Touring Session Drummer's Chaotic Day in Tunis
okay so i landed in tunis after a 7-hour flight with my sticks and a bag of half-eaten airport peanuts. the city smells like jasmine and diesel and somehow both at once. i just checked and it's 17°C there right now, hope you like that kind of thing. i grabbed a seat at this tiny cafe called cafe des delices, ordered a mint tea, and immediately got roped into a conversation with a guy named karim who claimed he once drummed with a famous mizwad band. no idea if that's true, but he did let me borrow his darbuka for a bit.
"you'll never find good cymbals in the medina,"
he warned, but i ignored him and spent the next two hours wandering the narrow alleys looking for percussion shops. found one run by an old man who kept calling me "the foreign metronome." i bought a pair of brass finger cymbals just to get him to stop.
if you get bored, hammamet and sousse are just a short drive away. but honestly, tunis itself is a drum solo you don't want to end. the architecture here is wild-ottoman arches next to french colonial facades, all under that impossibly blue north african sky. i heard that the bardo museum has some of the best roman mosaics in the world, but i was too busy trying to find a late-night souk that sold drumsticks.
*the weather* here is perfect for wandering-cool enough to walk for hours, warm enough to sit outside and people-watch. i overheard a local saying the best time to visit is actually spring, when the jasmine blooms and the city smells less like exhaust and more like heaven. someone told me that the cafes near avenue habib bourguiba are overpriced tourist traps, but i went anyway and had the best espresso of my life while watching a street performer juggle flaming torches.
anyway, here's a map so you don't get as lost as i did:
and since no travel post is complete without photos, here are a few i grabbed from unsplash (because my own pics are all blurry from drumming too hard):
definitely check out tunis if you're into chaos, rhythm, and mint tea that never ends.
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