Il Goloso

Exactly two years ago, Rihanna Gaga and I had our last Monday breakfast at the Scheveningen beach before moving to Sidi Bou Said. Today, we say goodbye to Tunisia and we do so by returning to Sidi Bou Said. Just around the corner from where we used to live in 2014, there is Il Goloso, a small new café that offers simple food for a very small price. It's very strategically located. The road to the market is opposite and it lies on the main road up the hill, where café des Nattes (called High Coffee nowadays) and café Hadj Amor are located. On a good day, hundreds of visitor to Sidi Bou Said pass by this place.

We come from up the hill, where we had a rendez vous with Rihanna Gaga's best friend and her mother and drank juice and coffee in café el Hadj Amor and said goodbye to the waiter who, after these two years, is still on very good terms with Rihanna Gaga. Rihanna Gaga and her friend ran around the square and climbed the stairs of café des Nattes repeatedly.  The great thing about Sidi Bou Said is that there are no cars in this part of the village, so that the little girls could run around all they wanted and play on the street with some of the toys that Rihanna Gaga brought along.

Then, we walked down the hill for lunch at Il Goloso, which I had spotted earlier. The place has a very nice cantina feeling to it and we sat down at one of the smal tables with stone couches and wooden chairs. Rihanna Gaga wanted a croissant - one of her favourite food things - and her friend got a pizza. I myself ordered a sandwich. The girls ran around the café between bites while the friend's mother and I chatted - we used to work for the same university.

Running the café were a friendly Italian woman and her daughter, who gave the place a very pleasant, hospitable feeling, all smiles and sparkling eyes. Rihanna Gaga apparently agreed with this assessment: after her friend's mother produced some crayons, feltpens and paper for the girls to draw, and after she'd finished her drawing, she told me it was for the woman from the café. The woman seemed genuinely pleased with this offering and immediately put the drawing up on the wall next to the counter.

The girls were getting tired, which always shows itself with arguments between them, so I proposed that we go home. While I paid, with Rihanna Gaga sitting on my arm, she pointed at the picture and told me it was a dinosaur. And indeed: the green and yellow colouring seemed to call forth a certain dinosaur-y feeling. She's been very interested in dinosaurs lately, because a character in one of her favourite cartoons - Peppa Pig - owns a dinosaur. This made her rediscover her own little toy dinosaur (a small rubber toy that was once given to her, about one and a half year ago, in the café Safsaf by two students) and she's been very excited by a promise I've made her, to buy her a bigger dinosaur once we've returned to the Netherlands. This is informed by a certain childhood nostalgia: I used to be obsessed with dinosaurs myself when I was a kid.