Au soleil levant and the other café

One of the main attractions in La Marsa is the Café Safsaf - or, as Rihanna Gaga calls it, the café with the camel, because there is an actual camel in the middle of that café. In front of the café Safsaf, there's a square on which several fastfood stands and another café are located. It's a pleasant square, with trees that give shadow to the terrace of that other café, which has no name. At least, I've never discovered it. For a long time, I thought it was called Café Ben Yedder, because there is a large sign with that name on it, but then I discovered this referred to Tunisia's most popular coffee brand. At least 75% of the cafés actually have that sign somewhere on their outside wall.

Rihanna Gaga and I still have the sand of the nearby popular beach on our feet when we arrive at the square. We buy a chicken sandwich at Au soleil Levant, a fastfood stand right next to the Café Safsaf. When we still lived a little down the road from here, I used to be a regular customer of this place. In the time that I travelled to the Netherlands on an almost weekly basis to teach there, I would often buy a sandwich on my way to the main road a little bit further, before catching a taxi to the airport. It was a way of saving money, because I could then eat that sandwich instead of an expensive meal at either Tunis Airport, Rome, Frankfurt or Paris while waiting for my next plane. Waiting for my sandwich, I think back to that time - not missing it at all. Picturing myself munching on a Tunisian sandwich in an airport somewhere in Europe, I mostly recall a feeling of loneliness - oddly enough, because I don't particularly remember feeling lonely at the time. I was mostly too busy to feel anything at all, especially the last four months, when I combined a fulltime job in Tunisia with teaching several courses in the Netherlands. As I remember it, I mostly went on autopilot, sticking rigidly to the schedules I had planned beforehand and really barely making it at all. It was a huge relief when, during the last three weeks of the semester, my mom came over to Tunisia to help us out with Rihanna Gaga.

The whole thing also put me in that typical father role, of being quite absent in the life of my child. A role I've always dreaded, really. Although I would take care of Rihanna Gaga the days that I was in Tunisia, she must has experienced me as a bit of an unreliable factor in her life, coming and going. I remember that when I finally stopped travelling so much, we needed to find a new rhythm again. It was almost like we needed to get used to spending all that time together again. There was a lot of stress and I am sure she must have felt that at times. 

I sit down at the terrace of what I still only know as 'the other café' - i.e. the café at the Safsaf square that is not café Safsaf. Au soleil levant will serve you when you sit here and then you can buy a drink from the café. It takes a long time before the waiter comes our way, but then I order a double café au lait. It's a regular weekday, but as usual the terrace is filled with chatting men, spending the entire afternoon on one cup of coffee, which they only drink half, after which the cup stands idly in front of them. Like the Safsaf, however, there are also quite a few families to be found at its terrace, and even a group of girlfriends. This gives it a different feel from the average Tunisian coffee hous, which is a strictly male affair. Two older women who are dressed conservatively, in long dresses and headscarves, sit down behind me - on the type of couces that the terrace is made up, this means that I am now sitting with my back pressed agains the back of one of them. They are joined by a slightly annoyed looking blonde woman in a short, stylish dress and Armani sunglasses. The older women speak in the Tunisian dialect with each other, while the blonde woman speaks English with them, but hardly gets any replies. After a while a man sits down at their table as well and they start eating sandwiches from Au soleil Levant too.


Rihanna Gaga and I share the sandwich, which like all Tunisian sandwich, has a rich topping of salad, tomatoes, cucumber, french fries, olives and chicken - I asked them not to add harissa, the Tunisian hot sauce, so Rihanna Gaga could also enjoy it. We had a great time at the beach, spending most of it in the sea, where she, as she calls it, swum - by which she means that I held her while she was floating in the water. She loves doing that, looking extremely content with herself and clasping onto me from time to time, whenever a wave rolls by. Luckily, the waves weren't high today. Before we went into the sea, we were 'building' - again, Rihanna Gaga's words. That meant that I was supposed to make sandcakes with a series of forms (that create a crocodile, a palmtree, a mermaid, and so forth) after which Rihanna Gaga announces in a loud voice she's going to destroy it. She then looks expectantly at me and asks if that's allowed - I nod and she gleefully stamps on the sandcakes and sandcastles I've built. It's one of her favourite pastimes these days.

I pay the waiter 1,5 Tunisian dinar when he finally arrives with the coffee. Rihanna Gaga says she's thirsty as well and I give her a small bottle of water. After a while, the waiter returns holding a coin that is clearly not a dinar, which he hands over to me. I apologise, because I figure what must have happened is that I accidently paid with a foreign coin. Rihanna Gaga has a whole collection of coins of countries that we've been to - Hungary, England, Turkey - that she loves to play with and will put in her bag when we go out, to - as she tells me - 'buy stuff'. Once, she insisted on paying with Hungarian forint when we were in a shop, causing much confusion among the shopkeeper. I take the coin from the waiter and then give him a dinar, for which I get half a dinar back, while I say to Rihanna Gaga that she once again has caused confusion with her coins. I hand the coin over to Rihanna Gaga, who looks at it with surprise.

As the waiter leaves, I recall the moment of payment in my head. I could never, I think to myself, have mistake this coin for half a dinar. It's gold outside and silver inside - I would have noticed. Then, I take the coin from Rihanna Gaga and take a closer look: it's not a forint, lira or penny. It's a French 10 Franc piece - a what? That's a coin that's been replaced by the Euro fifteen years ago - and indeed, it's from 1991. All this is a bit odd. What just happened? Putting aside the possibility of bad intentions from the waiter - who seemed friendly enough, if slightly odd with wilds taring eyes and a bit of a speaking disorder - I can think of either two explanations: somebody else paid with this coin and me being the foreigner on the terrace, I became the most likely suspect; or, he offered the coin to me as something I might be interested in purchasing - we were basically not having the same conversation, but both of us thought the other knew exactly what we meant.

It doesn't matter. Our sandwich and coffee finished, it's time to go home for Rihanna Gaga's afternoon nap. When we pass the bakery where we used to buy our breath, Rihanna Gaga says she wants to buy bread, so I buy a small roll for her on which she immediately starts munching.