Sunday, June 28, 2015

We met a camel and the funny bird ostrich

We've been to Friguia Park today! This is a zoo with african animals. 
We've seen a lot of animals but most impressing was this one!
It is called ostrich and supposed to be a bird
Although its not able to fly
But it made hilarious sounds and was very interested in us (I think it thought we were something eatable ;-))
We were lucky to find a huge feather and Caro allowed us to bring it with us, when going home to Johannes :-)
And look which fellow we met, aswell
As camles (or dromedars) are veeery common in tunisia, we asked caro, if we can ride one...
And see what we did!
 We will bring our own camel back home :-)
 
In the evening, back at the hotel, there was a huge suprise! Our chambermaid put flowers allover the bed, look how beautiful they are!

To finish the day, we played pool with Caro and Daniel

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Kasbah

We are still enjoying our holidays in Tunisia. But because bathing in the sun the whole day is not really our interest, we did another excursion today!
We went to the old city of Hammamet, to visit the Kashba. We went there by taxi (which is one of the cheapest ways to get from A to B in Tunisia) and the driver dropped us of right in front of the old Medina. One really annoying thing about Tunisia (or at least about the touristic areas of Tunisia) is the habitude of the street vendors… As soon as we got out of the taxi, there were several men who tried to sell us anything… They sometimes can get very  rude or try to trick you by pretending they know you from the hotel (we heard “hey, remember me? I’m the cook of your hotel” several times… ;) ) Well, to cut the story short, this is the reason why we won’t go to the markets in the Medinas… 
So as soon as we got rid of the salesmen, we noticed how wonderful the old Hammamet looked like (you can find us in the left corner on the bench!)
This could as well be a postcard, couldn’t it?
 We then went to the Kasbah which was built in the 15 century. We felt like in an old movie!
We climed on top of it and –again- we had an amazing view!
 ⁠⁠⁠As it was very windy Caro told us to be very careful… that’s why we first hide behind a great wall…
 But then we became bolder…
 In this picture you can see the Tunisian flag in the background:
 And then we discovered some cannons! And we were allowed to climb on them... That was so much fun! They must be really old!
 We finished off our day with some Tunisian peppermint-tea and a shisha! (yes, it was very dark in there and the waiter did luckily not ask for our IDs to check our age ;-))
 

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

We visit Carthago

Today was excursion-day! Caro and Daniel took us to Carthago. We went there by bus which wasn’t really interesting because you don’t see much of the country except the highway… but when we reached our destination, it was awesome!
As we told you before Carthago nowadays is a suburb of tunis, the Tunisian capital… Originally it was the center of the ancient Carthaginian civilisation but it was totally destroyed by the romans in 202 BC. Caesar build a new city on the same place which soon became an important location for the Romans in Africa… Nearly everything you can see today was therefore build during the roman period…
We visited the “Les thermes d’Antonin” which was a Roman bath or thermae… but enough of explaining, here are our pictures:
 
 Here we are siting on an ancient column
 In the back you see one of the hallways...
  The big stone in the back used to be a wall, more than 2000 years ago
Another column
 And another one...
This is us sitting on a roman bench 
 And here you can see a piece of the romans sanitation...
After that we went to the Museum of Karthago. From its Forecourt we had a wonderful view above tunis! (it was veery windy sotaking pictures was kind of a near-death-experience ;) ) 
In this picture you were supposed to see the harbour of tunis... (well obviously you can't)
But during the carthagian area, the harbour had the form of a circle...
 
 Inside the museum we went to see very old mosaics... Those in the picture are more than 2000 years old!
 After this educational trip, we took a break... :-)

Monday, June 15, 2015

Swimming at the pool

 Today was another lazy day. Luckily the hotel seems to be quite empty so we made an excursion through our hotel and neighbourhood… 
This is us in front of the hotel. We are now friends with one of the porters, who really seems to like us (but was too shy to join us in the picture…)
 “Thalasso” means something with water, which might be the reason for the huge amount of fountains in and around our hotel…
 Some of them are filled with salty warm water!
We found a huge pineapple! And climbed on it… (which was a bit dangerous…) Later that day Caro told us, that it wasn’t a pineapple but a palm tree
 After the climbing exercises we took a break at the pool. Caro didn’t allow us to go swimming because we didn’t bring bathing suits… but when she didn’t pay attention, we jumped into the water ;) it was lovely!

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Shopping time

Summertime! While the temperature in our hometown is about 15 degrees, we are enjoying incredibly good weather! That’s why we didn’t move a lot during the past two days… ;)
The first thing we did was studying our tourist guide on the balcony 
Than we figured out that we need to do some shopping (water and sun lotion!), so we took a walk to the next supermarket… we passed some huge elephants and were allowed to sit on one of their tusks! Caro explained that the elephants are referring to Hannibal, who crossed the Alps with 38 of them and who came from Cartago, which today is a suburb of Tunis! (And hopefully we will go there while we are in Tunisia!)  


 After our shopping-trip we spend the rest of the day at the beach, unfortunately we didn’t take a camera with us, but we had a lot of fun in the Mediterranean Sea – the water was amazing! – We will go there again and take some pictures

Friday, June 12, 2015

Our trip to Tunisia

Today was a travel-day! We went to hamburg airport by train... Here we are waiting for the train to come: 
At the airport everything was veeery crowded and chaotic. The self-check-in-terminals didn't work, so we had to stand in line a while... We guarded all the luggage while Daniel had to smoke... 
Finally, we checked in the bags and went to see the airplanes!
 This looks exactly like the one, we flew with.
The flight lasts 3 hours... It was very boring and we were hapy to finally reach Envida Airport, where we had a short break in the sun.... Tunesia is really hot!
 There was a bus picking us up and taking us to the hotel. And finally, after aprox. 9 hours we reached Hammamet.  Our hotel is impressing and looks really nice. We started to feel like holiday by enjoying a tubesian beer on the balkony :-)