Downtown Tunis is all pairs. The newer area with it's Parisian-style boulevard, cafes and grid patterned streets and the old Medina with it's well-maintained gates, nook-like stores and restaurants and labyrinthine alleys. This tension runs through just about everything form the buildings, social attitudes, styles of commerce, religious views, dress, food and so on. As a visitor, you either find it engrossing and kind of fascinating or sort of indeterminate and stuck. Luckily for me - since I'd been assigned here for a year with the Red Cross - I was in the former camp. I never got bored of the city and wish I would have found the time to visit more of it's neighborhoods.