[WillowTheWhisp]

Most of the towns are very clean. Look at this open "square" inside the Sousse medina. This is in an area where there are take-away kebab stalls etc, but there are also litter bins and people use them. It's not necessarily the same in some of the places outside the towns where there are some areas of rubbbish which spoils it.

There are a lot of feral cats but the stall holders tend to look after them, feed them and give them water and there's a Tunisian version of the RSPCA which keeps an eye on them. You still can't help feeling sorry for them tough. Occasionally some people treat the cruelly but that is rare. Some are semi-adopted by the hotels and live out in the gardens. They can't be very hungry either because although they do scrounge from people they are also fussy and if thy don't like what's on offer they'll turn their noses up and walk away.

Here are some of the shops in down town Sousse.

The carpets are all handmade either woven or knotted. They take months to make and some are very very expensive but beautiful. They are mostly made of wool but some are silk. They range in sizes from a bedside rug to something large enough to carpet a baronial hall.

In front of the second shop you can see a bucket containing small date palms for sale. We are repeatedly told that these should not be bought as they cannot be brought back through customs because of the risk of spreading plant diseases to other countries where the fauna has no resistance. The stall holders would tell us that it isn't a problem, just put them in a plastic bag to keep the roots moist and hide them in your suitcase! Imagine our surprise to see a man in the airport on our way home carrying one large as life on view to all and sundry and not stopped either in Monastir or Manchester! So much for keeping diseased plants out of the country.

Hanging outside the third shop you can see the famous Sidi Bou Said birdcages which I fell in love with. They are handmade (as are most things in Tunisia) and traditionally painted white with little blue spots where the metalwork is joined together. The blue and white are traditional colours. Most of these you see here are unpainted which are apparently more popular with the tourists (except me). As soon as I saw them I wanted one as I have a toucan which I could just see sitting on a swing in one of the blue and white ones. Not a real toucan I hasten to add. Busman kept insisting that we'd never get one home, not one big enough for the toucan but I asked a holiday rep and he said lots of people buy them and just ask for them to be put on the plane with the pushchairs etc. That clinched it! I was having one.

The one we bought is about 3 feet tall so you can imagine the overall size. It featured quite prominently later in the holiday. Tunisians keep real birds in them, usually canaries or other song birds in smaller ones so they asked me what size of bird I wanted it for when I was trying to decide how big of a cage I needed and when I said a toucan they looked at each other to confirm that they'd understood correctly! One even did a symbolic beak impression to his friend. I didn't try to explain that it isn't a real bird, so from then on they probably thought of me as the crazy English woman with a very unusual pet!