Nobody warns you about the wallet.
You arrive in Tunisia with a card in your pocket and the quiet confidence of someone who has not carried paper money since 2019. Three weeks later you are standing at a bakery counter at seven in the morning, patting your jacket for coins with the mild panic of a person who has learned, the hard way, that the machine is broken, the machine is always broken, and the baguette costs sixty millimes anyway.
That is the first habit. There are others, and they arrive without asking. We put the question to the foreigners in the Expats en Tunisie community — what have you started doing since you moved here that you never did at home? — and the answers came back in a rush: the naps, the bread, the coffee, the kissing, the driving. What follows is less a list than a portrait of how a country rearranges you, one small surrender at a time.
You Start Carrying Cash Again
“In the US I rarely carry more than a hundred dollars,” one American told us. “Here, I panic if that’s all I have.”
The reflex is universal among newcomers and it is not irrational. Tunisia runs on dinars in hand: the taxi, the market, the man who fixes the water heater, the café that has a card machine but would rather you didn’t ask. Cards work in supermarkets and hotels and increasingly in the better restaurants, but the texture of daily life — the sixty-millime baguette, the three-dinar espresso, the louage to Nabeul — is a cash economy, and the foreigner who refuses to adapt spends a lot of time at ATMs. Our cost of living guide puts real prices on all of it, and the arithmetic explains the habit: when most of what you buy in a day costs less than a euro, plastic feels faintly absurd.
The other half of the habit is learning the dinar’s rules. It is a closed currency; you cannot take it out of the country, and foreign cash above a certain threshold must be declared on arrival if you want to leave with it. Newcomers learn this once, at the airport, and never forget it again — the full rules are in our safety guide, and they are worth reading before you learn them the expensive way.
Lunch Becomes the Point of the Day
It is no surprise that in a country this devoted to its table, most of the habits people reported were about food. What surprised them was how completely their relationship to a meal changed.
The weekly shop, first of all, stops being weekly. “While living in Tunis with a Tunisian friend I learned to buy fresh food almost every day,” one member wrote. “It was amusing to hear a group of Tunisian friends rejoice over a seasonal crop of green beans.” This is not quaintness; it is how the supply chain works. Produce here travels a short distance and sells fast, so the tomato you buy on Tuesday was in the ground on Monday, and buying for the week would mean eating Monday’s tomato on Sunday. You go to the market, you go often, and you start — this is the part nobody expects — to care about what is in season.
Then there is the bread. Every meal, lunch and dinner, a baguette or a round of tabouna on the table, torn rather than cut, used as a fork rather than a side. Foreigners report eating more bread than they thought possible and feeling, for the first time, that it has a job to do. Our guide to Tunisian eating customs explains the full choreography — the shared plate, the harissa swirled with oil, the lunch that runs ninety minutes and is not considered long — and most of it becomes instinct within a month.
Smaller surrenders follow. People start drinking only bottled water, which felt like an extravagance at home and here is simply what one does. They eat pizza with a knife and fork, because everyone around them does. They eat an entire pizza alone and nobody blinks. And a remarkable number of them, with the rueful tone of people confessing to something, admit to having become olive oil snobs — a condition the country induces deliberately. Once you have eaten fresh huile nouvelle in December, green and peppery and poured over bread with a pinch of salt, the supermarket bottle at home is a different substance entirely, and you will say so, at dinner parties, for years.
Coffee Stops Being a Drink and Becomes a Schedule
The frothy coffees go first. Within weeks the foreigner who arrived ordering lattes is ordering an express, black, in a cup the size of an egg, and drinking it standing at the counter like everyone else. Then comes the second one, mid-morning. Then the one after lunch. Then the late-afternoon one that is less about caffeine than about the chair, the pavement, and the forty minutes of conversation that come with it.
“Multiple coffee breaks throughout the day,” one member wrote, “which is not considered lazy but necessary.” That sentence contains the whole adjustment. In a lot of places, the third coffee of the day is a confession. In Tunisia it is a social obligation, and the café is less a place to buy a drink than a public institution with espresso attached — where the working day starts, where football is litigated, where friendships are maintained by the simple act of showing up. The vocabulary takes a little longer: a capucin is not a cappuccino, a direct means different things in different cafés, and learning to order properly is the small rite of passage that tells the waiter you intend to stay.
You Discover the Kayloula
Many people come to Tunisia for a change of pace, and most of them find it, though rarely in the form they imagined. “I have a more relaxing and enjoyable life,” one member said. “I live in more detail, at reduced speed.”
The reduced speed has a name. The kayloula is the Tunisian siesta: the hour, or two, after lunch when the shutters come down, the streets empty, and a surprising proportion of the country lies down. Not every Tunisian does it, and downtown Tunis at two in the afternoon is nobody’s idea of restful. But in the coastal towns, in the interior, and in any household where lunch is taken seriously, the nap is not a weekend indulgence. It is part of the day’s architecture, and the foreigners who embrace it — “three-hour lunch breaks,” several reported, with no apparent shame — describe it as the single habit they most dread losing when they go home.
