Yaourterie Filli d'Alfonso

'What do you want to do?' I asked Rihanna Gaga this morning, and like she usually does, she said: 'To go to the sea!' It used to be the ducks. Then, for a very long time it was the playground. But now the sea is her standard answer. We live a bit further away from the sea than we did before - 15 minutes walking instead of 5 - but we still go there often. There is little else to do anyway. The La Marsa beach is quite a pleasant place. Crowded with families in the summer and at times quite dirty, but certainly not as bad as some other beaches around Tunis get.

However - and this was not an exceptional situation - she then turned her attention elsewhere, playing with her dolls for a long time as I sat and read at the kitchen table. I was quite relieved, actually, because I prefer to go to the beach in the late afternoon, when the sun has lost its vigour and there is no risk of getting sunburned. Rihanna Gaga's life is difficult enough already, with her being covered with musquito bites and suffering from a rash from the heat.

When she is finally ready to leave, I propose we do things differently: we'll go to the sea later today and will now visit the market. We're having guests this evening and I'm planning on making a Thai coconut cream soup. One always needs a bit of creativity when making dishes like that in Tunisia, with many of the ingredients not available. In fact, the basics - the coconut cream, soy sauce, and lemon grass paste - I have taken from the Netherlands. And once I found a supermarket selling jars with baby sweetcorn, of which I immediately bought quite a stack. And then we'll just see which vegetables are available today that will at least approach the original recipe.

But before going to the market, we'll have an icecream! Both the market and the icecream - and the promise that we'll then go to the sea after her afternoon nap - sound like a 'good idea' to her and we get ready to go. Both of us haven't slept well. She woke up in the middle of the night and then early in the morning again. This makes her prone to tantrums and I have a headache. Not a good combination, so I proceed with care, making sure to avoid any situation that could lead to a standoff between us, that normally ends with her in a fit. There is a tense moment when she decides to crush some grapes that have fallen on the ground with her feet. 'Stop that,' I tell her. She looks at me with that particular naughty twinkle in her eye and hovers her feet over another grape. I explain to her that it's a waste of perfectly good grapes and that it will make the floor dirty. She hesitates, then decides it's not worth it and I let out a sigh of relief. Later on, she even cleans up the grapes she did crush herself.

These circular movements around possible clashes mean that it really takes quite a while before we're finally off. Seated in her stroller, she asks me - as she often does - to tell a story about the mouse and the crocodile. This is something my girlfriend started and she loves the stories of these two animals, which often are recountings of her own experiences: the mouse and the crocodile go to daycare, the mouse and the crocodile go to feed the ducks, the mouse and the crocodile go and visit their grandparents... Today, the mouse and the crocodile go to the marked, but before that they have an icecream. Other characters include the bird and the cat - who do exactly the same things as the mouse and the crocodile - and the yellow lion and the green lion - who, again, will do very much the same things, occasionally running into the other animals or even Rihanna Gaga herself and her favourite friends.

We arrive at Yaourterie Filli d'Alfonso, about the only place on the La Marsa Corniche that we haven't visited for this blog yet, right in between Café Fragola and Route 66. Rihanna Gaga and I go inside to pick the icecream. It's frozen yoghurt and we can choose two toppings over it. We opt for pitache - we always do, because Rihanna Gaga's favourite colour is green and so she wants green icecream - and then the girl behind the counter decides that must be complimented by strawberry. Very well.

The icecream tastes a bit too sweet and synthetic, but really is quite okay. I order a Coca Cola (talk about sweet and synthetic...) and Rihanna Gaga eats her icecream with gusto, sharing some of it with me. The corniche has a beatiful view over the sea, but it is a pity the street in front of it is so busy with cars. When we're finished, I pay and we make our way to the market.