The US embassy in Tunisia threw a gala event to celebrate election night 2004. It was at the Sheraton Hotel, the nicest hotel in town. The party went from about 8pm until 8am. Anne and I stayed until the bloody end.
The ballroom was packed all night long. There were about 400 people in the room at any one time. Several thousand came through during the course of the night. The party was open to anyone willing to pass through the metal detector. Tunisians outnumbered Americans by about four to one.
There was free wireless internet access. Kellen and I took full advantage of this fact.
This evening was my first meeting of Xiyun. Originally, she had tried to contact me over Livejournal but due to highly limited internet access in Tunisia, this was our first actual meeting. She was in Tunisia studying French on leave from Brown University. She also was using the free wireless to the full extent of its capability. Later during my stay in Tunisia, we found ourselves on many an adventure.
This was also the first night I met Noam, the guy with the bright red hair to the left of Kellen. We would run into each other several more times in my extended stay in Tunisia.
Nice place for a sticker, Heather!
One of the handful of Bush/Cheney supporters that I spotted during the evening.
As dawn broke across Tunis, Anne and I trudged home through a gray drizzle back to my apartment several kilometers away. Neither we nor the traffic jam on the 7th of November highway were feeling particularly celebratory.
