Henced to see roman colosseum (sic?) 2 hours drive away. Talked to American lady on bus who lived in Chicago and told me all about the tax differences of living in santa fe, new Mexico, as opposed to a condo east of lake shore drive (yes people, THOSE condos.). Heard a bit from someone else about Wicked and how zhai it is and how insanely cute and whackable the good witch is. Nice old ladies.
Colosseum is abso-fricking-lutely humongous. 3 levels, dating back to 200ish AD, and about maybe 50-60% intact, after preservation and restoration.
Most of the arches are still there along 60% of the perimeter, and it's like 128m long by something else wide, and each arch is about the height of 3 x (my mum's height). Amazing feat, building it in 8 years like they did. Walked around, got the nice picture of tunisian houses from a height that i wanted all along. Met a taiwanese scout with whom i conversed with a bit in chinese, then a tunisian scout came along and i talked a bit to him in french, which i think was the first practical time i had use of this whole faux trilingual thing. Cool beans. Am starting to really enjoy this whole international thing, as i was walking around i kept bumping into friends i've made over the last few days, the thai girls and saudi guys and the lady from saint vincent and the grenadines ("it's in the carribean. *stately nod*"). So many familiar faces, even after just 4 days or so! Even if i can't quite match their names to the faces (it's easier than chinese names, and ironically the other 2 singaporean ladies have really hard to remember names!).
Ate dinner along the side of the colosseum, which was a sort of box set centrally distributed a la National Day Parade rehearsals. In fact, the whole eating in the wings of a stadium from a box was so reminiscent i quite enjoyed it, despite the aggressive flies (they did provide like half a french loaf hard enough to whack them with), the food actually was pretty good (compared to the other provided dinners so far), although some other people didn't like it, i think i loved it because my benchmark was NDP food, which is super cmi.
Forced my parents to be antisocial while i caught the sunset from a cool vantage point (literally, the arches had this whole bernoulli effect with the wind.....nevermind.) and as usual no single photo can do justice to the magnificent juxtaposition of nature's beautiful sun setting to the architectural marvel that is this colosseum, so of course i took about 30 photos. Here's one of the nicer ones:
Then joined the rest of the contingent for the cultural show thing, and i am beginning to make a bit of headway into appreciating tunisian cultural music (hooray for music 101). Actually quite enjoyable. The Coloseum is magnificent in the night (due to the artificial lights they put in here and there and the bottom up red lighting which illuminates the arches) but we left before long to catch the 2 hour bus back (police escorted in a convoy, damn funny.)
Back to hotel after making a water run. Heard big commotion in central open foyer area, turns out there's a sort of dance party going on. So. Dance lor. Then noticed that the Singaporeans who just finished a meeting were looking from a window... paiseh. And they came out to join me. Now here we're talking people from maybe mid-late 20s to their 50sish, and we took over the whole dance floor, and someone took over the bongos, and we had a regular wild old time. My dad danced too, despite food poisoning from above horrible food. Go dad! Only now the water i bought isn't enough.
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