Tunisia

Coming to Tunisia we had to - as usual - effect a number of urgent repairs. The most serious of which was re-replacing one of the wires of the rigging that we replaced in Malta. The new one (which in reality was a pretty old one that had been kicking around in the bottom of the boat for a while.) Didn't even last the trip over from Malta and had split in two or three places. Egil was dispatched up the mast to put the old one back. Now we're hoping everything will hold up until we reach home. ...which is getting pretty near now. Unbelievable! We have been sailing for more than a year now. The stars look familiar, we're on the right hemisphere, our clocks are set to the right timezone, the weather is cold and we've stopped provisioning "as much as possible" whenever we find something cheap. In maybe as little as a month we can be in Norway, and by the beginning of August back home by the border to Russia.
Whoa, whoa! That doesn't have anything to do with Tunisia, does it? I digress!

Finished with our repairs we got drunk, visited the most dodgy pub since Ivalo-Hotelli and Sevettin Baari combined, and despatched the TV-celebrity Erlend back to Norway as all the attention and groupies he kept drawing got too much for us, modest, quiet and shy as we are.
Then it was time for some sightseeing. Because of the weather we couldn't move anyway, so we bussed over to Tunis and Carthage/Karthago to check out the city. Egil also needed some new shoes to replace his old ones, bought in Egypt. These had disappeared mysteriously, possibly due to extreme ugliness. After having haggled the price down to less than a quarter of the starting price the salesman found it essential to call Egil "Ali Baba" as he handed him his change. Egil thought it necessary to reply by "No, YOU're Ali Baba!" Those who are in the know, know....In Carthage we checked out some really old bricks. Apparantly made by some rumanians, bad job it seems anyway, since it's all falling apart. After seeing all this and having mangled and abused the french language as much as our rusty high-school french allowed us, we returned to the boat.Back in Bizerte, oh, yes, that's were we kept the boat, we had to wait a couple of more days for the weather to be tolerable. While we were gone a storm had passed and filled the boat with gravel, sand and dust that didn't go away until yesterday when a weatherfront passed us with crazy winds in the face and water all over the boat. Now it's back to no-wind again, and it seems like we'll stop over a day in Algeria. The Med sucks for sailing.