Arrival Scenes

June, Week One: Arrival Scenes

Anyone who has ever read a classic ethnography, colonial-era novel, or some form of travelogue (Heart of Darkness comes to mind) will know what I mean when I say I romanticize the arrival scene: the weary (typically Western) hero or heroine, after journeying some days, weeks or months plagued by seasickness, swatting flies and cutting through dense jungle, lips cracking with thirst and mirages in the desert, and threatened by fevers, thieves, rapids, wild animals, or quicksand, finally arrives at some frontier outpost. There was a time when Tunis might have been a distant outpost, but no longer. The transit from the Paris airport to the Tunis airport seemed like one contiguous, placeless space; as we passed the duty free shops and onto a bus, I felt that I hadn’t arrived anywhere yet. We had merely hopped from one ubiquitous, anonymous space to another, but that’s how airports are.

In 2008 I studied abroad in Jordan with a group of American students. Before my trip, I read widely about the country. When we arrived at the Amman airport, a solemn Jordanian met our group at the gate to take us to the hotel. After we loaded our luggage onto the bus, this silent man, who only told us his first name, proceeded to sit next to me on the bus and ask me all about myself. Having been (mis)lead to believe that it would be improper for me to converse with Arab men, I tersely answered his questions, glancing nervously out the window and fumbling with my backpack – only to discover the following day that he was the director of the study abroad program.

This time, I hoped, there would be less faux pas, but the more I travel abroad, the more I see that each place and each encounter has its own dynamic. As soon as we boarded the bus for Tunis, some of the advanced Arabic students took a voluntary language pledge to speak in Arabic as much as possible. Being unable to converse in Arabic with some of my fellow American students was only the beginning of my culture shock. Feeling the numbness of exhaustion, I leaned my head back against the bus seat and awoke only when our bus lurched up a long hill and pulled into the Hotel Sidi Bou Said parking lot. There we caught our first glimpse of the sleeping city flickering below in the darkness, and beyond, a thin sheet of glass gleaming still and austere in the moonlight. It was the Mediterranean. Beyond that were some purplish-black hills. And beyond that was darkness and sleep.