Football!

One of my French teacher spends her free time running a therapeutic farm for disabled people. She has promised to bring us there later in the quarter to take a tour and volunteer a bit. I'm not really certain exactly what goes on there at this point. From what I can gather disabled (mostly mentally) people ages 6 and up spend time there during the day doing projects and such. It is on a farm with olive trees, a garden, some animals. I think the disabled people work with the animals. Like I said, I'll get a better grasp of all this later and explain it at that point. Today was a very special day at the farm, the Tunisian National Soccer Team was coming to give away signed merchandise and take pictures. My French teacher canceled our class today and invited us to stop by the farm if we liked. Of course, a group of girls in their early twenties would like nothing more than to spend a few hours in the presence of professional athletes, we accepted her offer readily. The farm was a zoo of media people. It's apparently ran by the Lion's Club of Tunis so many business people and other people affiliated with the farm stopped by as well, I'd say there were well over 100 people there. My group of girls spent most of the time wandering aimlessly around. There really wasn't much we could do but stand there. Obviously our teacher was far too busy being interviewed and running this circus without us getting in her way and asking to be shown around. So we stood and stared. Finally we managed to snag a soccer player to get a picture taken with-- our one and only desire. We ended up getting in a second picture with multiple players as well. This is the first time that I have seen anyone of the females in my group react positively to heckling from males. We are now used to being catcalled every second of the day. However, when a professional football player is saying "Pretty, I get number?" the reaction is much more positive than when the creepy boy on the corner throws out a common pick up line ("lovely bubbly," "sex machine," "Britney!," "How much?"). I think some of us might even have given it to him if it weren't for our French Professor standing by. We had a quite a fun day, if anything, it was exciting to say that we got to meet them. We also snagged free tickets to this Saturday's game against Seychelles! Sure to be a very exciting.

Whoever took this picture did a horrible job.

Today was also my first day of cross-cultural conversations class, a really interesting experience that I will definitely discuss in a further post.