Algiers is on the coast. It means "islands" and has been a habitation for some thousands of years. The land upon which the city has been built and rebuilt is hilly, green, and bright with sunshine. The hills fall down to the coast, not unlike the middle section of California; they aren't precipitous, but they definitely slope. Because of this the town is based on winding switchbacks and stairs. There is no way to get anywhere without a significant change in altitude, the whole place is more vertical than any city I've been in. More than San Francisco, more than Seattle...I guess a bit less than this one Greek island I was on once but can no longer remember the name. And you thought I wasn't getting old.
What all this means is that the city has tons of steep back alleys and stairwells connecting two streets that run more or less perpendicular for a few blocks. Along these stairways are little shops: butchers, chwarma shops, cobblers (yes, cobblers - it seems that no one throws shoes away in Algiers), men's clothing stores, tobacconists, and photocopy salons. I would imagine there are other types of stores as well.
There are great parts of the city where you are turning the corner on a stairway, there is a white and blue building on your right, a green and white state school on your left, lines of shops on the street below, and as you come around the corner you look up from the stairs to see a blindingly crispy blue Mediterranean in the near distance. It can really be stunning. Then you get to the bottom of the stairs, are almost bowled over by the stench of urine, mobbed by mosquitoes, knee-deep in trash, with a bunch of unemployed twenty year olds silently watching you in a kind of menacing manner (they probably have university degrees and speak three languages, but you try being unemployed with no hope of employment for about three straight years and you'll look menacing, too).
Couple that menacing unemployment with the fact that no one is on the streets after 8pm, that there is nothing apart from a few man-bars even open after that hour, and that the Algerois - due to about ten years of generally random violence that ended in the deaths of about 200,000 people at the end of 170 years of terrible governance - have internalized a curfew that keeps them from even thinking about interacting with others late at night, and you have the deadest city of millions this side of Salt Lake.*
The city has the physical set up to be a really interesting, really fun town. A few nice restaurants moving in, a little paint here and there, a nightclub for the kids, some decent employment, a working infrastructure to repair roads and take away trash and provide services to the population, a complete overhaul of the political/economic structures that keep a handful of very very corrupt guys/parties at the head of all the major industries and government ministries...you know, just a few little things and this town could be a real gem.
I must admit to liking - or at least to having a grudging respect for - the fact that Algeria is sticking with the Thursday-Friday weekend. No matter what happens to the country I hope it maintains its quirks like that, it helps give the place its character.
I'm not going to conclude with anything here, I just (note the rhetorical move) think that it is a shame that things have gone so poorly in Algeria for so long that a place like Algiers, which could be a beautiful, amazing town that everyone would want to come see once in his/her life, is instead a poor, poorly run city that people try to avoid.
*I have never been to Salt Lake City, have no idea how many people live there, and am only guessing that it is boring. I'm standing by that guess, however, largely based on their basketball team from the 1990s.
1 comment:
You clearly missed SLC Punk with the fine Matthew Lillard!
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