37.16.422N 9.52.817E

It’s been a hot, hot, hot week. Most of the week it’s been 30c+ in the shade. Those blogs complaining of wind and rain seem a distant memory now J. Instead we will now complain about the heat and sand that gets everywhere.

We have spent the week trying to catch up on some chores. Most days we did some laundry. As there are no washing machines here we fill our large black bucket up with water and leave the laundry in it to soak for 24hours plus. The warm air heats the water and then we stomp on it as if we were crushing grapes. Then we give it several rinses. It seems to work well, and in this heat getting splashed and having a bit of a paddle is quite refreshing. We are now pretty much caught up with the washing.

We’ve spent some time in the internet café catching up with news etc. One day we got up early (it was a shock to us too!) and went shopping. Anne bought a Tunisian tunic dress with some lovely embroidery on it. The man in the shop gave us an Arabic lesson. We can now sort of say Hello, Goodbye and Thank you.

We also started making mosquito nets for the front windows. Version 1 is complete and installed, it hasn’t worked brilliantly – so version 2 with a different design was made. This is better and we think the third version will be the winner. Naturally we still play tennis with the mosquitoes at night.

We have managed to find a supermarket that sells Tunisian wine – so far it all has been very good. The supermarket also sells beer but not to us. We are not sure why – we can see it but they won’t let us buy it. We are at a loss but maybe one day we will figure out what we are doing wrong.

If it seems we aren’t doing much then that is because it is to hot to do anything after lunchtime apart from read. The local cats seem to keep away from our boat now. Naturally the tuna supply is constant for the cats. Having a slight misunderstanding one day, we ended up buying 2kg of tuna. This has meant Yoyo is now rather happy. The cats naturally don’t move from about 9am to 7pm – its too hot to do anything with a fur coat on!

More boats are arriving now. The electrical connections are getting “interesting”. This morning the small electrical fire on the pontoon indicated one too many boats were plugged into the only working socket. We simply disconnected a few boats until the smoke stopped. And who says we are not electricians!

Another British boat arrived the other day, so we have been socializing with them.

We are not saying we have cakes every day at the patisserie, however the chef who makes them has now been to chat to us for feedback as we are a regular customer.

To be honest the winds have now abated and we could move on. But why? Its cheap, the people are lovely, the local patisserie are happy they have a new regular customer, and apart from a few interesting electrical connections its all fine here. We will move on soon but in the meantime we are exploring Bizerte more.