< ![CDATA[  I know we’re beginning to be settled into the area when cabbies roll by with head and shoulders leaning out the windows yelling, “Hey Canada! Where are we going today?!” and pull over about ten yards up the road. “Do we know that guy?” my Dad asks... “Yep, he drove me to the souq awhile ago... nice guy.” Seeing my entourage, he waves a friend over and we pile into the two cabs at the “friends and family” price of 4 dinar into Sousse, instead of the six he tried, unsuccessfully, to extort the first time. “You married?” He asks. Tony is working at the apartment today. “Yes, four kids... the cycling story... blah, blah, blah...” I give my standard cab driver speech. “Good!” he grins! “Very good! You have strong legs!” He reaches over and gives my leg a squeeze, just above the knee. Definitely not normal behavior for a muslim cabbie. But he grins again and dives into his own story about his new baby who has a fever and how they are not sleeping much, and points at the bags under his eyes, so I don’t take offense to the knee squeeze. We were heading for the medina. The labyrinthine maze of little crafts and food shops within the wall of the old town in Sousse. It houses the best preserved ribat in the country (you can climb it and look out over the city) as well as the main mosque. My parents love nothing more than to waste a day in the market and Tony had sent me on a mission for a set of blue speakers he’d seen hanging “somewhere” in the medina, as his have died and my Dad can’t hear the movies they watch in the evening without them. A visit to the medina requires a certain degree of settledness into the third world groove, and a sense of humor... and the ability not to be freaked out by people practically pulling you bodily into their shops. My parents have all of these qualities. They taught them to me. I did, however, mention one local detail to my Dad: “If someone says that there is a special festival, today only in their shop... there is not. He’s a rug seller and you’ll be there all day. I only escaped because they couldn’t believe we had no house in which to put a rug when we get home.” He laughed. It was a profitable day: Dad spent 9 dinar on a pair of sunglasses right off the bat. Elisha wore them. This made me happy as it gave me something to chide him for all day. My Dad, negotiator extraordinaire, paying NINE DINAR for fifty cent sunglasses. Ha! Mom bought a lovely purple pashmina scarf, for a much better deal of 7 dinar. And then, all of a sudden, we’d lost my Dad. Not completely unusual. We found him, with the aid of a little local boy who pointed his thumb over his shoulder into his uncle’s shop. Knee deep in negotiation for a hookah. A HOOKAH, mind you, not a “hooker”... it’s not that kind of blog, and he’s not that kind of Gramps. Mom just rolled her eyes and we girls started trolling the nearby shops for packages of saffron. I managed to score three camels teeth made into necklaces for the boys for Christmas (all three for less than the cost of the sunglasses, thank you very much!) Every time we looked into the shop Dad and the shop keeper were smiling and the pile on the plastic lawn chair was growing. Eventually, Gramps emerged, owner of a hookah, and all of the trappings, that even the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland would be proud to smoke from and the shop keeper was smiling like the Cheshire cat. Other things were procured: rice, raisins in two colors, a knife (anyone who knows my Dad knows that a knife is a standard purchase in any new market) a top for Elisha to spin, and onions. We were out of onions. We ate lunch (some local sandwich similar to the doners we fell in love with in Germany, only with a healthy dash of harissa paste) at an outdoor cafe and did what we knew to be stupid in not determining the prices of the drinks BEFORE we sat down. We paid 12 dinar for three orange juices and one thimble full of coffee... while the actual lunch was only 6. But, we had the fun of watching a little girl chase a feral cat around the tables, so maybe that was worth the extra ten dinar. We procured the necessary speakers (I was unsuccessful at negotiating the price... it seems the vendor knew we had to buy them anyway... I hate that.) We walked along the wharf and looked at the freighters and pirate ships, moored together. Then, caught a cab home... with a new cabbie, determined to become our new best friend and drive us anywhere in the country that we wanted to go... “Today, we just want to go back to the apartment!” I said, with a smile. Dad made him happy by asking for his card.]]>