As my faithful readers may have noticed — I haven’t posted in about two weeks. Calm down, calm down. There’s good reason: Tunisia.
That’s right, for the last two weeks, I’ve been attending an environmental journalism workshop in Tunis, Tunisia. We discussed all kinds of issues relating to contemporary media coverage of the environment, specifically focusing on Tunisia, Algeria and the United States.
The workshop was the second installment of a three part project, funded by the U.S. State Department and offered through my university, Bowling Green State. Since I had the incredible opportunity to be a part of this historic project, I will be passing on some of what I learned while there. There’s too much to fit into one blog post, so I’m hoping to do it in two — one this week and one next week.
Stay tuned.
Are these pictures you took? Either way, would be nice to provide a line about what they show.
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Yes, I did take those pictures. The first one is of a visitor to the burial site of one of the Profit Mohammed’s friends, in Kairawan, Tunisia.
The second picture I took inside the “souk” or market in Kairawan. All of the traditional markets in Arab countries are designed with a mosque at the center. From there all of the alleys kind of weave their way out in a spiral pattern. For me it was easy to get lost, but the Tunisians and Algerians we were with said after you get used to the layout, it makes a lot of sense. One of them commented that traditional Arab urban planning was much different than in the U.S. where we tend to have First St., Second St., etc.
The third is also in Kairawan. The camel actually is powering a water well. The colorful scarves tied around him were put there by Tunisians as a kind of good luck superstition.
The fourth picture is of a woman weaving a carpet traditionally. Kairawan is known for its carpets. The one pictured above will have about 100,000 knots per square inch. Apparently it takes about 1 month to make one square meter of carpet. No two designs are ever the same and the patterns are inspired by the weaver’s dreams. They also don’t draw anything out ahead of time — they weave completely from memory.
As as aside, on that same day we saw another carpet woven from silk instead of the traditional wool. It was amazingly soft and had 250,000 knots per square inch!