Tunisia!

What a week we just had in Tunisia. We went to Club Med in Hammamet, a small town in the northeast corner of this oft-overlooked North African country, wedged between Algeria to the west and Libya to the east. Sounds exotic and it kind of is, but it's still just a 3 hour flight from London. We had never done an all-inclusive resort before and decided to give it a shot. It was more or less a home run - gorgeous facilities (see above), near-perfect weather, surprisingly decent food (even the serve-yourself house wine "Hannibal" - presumably named after the Carthaginian general who attacked Rome on Elephant-back in the second Punic war - wasn't so bad; I prefered the smoother March vintage over the tarter April), some nice British folks, and the ability to sit at the pool, beach or bungalow and relax.

And then there were the French. Tunisia was a French colony for a long while until the 1950s and it remains a Francophone nation, though it's the second language behind Arabic, this being an entirely Muslim country. Club Med is a French company, the staff were mostly French, as were most of the guests. Really, they were all fine and it's not their fault we don't speak the language. Aside from the widely-practiced topless sunbathing (I can't stress enough how unappealing this was - think Cameron Diaz's elderly roommate in Something About Mary), the only hiccup was that the resort caters to families with small children and babies (it's why we chose this one over many other options), but the baby and kids clubs left something to be desired. Some of the counselors were bilingual but the boys weren't thrilled to be separated from us to begin with and it probably didn't help that many of the cheers and games were in a language they didn't understand. The baby club? Don't get us (i.e., Tracy) started on that - it was a massive cry-fest that we really couldn't subject Sarah to once we realized what was going on. Tracy and I did manage on a few days to get some hours of down time, which was great to sit by the pool and read, do crosswords, etc. We did see that some of the other families did stow their kinder away from 9am to at least dinner time or in some case 9pm every day, but that to us defeated the point of taking a family vacation.

Chacun son goût.