What the nap really signals is a reordering of priorities, and the people who notice it most are the ones who came to stay. The retirees along the coast, the remote workers in La Marsa, the couples who arrived for a winter and are still here three years on: they talk less about the cost of living, which is low, and more about the texture of the days, which is slow in a way that stops feeling like laziness and starts feeling like sense. Our guide to life in Tunisia covers the paperwork and the fine print; the kayloula is the part no residence permit prepares you for.
You Kiss Strangers and Stop Queueing
Then there are the manners, which do not so much deteriorate as get swapped for a different set.
“I’ve developed a habit of forgetting to say please and thank you when I’m home in the United States,” one member admitted, “and I’ve responded to people speaking English with a boh, which did not go so well.” The boh — a shrug rendered as a syllable — is one of a dozen pieces of Tunisian Arabic that colonise the foreigner’s speech without permission. Yezzi for enough. Barcha for a lot. Behi for yes, fine, deal, whatever. You do not decide to learn them; they simply arrive, and one day you hear yourself say bahi to a colleague in Manchester and watch their face. Our guide to Tunisian Arabic explains why these words are so sticky — a language built for economy tends to win.
The queue is the next casualty. Orderly lines are a Western etiquette that never quite took root here, and foreigners report going through three stages: outrage, resignation, and finally the moment they catch themselves barging in alongside everyone else. One member described returning home and laughing at “Americans in airports with their elbows out, desperately attempting to maintain their position.” It is the same person, six months apart.
And there is the kissing. Tunisians greet with two cheek kisses — four in parts of the south — and they do it generously, between women, between men, between people who met ten minutes ago. Newcomers find it bewildering, then find themselves leaning in automatically, then find themselves doing it to a startled neighbour back home. Here is how to get it right, including which cheek first and when to abstain. The broader rules of warmth, modesty and hospitality — the ones that make Tunisia feel so immediately welcoming — are in our guide to the cultural aspects worth knowing before you arrive.
The Habits Nobody Is Proud Of
No country exports only its virtues, and the community was honest about the rest. Swearing more. Shouting more — not in anger, exactly, but at the volume Tunisian conversation is conducted at, which takes some getting used to and is then impossible to turn down. Several people confessed to picking up smoking again after years off it, because the café, the terrace and the cigarette form a trinity here that is hard to break up.
But the one area where foreigners reliably pick up the worst of Tunisian habits is behind the wheel. One member admitted to “driving dangerously.” Another, with disarming candour, to being “an absolute asshole in traffic.” Most of the thread agreed this was less a moral failing than an adaptation: Tunisian roads run on eye contact, the horn as language, and a loose relationship with lane markings, and the driver who insists on home rules is the one everyone else has to steer around. Learning to scan ahead for potholes, to look three times before crossing regardless of the colour of the light, to treat a headlight flash as I’m coming through rather than after you — these are survival skills first and bad habits second.
The one everybody mentioned, and the one that may be the most Tunisian of all: “not taking traffic lights too seriously when I’m in a hurry.” We have a whole field guide to the road habits worth watching for. The honest advice is to absorb the grammar, keep off rural roads after dark, and accept that you will drive differently when you leave — and that it will take your passengers a while to forgive you.
What Stays With You
Ask people who have left what they kept, and the answers are consistent and a little wistful. The cash, briefly, until the home country trains it out of them. The olive oil snobbery, permanently. The nap, for as long as a job allows. The bread habit, which turns out to be a bread appetite, and does not care what country it is in. The yezzi that slips out in a meeting. The urge, at eleven in the morning, to stand up, walk somewhere, and drink a very small coffee with someone.
None of these is a big thing. That is rather the point. Tunisia does not change you with monuments or revelations; it changes you at the bakery counter, the café table and the roundabout, in increments too small to resist, until one day you catch yourself laughing at a queue and realise the country has moved in.
Thanks to everyone in the Expats en Tunisie community who answered — and to the ones who were brave enough to be quoted on their driving.
From the Carthage Magazine Bookshelf
The habits arrive on their own; these three help you understand where they come from, say them properly, and cook them when you’re back home.
- All About Tunisia — the definitive English-language traveler’s guide. 572 pages, 27 chapters, all nine regions, every UNESCO inscription, five thematic trails — and the practical answers (visa, currency, transport, etiquette) most travelers wish they’d had on the plane. $24.99 · PDF & EPUB.
- Speak Like a Local — 200+ Tunisian Arabic phrases with native audio recorded in Tunis. The phrases for the taxi, the souk, the café, and the dinner table. $14.99 · PDF, EPUB, MP3.
- The Authentic Tunisian Cookbook — sixty traditional recipes from the heart of North Africa. For when you get home and find yourself missing the food. $9.99 · PDF & EPUB.
All three available as a bundle for $39.99 — guide, language, and food, delivered together.
1 comment
The tunisian cheek kiss link gives a 404 error.