24 May 2004

Putting up with fellow travelers

The capital city of Tunisia and the Mediterranean Sea seemed spread before me as I studied the view of the thousands of white buildings from my hotel balcony at the Sidi Bou Said Hotel in Tunis. I've come back at the invitation of the Tunisian Tourist Board to write about the Ghriba festival on the island of Djerba.

All 11 of us who are traveling together are different types of journalists. The one I am most impressed with early on is Delinda, an editor with "The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs" in Washington D.C. She is a small woman with wild brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

Michael is her photographer. He is a tall bespectacled graying man with a quick smile and a flare for taking photos of people. I see why when I watch his face after he acknowledges the person he's photographed.

Carl is a reporter for Associated Press. He looks more like he could be from an Arabic country with his tan handsome face and black curly hair. He is a soft-spoken person eager to impress his Tunisian hosts.

Pat is the editor of a Missouri-based Catholic newspaper. She is a nun who also freelances for other publications including a Jewish magazine.

Al is retired and writes articles about travel. He is a blond-haired older gentleman who seems eager to travel and experience everything. Kimberly is Al's redheaded daughter who was along for the adventure. She had a lot to say about politics, in a naive kind of way. She had a difficult time understanding that in meetings people listen when others talk, and they don't talk while others are speaking -- especially when they aren't a part of the group.

Bernie is an aging guy based in Washington D.C. who co-wrote a book about the best spas around the world. He complained about things like not having free bottled water in his room.

Nancy is a freelance travel writer from Hoboken, N.J. She wears dark sunglasses, and has an air of being removed from everyone else.

Stacy owns a travel Web site. She is a tall woman who has a lot to say about American politics. She tends to complain a lot about almost everything.

Farhad is a dark-haired balding young man who writes for a leisure magazine. Nothing is too extreme for Farhad, except maybe working for FOX News, which he left a few years ago. He enjoyed sitting in front of the bus speaking in German to the bus driver so no one else could understand him. Farhad never missed a chance to be obnoxious, loud and often disrespectful.

The one person who was not a journalist or American was our tour guide, Hamadi Belguith, a tall, thin, aging Berber Tunisian. His people came from Egypt to Tunisia centuries ago. He is an archeologist with a doctorate from Oxford University.

Hamadi's graceful hands sweep across the sky when he talks. Any one of the nine languages he speaks rolls out of his mouth gracefully. It is no effort to speak German one minute, Berber the next.

At our first meeting over dinner, Mike, Delinda and I arrived very late. The others were pretty far down the road in their discussions about the war and after-dinner drinks. Their talk resembled a dog chasing his tail because at the end of it there was no solution.

I found myself growing more quiet as the evening wore on. I definitely was feeling the effects of living abroad for three years -- slower, more relaxed and less tolerant of the loud, obnoxious behavior that many Americans seem to exhibit when they travel.

As I half listened to their drunken conversation, my mind raced ahead to why I had come on this trip. I remembered looking at my new passport with the first stamp in Arabic, and wondering what it would mean for me in the future when I entered the United States.

I tried not to think about the possibility of being attacked by some idiot who might blow us up for trying to figure out why Jews and Muslims manage to live together here in harmony. Somehow it feels like the most difficult part of this trip is going to be how to tolerate some of my fellow travelers for the next nine days.

Annie Warmke lives in Hadleigh, England. She writes a weekly colum