Welcome to Algeria! Where???
Its been coming to our attention that many readers of this journal are beginning to lose us geographically. Rather than take you to task for throwing away your old globe from elementary schoool, heres a map you can look at, that has pretty much all the countries labeled that we are going to.
Found Algeria? North of Africa, in the middle kind of to the left? Good. So whats happening here?
The most obvious thing is amazing roman ruins. Here are somehights: Djmella, Timgad, and of course, Tiddis.
As for why the romans were here, (besides their desire to conquer and rule the world)its quite obvious—its beautiful. I really didn’t expect Algeria to be so green. There is plenty of desert in the south, but as you can see, the north(where we are sticking to, as its already June and hot in the desert) is full of mountains, rivers and farms.
As for the people here, I think they have been the nicest of anywhere we’ve been. Folks are giving us free food, free car rides, good hospitality, and in general are just plain Buena gente.
After crossing the Tunisian border, we spent a couple nights in El Kala, a picturesque fishing village.
Then on to Constantine, an amazingly situated city. Its built on a giant rock, surrounded by gorges several hundred feet deep. You have to cross bridges to get to the city.
The photos don’t really capture it, but here are a few.
We were lucky enough on our first day walking around Constantine to see both a youth parade, and the filming of a movie, which had everyone on world war II era costumes.
We were told the film is by the same producer as The Battle Of Algiers(a great flick by the way-check it out), but we’re not sure—we may have lost something in the translation…
We also spent a week in Algiers, the capital, doing a radio training class (more on that to come), and checking out the town.
By government order, (almost) all the buildings are blue and white:
in other news…you can hear a radio story i reently did for a BBC progarm called The World; by clicking here. The story is about the clean up trip we took to the white desert, egypt.
and if you get a free subscription to E! magazine, a>you can click here and read an article i wrote about the cave dwellers in granada, spain (sorry about the subscription thing, i dont like that either)
Back to the present day and algeria.. we are now in Cherchell, another beach town, recovering from a week of big city life. We’ve got a couple more stops on our way back east, where we’ll cross back into Tunisia. We spent a few days in Tunis(the capital) earlier this month, and well have more on that soon. One note however: in a major surprise, Tunisian food is slammin! In my opinion, its been the best food so far of anywhere, with Italy a close second. Well have more pics, details n’ recipes comin soon…a tut alors…
