My birthday (Octopus, Round I)

So my birthday was a couple weeks ago, and although it went absolutely nothing like we had planned, it was pretty phenomenal.

We had wanted to go to Sfax, one of the lesser attractive and more industrial Tunisian cities, but then take a ferry across to this really beautiful island where both Hannibal and the first president of Tunisia were exiled. We would skip around the island all day and then come back to Tunis in time for class the next day. My roommate was also conveniently tutoring this woman with some sort of residence in Sfax, and she offered to drive us down there, put us up, probably feed us some couscous, and show us around this island herself. It was pretty much the perfect arrangement.

Our plan hit the only real unforeseeable obstacle, being that the weather report the night before was horrific. The woman said it wasn't worth the 3 hour drive down there to find out that the ferries weren't running because of the rain, and that was that.

The weather the next day of course ended up being beautiful all over the country, which blew for our trip, but should never be a reason to complain on your birthday. Some of the friends who would have gone with us came over in the morning and made some amazing omelettes, homefries, and biscuits for us, all of which I smothered in Tunisian ketchup. Mmm.

If that weren't enough to thrill me for the whole day, one of the guys then went "Today's such a nice day. It's a shame we don't have something like a ball or frisbee to play around with in the park." I guess he just didn't really know me that well at that point. I'm probably doing without at least four pairs of socks in order to make room for the frisbee I brought with me, which I'm sure has only nominal shock value.

So we went to the park to toss a bit, totally unaware of what a ruckus we would cause. I'm not sure whether it was the frisbee or the Western-looking men and women(!) playing that caused more commotion, but we were almost immediately surrounded by no fewer than 20 little boys, all wanting to play. I have never seen so much pushing and shoving and grabbing to get a frisbee that the victor was just going to chuck into the ground anyway. The group fizzled to 6 or 7 pretty quickly after most of the kids realized it was just a piece of plastic that had nothing on a soccer ball, but the ones who stuck around were actually not bad by the end.

Afterwards, we ate some ice cream, bought some bootleg DVDs (you can't buy them any other way here) and a cheapo grill, and went back to our place for a barbecue. One of our friends brought over about 20 fresh little octopi to experimentally grill, which were really, really tasty after we took all the brains, eyeballs, poop sacks, egg sacks, and ink shooters out (science is so cool).

Last year on my birthday, my friends blindfolded me to take me to a corn maze in rural Georgia, and my mom took pictures of me tapping a keg in a clown costume. Birthdays rule.