Hammamet and the elephants

Let me be the first to admit that this post is useless without lots of photos (I only include one I found on the net.) I know, I'm working on it.

So we're in Hammamet, specifically Yasmine Hammamet, with a few friends and we walked past Hannibal on his war elephants. The city's name comes from hammam - a Turkish steam bath. Apparently Yasmine Hammamet is a new tourist city built recently and not everything is necessarily old. Fooled me.

We sit down for a beer and some conversation. Well, I was not saying much except the occasional "Oui, voila!" and "No, I did not just agree to buy your entire inventory of hookahs!"

After one of our friends did a decent rendition of Mariah's "I Can't live (if living is without you)" [I hate that song, obviously] on karaoke we went for a walk and someone brought up elephants, specifically white ones and pink ones.

I did not know that white elephants existed, so I thought that if something was a "white elephant", then it was inconsequential. Unsurprisingly, I was wrong. Apparently, white elephants are a rarity and surrounded by much myth. Possessing one is a blessing, but you can't use it for any king of labor, so as a metaphor it means something whose costs exceed its usefulness (leave your best girl/boyfriend jokes in the comments.)

In french, an "éléphant rose" means hallucinations caused by the ingestion of various substances, or figuratively, wasting time on something which does not exist.

That evening's lesson was that looking through the karaoke books for Robert Johnson was like chasing a pink elephant, and trying hard to think of the french word for 'tune' was like paying good money for a white one.