Both the lady in orange and the man in green were taking photos with their tablet.

Down one level

Looking up from below and waiting to get eaten by a lion. 

The Romans may have given us much good, but they also gave us this horror show.

Going up to the bleacher seats.

It really reminded me of walking through Salem Stadium to sit and watch the Salem Red Sox

View of the shops surrounding the entrance to the coliseum

The Roman road leading to the coliseum

We saw this cut in many of the blocks possibly used to lift and move them.  That’s a guess.

Purchasing videos about Tunisia and the Bardo Museum in Tunis

We did some mosaic shopping in el Jem but that’s a whole story in itself so I’m skipping it for now.  From the coliseum we went to the El Jem Museum.  When Randal tried to pay we were asked if we’d visited the Coliseum.  When Randal said yes, the young man told him one ticket was for both so wouldn’t take our money even the 1 dinar charged for taking photos.  The total cost or our visits to both the Coliseum and the El Jem museum was 21 dinar = $14 which was totally worth it. 

El Jem Museum

This is the first room you enter and you’re immediately wowed by the beauty and condition of the mosaics.  Most were once floor mosaics and have been brought to this former home, now museum.  When you look at the patterns you must remember that as with carpets the images are too be looked down on from different parts of the room. 

Our guide in the Bardo museum in Tunis referred to the same image as the Star of David.  The huge entire mosaic book Randal bought ignored it altogether though it did have some pages on Christian themed mosaics.

It was like looking at tapestries, the patterns were so intricate.

You could absolutely imagine these as “carpets” similar to the carpets we saw in India, Turkey, and Tunisia.

Randal, “Spirit of the Year”  and the Four Seasons…

The 4 seasons are the same woman with each image getting progressively older representing Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

This one too ould be mistaken for a woven carpet

Dolphin and swans; each mosaic had an explanation with it so you could have spent hours looking and reading about all of the imagery.

Corner detail shows the details in the designs.

Dionysus/Bacchus features heavily in these mosaics

The original : this image is copied by many of the Tunisian mosaicists

If this were a less grim image it would make me think it came from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.  Wonder if he studied mosaics for some of his images. 

Nice happy bunny mosaic.

You can certainly learn a lot about illustration studying mosaics.

We left El Jem the first time aiming for Sfax as our overnight stop, the plan being to get up early the next day, leave Sfax and drive to Djerba where we would spend the night.  We did finally find a hotel in Sfax.  It was clean enough, more than it was worth, but we had no other option as we’d made no plan ahead of time not knowing actually where we’d spend the night.  We’d hoped to be further along the road to Djerba, but we’d had too good of a time in El Jem so left late in the day.

Hotel Al-Rachid in Sfax with a view of the sun set over concrete

Our less than luxurious room.  But it had wifi, AC, was safe and quiet.  And the shower was hot.  The staff was very nice too.

Finding food.

Hotels don’t start to serve dinner until about 8 pm and we were hungry by 7 pm after an early light lunch in El Jem.  But there was not much around our hotel so we ate in this little local joint down the road a block.  We had Tunisian salad, grilled chicken, fries, bread and some water.  It was fine.  Tunisian salad is like Greek salad without the cheese.  But usually it has tuna with it and this one also had rice.  If you read French or Arabic you could order from the menu.  I know enough French to order a few things combined with the café guy’s bits of English.  Aqua with gas was a stumper.  But they didn’t have any anyway so I had plain bottled water and Randal had regular Coke, no Coke Light, Zero or Diet being available. 

We probably could have taken a taxi to an upscale restaurant and paid more money for grilled chicken but we were too tired and this was just fine.  And kind of fun.