While Husband is planning his big Renaissance weekend, I have also been planning a reunion of sorts. A Peace Corps friend of mine who lives in Cairo, P., is on the east coast for the summer, and we are planning to take the boys on a road trip to the Finger Lakes region to see two other Peace Corps friends, K. and V., who recently bought a winery. (My friends: winery. Husbands’ friends: Renaissance Faire. Need I say more?)

I’m pretty sure that K. and V. first learned to make wine in the Peace Corps. P.’s roommate, T., used to make batches in their kitchen. He didn’t have access to any special wine-making equipment, so he’d use big water bedouns to ferment the fruit and condoms that came with our medical kits as airlocks. When the condom got flaccid, that was the signal that some crucial biochemical process was completed.

One weekend T. held a winemaking seminar/party at his and P.’s apartment in Jendouba, on the western border of Tunisia. Here we are:

Winemaki

Don’t we look hippie? And sweaty? And drunk? The pink stuff in the water bottle was the finished “wine”; the big bedoun on the floor contained the elixir-in-progress. It was high summer in Jendouba, a town generously described as “the armpit of Tunisia.” Does your armpit harbor mosquitoes the size of single-engine planes? No? Well, then, I’d rather vacation in it than Jendouba.

I’m the one with my eyes closed, which is usually how I’m photographed. I’m holding the wine-making manual (pre-internet, we had to learn things out of books — how quaint). I distinctly remember how happy I was to be wearing shorts outside of my apartment without having anyone call me a kahba (whore).

It was so hot that night that, after consuming a considerable quantity of our moonshine, we decided to sleep on the roof of the apartment building. Even on the edge of town there weren’t many artificial lights, and I spent an hour watching shooting stars before I fell asleep. At least, I think they were shooting stars. They may have been auras from the ocular migraine caused by the drink. I awoke some time later with mosquito bites on the palms of my hands and soles of my feet. Those were some tough mosquitoes.