2005-07 Jul - Tourists in Tunisia and Seeing Switzerland

Just to start off, we are both fine and not directly affected by the bombings in London, though they still came as quite a shock. Monique was at her job (in East London) and Fraser arrived at our local tube station just before they closed the whole transport system, so ended up going home and working from there. Everyone we know is ok too, and life has pretty much carried on as normal.

We've done a couple of interesting things since our last newsletter. Back in March we went to Tunisia and a month or two ago we spent some time in Switzerland, most notably Bern.

Tunisia

Tunisia is quite an interesting place. It's not beautiful in terms of scenery and nature but it is beautiful in terms of culture and heritage. The people are very friendly and helpful and generally speak two languages, Arabic and English or French. Amazingly though, some of the people, especially the market traders, can dabble up to 4 or 5 languages.

We decided to go on a half day excursion to El Jem, known as Thysdrus during Roman times, which has a well preserved Roman amphitheatre. It's only a bit smaller than the one in Rome but it said to have been able to hold up to 30,000 people in its day. That's quite amazing to think because currently El Jem is just a tiny little town - oh how times change! The seats you see in our photos are a reconstruction as the amphitheater is now used for classical concerts in summer.

We also spent a lot of time just relaxing, which was the whole point of the holiday in the first place. Our hotel was wonderful, situated a stone's throw from the beach and not far from Port El Kantaoui. We were fortunate with the weather, it didn't rain the whole time we were there and was mostly sunny. It wasn't peak time when we went so the hottest it ever got was 24 degrees Celcius, but that was fine for us. Our room over-looked the Sea, so we had great views.

There are two ways to buy things in Tunisia, go to a fixed price shop or haggle with the local traders. We generally opted for the fixed price shop but did go for a haggle for the fun of it. The trader probably made a handsome profit off of us, but that's ok because we still got a good price by our standards.

Switzerland

Six weeks later Fraser had to go to Geneva again for a meeting, so we made a long-weekend of it. Monique spent the day in the city while Fraser attended a business meeting. After that we took a train up to Bern and then off to a suburb called Zollikofen.

We stayed at the temple accomodation there (in Zollikofen) which was quite comfortable. The LDS temple was the main reason we wanted to visit Bern, as it's very similar to the New Zealand Temple. However we also went and visited Bern itself, which was also nice.

Bern is the capital of Switzerland and also classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Unfortunately when we were there, the main street was being ripped up so that kind of killed the old world charm we had read about before going. The other problem was that Fraser came down with the flu the first day and spent the whole time blowing his nose and wanting to sleep!

Fraser's new toy

For his birthday Fraser had worked extra-hard to save up and buy himself a new toy. And shortly after he was ready to buy himself a new Motorola E680 phone. He can now watch videos on it while travelling to and from work. (The screen is 2.5", which is roughly the same size as you middle three fingers, and is just big enough to watch things on.) He's very happy with it.

Fraser's father

Some of you will know that Fraser's father was hospitalised 3 months ago with a ruptured bowel. It's been a slow (but steady) road of recovery for him, but this last week he was able to return home - 3 months to the day since he was admitted.