After two hours of delay at the airport and a taxi before take-off that was so long we started calculating the airplane drive time to Tunisia, we landed in Tunis around midnight. Our possibly slightly inebriated (and very talkative) 60 year old driver then shuttled us off to P’s lovely apartment in La Marsa in his yellow, heavily experienced, speedometerless car. It quickly became apparent that the speedometer was not an essential tool for “Noah,” as there was an inversely proportional relationship between the rapidness of his speech and the speed of the car. With an ETA bet on the line, you can imagine this drove a certain member of our party (not me) nearly mad with impatience.

We dropped our stuff at the house and then went to grab a couple drinks at the Plaza bar just down the road from P’s place. The Plaza is a Tunisian restaurant/bar/club/terrace with a never-ending selection of thematic rooms. It was built by an American-Tunisian, so it’s filled with an eclectic collection of Americana, including a 2-foot-tall Holstein cow surrounded by plastic flamingos, one of those armoir-type things with the display cabinet in the top where you keep dollhouse furniture, and numerous beer signs.

We bypassed the terrace with the pool you aren’t allowed to swim in for a more understated room where the tables were filled with people drinking and smoking. We sat down, and they gave us menus, but ten minutes later when we tried to order, it turned out that they were no longer serving (us?) and we had to go to the nightclub downstairs for a drink. Three hours, a couple Tunisian beers and a 360 dinar bottle of champagne later, our survey of this “bar of invitations” was complete. If you are a wealthy man looking for companionship or a less-than-wealthy woman looking for an invitation from said man, this nightclub should be right up your alley.

The next morning saw the arrival of our US-residing partners in crime, completing our merry band of six. We celebrated their arrival with food and a walkabout in La Marsa and the blue city of Sidi Bou Said, followed by a lovely dinner, drinks, and dancing in Gammarth. There was an all-male conga line; a hands-to-the-face, almost-fight; and some interesting beats blending Arabic sounds with standard house … how can you go wrong?