I went to Tunisia a few months ago. I was living like a vagabond at the time, and staying at different friend’s places while they were abroad, but had a nine-day window of homelessness. So I looked around for cheap flights and hopped on one to Tunisia.
It was my first trip to Africa, and was also the setting for some of my favorite movies, including Star Wars and The English Patient. And while we think of Tunisia as North Africa, it is incredibly close to Sicily and Italy geographically, and at one time culturually. I visited the amphitheatre of El Djem (also called El Jem), an amazing structure that seated 35,000, double the town’s current population. Perhaps the most impressive thing there was the cleanest public bathroom I have ever seen in my travels, and a necessary one at the time, but I digress. Here are a few photos:
The amphitheatre rises up out of a painfully ordinary small town, amazingly incongruous with its local surroundings.
The amphitheatre was largely intact until the 17th century, when the it was disasembled for building materials in local projects. You can see the back here, and in the other image the town in the background.
If you remember watching the movie Gladiator, the slaves and gladiators alike were in underground passages directly below the amphitheatre until their 15 minutes of fame. In the Roman Collosieum, you can’t get down to those passages and rooms where the animals lived, but you can in El Jem. Here’s the corridor, with rooms along the side. The light above comes from a metal grate, but originally it would have been a wooden platform, with a rudimentary elavator on each side.
What little I know of photography I learned by reading KenRockwell.com. He speaks highly about shooting at night, or at dusk or dawn, and the difference in results is amazing. Here are two of essentially the same shot, but one at 5 pm, and one at 8 pm. The colors of the sky and the stone are so different! I’ve uploaded about a dozen photos, see them here.
