Tea With The Bedouins

This is another of the photos from our holiday in Tunisia which I converted from a slide. It needed quite a lot of restoration work but it was worth it as I´m unlikely to get another chance to wear a Bedouin wedding costume or to drink tea with these hospitable people, so this will be a memory to cherish. I think the photo still requires a little more editing, especially to bring out the green of the tattoos on the older wife´s face without affecting the rest of the photo. I´ll need to experiment with that as I´ve no idea how to do it.
Tea Tunisian style is unusual to say the least. On this occasion the water was boiled in a can over an open fire - I had to extract the tea set from another photo. A handful of tea is put into the teapot followed by a handful of sugar then the water is added and everything is mixed thoroughly and allowed to infuse for several minutes. The addition of the sugar puzzled me at first until I discovered that no saucers or tea spoons are provided and, since it´s assumed that everyone likes their tea strong and sweet, it seems quite practical to put the sugar directly into the teapot. As you can imagine, the resultant brew is very sweet indeed and an acquired taste for anyone who doesn´t have a sweet tooth! I do, so I enjoyed it and, anyway, making tea this way is no more eccentric than adding milk or lemon to it. I´d say that asking for milk wouldn´t only have been rude but might also have presented a problem since the only animal in sight was Fortuna, the camel we arrived on, and supermarkets are few and far between in the desert...

(click to enlarge)

I used quite a few gold elements from Summer Past to reflect all the gold jewellery adorning the three of us, and I recoloured a floral background to suit. I´ll show a preview of the kit just as soon as I´ve finished converting and editing my slides.
Almost forgot...no prizes for guessing which of the ladies is me.