Although La Saf Saf is an open air restaurant, part of the courtyard is covered by a tent during winter. This is a good thing, because although today is quite sunny, it is also windy and chilly when we walk towards La Saf Saf, which is just around the corner from where we live. It's still quite early and we are the only guests. I ask if it's possible to order a sandwich and I'm assured they're open to business, so I sit down - after which nothing happens for a long time.
Rihanna Gaga is in a very cheerful mood. She walks around the tent, picking up autumn leaves from the floor and handing them to me. Meanwhile, she sings to herself. These days, she's always singing, something she seems to have picked up from the nursery where she goes three days a week. They sing a lot there, French nursery rhymes, and she really enjoys those melodies. These days, when we sing in Dutch to her, she'll shake her head - it's French songs she wants: "Sur le pont d'Avignon", "Au clair de la lune", and many more we don't know.
When the waiter finally arrives, I order a merguez sandwich and a tea. Recently, when my students asked me why I wanted to live in Tunisia (something they found remarkable), I answered that it's because of the sandwiches. It wasn't entirely a joke: Tunisia's sandwiches are incredibly good. Fresh ingredients and an ecclectic approach to what can be combined with what have made eating a sandwich here into quite an experience. Any combination of olives, pickled vegetables, salads, delicious spreads, amazing bread and french fries form the bed on which the main ingredient (which can be tuna, salami, spicy merguez sausages, shoarma, among many other possibilities) is served. Even in the most remote town, in a dodgy hole in the wall next to the railway station you can get a tasty sandwich, with our without the spicy seasoning of harissa, Tunisia's national hot sauce.
However, the sandwich takes even longer to arrive than the waiter did in the first place. In the meantime, Rihanna Gaga's mood has turned and she's now whining, fed up with walking around in the tent and listening to the wind howling around it. Several other guests have arrived. A woman that impatiently waits for the waiter to come and an elderly couple that pick up some bread from the counter and start crumbling their bread into a bowl, after which the man takes the bowls to the counter to have a kind of rich soup poured over the bread. They seem to be engaged in a cold war, barely talking to each other apart from the occasional snarl - such as when the man arrives back with the two bowls and he apparently forgot some ingredients the wife wanted, for which she scolds him coldly and mercilessly.
When my sandwich arrives, it is worth the waiting. Rihanna Gaga agrees: as she sits on my lap she picks french fries, olives, bread and pieces of salad from my sandwich, not minding the harissa. In fact, she quite likes spicy food. When we have finished the sandwich, I have accepted that the tea will never come and I pay. I consider going to the tea house to have my tea there, but it really is quite chilly and I suspect Rihanna Gaga is not really in the mood, so we leave. Next to La Saf Saf is a fast food restaurant where they also serve great sandwiches, along with all kind of sweet and savoury snacks. One of these is freshly made crisps, which were quite the discovery when I fist found them. It's impossible to get good crisps in Tunisia supermarkets, like it's also impossible to get good juices. But what we discovered, is that you shouldn't really buy those in supermarkets anyway: better go get them fresh from the many fruit stalls around town. So I make a stop to buy a paper bag filled with crisps, before we head home.
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