Sidi Bou Said

Rihanna Gaga is in a grumpy mood. Her mother is away for the weekend and it's very hot. She's suffering from musquito bites and she's bored. This afternoon we'll go and play at a friend of hers, but that's still a long time from now. She misses her grandmother - my mother, with whom she's just had a Skype call. So to cheer her up, I propose to go and have a pancake at Sidi Bou Said, where we lived two years ago and which she still likes very much.

We take a taxi and when we arrive, we're not let into the centre of town, much to my dismay because this means we'll have to do the steep uphill climb on foot. Luckily, Rihanna Gaga is really into walking these days - as she was, I suddenly remember, when we lived here. It's funny how these things go in waves. When she was one and a half, she would walk anywhere, but then when we moved to Dubai she refused to walk at all (unfortunately, because her earlier willingness to walk had made us decide to leave the stroller in the Netherlands). About half a year ago, she would walk the long walk from our house to her daycare all the time, since then she mostly preferred to sit in her stroller again. But lately, her willingness to walk has increased.

As we leave the taxi and walk towards the centre of Sidi Bou Said, we hear drums and chanting. Rihanna Gaga asks what's that and I tell her I suppose it is a wedding - the summer is the wedding season and there's music everywhere in the evenings, often extremely loud. That and the heat hasve lead to much sleep deprivation since we returned from the Netherlands.

But as we climb the main street of Sidi Bou Said, we discover this is no wedding. A little bit into the village, the road is blocked by men locking arms, moving their upper body to and fro as in trance, while chanting. Other men beat drums in a beatifully intricate but steady rhythm. Behind them, yet another group of men holds flags and standards with chains and metal objects dangling from them. They are all clothed traditionally, in long robes, some of them made of white wood. One of them, in a dark brown dress, has his eyes closed, partly because of some trance he's apparently in, partly because the heat seems to be getting to him. Other men see what's happening and pour water from bottles over his head.

It's a bit much for Rihanna Gaga, who clasps my legs and wants to be picked up. She doesn't like loud music, always complaining it's hurting her ears - except when it's her favourite songs at home, in which case the volume can't be loud enough. I pick her up and she hugs me tight, only occasionally glancing towards the group. I decide to go around the main street, walk through the market - where, I notice, the majority of shops is closed. Since the terrorist attacks last year, Tunisia has seen a dramatic decrease of tourism, which must have hit Sidi Bou Said hard, considering that tourism is one of its main sources of income.

Back on the main street, I see that it is actually a procession, as the standard bearers and drummers have all bit caught up with us. Rihanna Gaga, who was walking again, wants to be picked up once more and I quickly carry her to the centre of the village, where I put her down and together we walk towards the central café. The whole village is buzzing. In the distance we can hear the procession approaching and everywhere people stand holding their cameras in anticipation. The crowd is a strange mix of the pious - this clearly is a religious procession of some sort - and local and foreign tourists in various states of undress. Men and women in long traditional robes, the women veiled, walk alongside women in tiny dresses or even miniskirts and bikintops.

The waiter from the café recognises us and comes towards us with a broad smile, asking us where we've been and how we are doing - it's been such a long time, he tells us. Apart from the procession, nothing has changed here, from the tourist shops and the waiters, to that one local who is always sitting here, a prophet-like figure with long yellowy white hairs and beard. Almost all the men have a flower behind their ears - the artificial scent-bomb that is made of several yasmin flowers artfully bound together into something looking like a large flower; apparently you can tell whether a man is single or married from whether he carries the thing behind his left or his right ear. We order a tuna-cheese pancake, a strawberry juice and a café latte for me.

Rihanna Gaga is happily chatting with her baby doll, but when I tell her the music is on its way to us, her face darkens. When the standard bearers arrive at the square on which the café is located, she grabs her favourite toy - the pink sheep she calls 'Come' - tightly and crawls on my lap. Our coffee and strawberry juice were brought to our table by our regular waiter, but the pancake hasn't arrived yet. From the little stand where the pancakes are made, I can hear a man shouting 'pancake!' but our waiter is too busy trying to entice people passing by to sit at his terrace, so after a while the man who prepares the pancakes appears from inside the café himself. We're sitting right next to the door, but I fail to get his attention and he walks around the entire terrace asking everyone whether they've ordered a pancake. Finally he notices me and puts the pancake on our table. I put my arm around Rihanna Gaga, who's getting quite tense, while I continue to feed her bits of pancake with my other hand. Both she and I are sweating copiously - the heat is oppressively covering the square that gets busier and busier.

The flags - white, dark red, dark blue, black - have words like 'Allah' embroidered on them and there are several of them, carried by men who wait for the rest of the procession to arrive. The music becomes louder and the drummers arive. Suddenly, from a side street around the corner from the café, I hear a sound like a manatee in heat: a man comes running towards the square in a black robe that is a slightly jarring combination with the trendy sunglasses he's wearing. He continues to make that remarkable sound while he positions himself opposite the drummers and starts bopping his head towards them. Somebody hangs large prayer beads around his head and I can see more men wearing similar robe and prayer beads walking around the square. The square turns into a seething mess of people, families trying to escape from the crowd and tourists with large cameras diving straight in, people who've come to see the procession and are jostling for the best places, dancers, drummers, standard bearers. Just over the flags, on the roof of Café des Nattes - which is itself full of people hanging from its balconies to catch glimpses of  the procession - a woman in a tight, short dress, who's taking pictures of the scene flashes her knickers (unwittingly? carelessly?) to the crowd below. The standard bearers start moving again, walking past the café des nattes towards the other side of the village, and the singers arrive. Among the waiters, meanwhile, a heated argument has broken out following the pancake accident, which the pancake man seems to have experienced as a loss of face for which he has to be compensated (but how?) by his colleague. They're gesturing excitedly and shouting, but their cries are mostly lost in the chants of the procession, only occasionally rising above it.

Then, slowly, the noise dies down. The procession suddenly moves, more unhindered now, remarkably quickly and the last singer turns the corner not much later. The argument among the waiters is settled and most of the crowd has followed the procession. Rihanna Gaga has lost her appetite and I finish her strawberrry juice and pancake for her. She tells her that listening to the music has made her tired, so we pay and walk down to the road to catch a taxi back home.