess they work ocean side too!

We hope to have more adventures soon especially if we are allowed to rent another automatic vehicle from the embassy.  Tonight is New Years Eve and we wish everyone a happy celebration tonight- for our part in Tunis we will be celebrating with home made gluten free spinach pizza (Keegan says he is making it!) and playing games.  We will toast all our friends back in Canada and hope that 2014 will be a happy and healthy year for us all no matter where we are!!

Getting lost down town...

On Saturday, in our rented car Mr was our tour guide down town.....and we got lost.....not badly juste une peu.

Things started off well and then we took a bit of a wrong turn....

and we drove into the Medina

the traffic was a little scarier than we were used to- but Richard did a great job navigating us through the narrow streets and various road obstacles (sidewalks are optional for pedestrians to use, stop signs and red lights are considered to be suggestions, and motorcyclists don't have to obey one-way road directions)

The next few pics are from our car windows as we tried to recalculate where we were and where we were going.

Eventually we found our way into this scary tunnel 

And out the other side into a big roundabout. Out of the 8 possible choices of exits from the roundabout, Mr chose incorrectly, so after that we decided after that to give up on our idea of getting to the National museum (known as the Bardo Museum). We headed back in the rough direction of the airport, and we ended up bowling near our house instead. Kaitlyn got the best score, Kellan managed to deal with the adult-sized balls, and Keegan did well, too (despite trying not to try).

We went home after this and prepared to attend a dinner at the Canadian ambassador's house.

It was a lovely event and we met some of the Canadian and Tunisians working at the embassy here.  We got a little lost on the way to the dinner but it was only to make us fashionably late.

Keegan got to fill up on delicious turkey and there was plenty of buche de noel for the finale of the evening.

Kaitlyn even got to jump on the trampoline in the back yard (a highlight in her view!).

And the views from the hill where the house is situated are wonderful.  

We got home a bit later than we wanted and had trouble sleeping....which made a much later start to the day Sunday.....but we are still on vacation.  

We did visit the beach and hope to post those photos soon.

Love to all!