Djerba (Tunisia): Restaurant Aladin and the Green Palm

Our basic travels around Tunisia, except for the last few days in Djerba and La Marsa had come to an end. We were dropped off at the Green Palm by Ben, who would be picking us up tomorrow for a short tour of Houmt Souk and Erriadh. The Green Palm is located, along with what seems like a zillion other "all inclusive" type reports in the Zone Touristique. The objective is to keep you on the property or in the properties clutches the entire time. No outside food or drink allowed on the premises, distances between properties can be a bit of a hike......

The facilities are decent, there are "animation team" (I didn't even know what that was until we got here) events, a large pool, and the Missus started whining from the moment we arrived feeling trapped.

There's a definite lack of atmosphere at places like this.....you can tell, Club Med ain't for us. I will say, the folks here are really nice, more on that later.

So after freshening up, the first thing we did was to go for some lunch.....not in the hotel. We walked about a mile or so and stopped at a place where all the cab drivers were eating called Restaurant Aladin.

You can always count on cabbies, cops, and other civil servants to find places that are reasonably priced with decent fare. And this was not an exception. The food was simple, the lettuce was iceberg, but it was a decent meal, and very cheap.

The brik was a bit overdone, the egg too overcooked.

The merguez was quite good though......

For some reason, the Missus kept wanting more tomatoes.......

It was a decent meal that filled us up nicely.

We picked up some bottled water on the way back to the resort....not knowing at the time that outside drinks of any kind were not allowed.....what ensued when we passed by the guards was nothing short of hilarious. The guards stopped us and spoke to us first in French, then German, the Arabic......yeah, we really looked like we spoke those languages. We kept talking to them in English, which they didn't speak. Finally, they got a clue and asked us, "you.....English?" When we nodded in agreement, they pointed to a sign on the wall......the was WRITTEN IN FRENCH! What? I told them, "no francais, no francais....." By this time, even they were laughing, and they passed us through.

We also came to find out that there was no wifi reception in our rooms, so I ended up getting some "cafe express" in the massive lobby area, while checking email and even doing a short post.

Later that evening, as we were getting ready to go to the dinner buffet, I recall looking out off the terrace at the empty lots and other resorts thinking to myself, "this is going to be a pretty rough two days...."

Comments

[kat]

wow, in the boonies...

[caninecologne]

Now THAT is a lobby!!!

[Kirk]

Hi Kat - There were a lot of resorts aorund, but all of them are all-inclusive.

Hi CC - Yeah, the lobby was humongous.