The City of Sidewalks

Labor Day weekend involved my first venture out of Algiers – a CLO trip to Tlemcen, a city in the west of Algeria about 20 miles from the Moroccan border. Tlemcen is quite different from Algiers; notably, it’s cleaner, the buildings are in better repair, and it has sidewalks! Big ones! You don’t realize how important sidewalks are until you walk to work without them. (Don’t worry, Mom, it’s safe – it would just be better with sidewalks) 🙂 Anyway, let’s start off with a view over Tlemcen:

A group of 18 from the embassy traveled together for this one; we left Friday evening and took a quick, one-hour flight. It would have been quicker if AirAlgerie wasn’t perpetually late, but you take what you can get.

When we arrived, our “minders” met us as we got off the flight. For any travel outside of Algiers, we have to have an escort. It is unclear whether this is for our protection or to make sure we don’t do anything bad. I imagine it’s a bit of both. At any rate, they whisked us off onto a bus and off to our hotel, the Ibis. Definitely a budget hotel. Didn’t really want to walk into the bathroom in my bare feet, but the bed seemed fine. We arrived around dinner time, so we ate at the hotel and headed to bed to rest up for the next day. I enjoyed the free wifi and watched some Downton Abbey dubbed in French. Which is strange, but easy to understand. It was the episode where everyone has influenza or whatever and Lavinia dies. It wasn’t a half bad night!

Next morning, the bus tour began. I have to say I’m not a huge fan of the bus tour thing – but it would be very difficult for me to do this trip on my own, so I sucked it up with minimal irritation that pretty much was kept til the end of the trip. The main issue with the bus was the diesel engine was REALLY loud so our tour guide could only be heard by people sitting in the first few rows, which was not me. So I didn’t catch many details about the stuff we saw. Ah well. Bottom line – we saw a lot of mosques. They were cool.

The first place we went was an old, 11th or 12th century set of palaces, plus a mosque. Pretty courtyard, tiles, fountain, etc:

Next up was another ancient mosque. This one involved us ladies covering with scarves – sadly no photos of that (although I’m sure I will have many opportunities to photograph myself in a headscarf over the next couple of years), but the prayer area was gorgeous, and the entire mosque complex was lovely and had a fabulous view.

Then it was off to lunch, which consisted of massive amounts of traditional Algerian food. Good, but way too much. The highlight of lunch was ducking out of the restaurant to take pictures outside a butcher, where a freshly chopped-off cow head hung from the door:

It was still dripping blood. Not kidding.

After we gorged ourselves at lunch, we piled back on the bus and headed off to a super cool cave outside Tlemcen, where we met about 1000 of our closest Algerian friends who were all waiting to get in. But we made it and it was pretty much worth it. Very cool stalactites/mites:

Apparently back in the day this cave stretched all the way to Morocco, but at some point during French rule, they decided to put an end to all the weapons smuggling that was happening through the cave, so they blocked it off.

After we got our fill of the cave and our PAO who was on the trip did an impromptu interview with a local TV station that happened to be filming in the cave that day, it was back on the bus again to head to mosque #3. This one was destroyed a bunch of centuries ago, but apparently is still the largest mosque in Algeria. (Although Chinese workers are building one in Algiers right now that’s supposed to be even bigger when it is completed…)

Anyway, this mosque was part of a city that the prince of Fez lived in back in the day when they (Morocco) were trying to take over Tlemcen. They failed and their city was torn down. BUT parts of the mosque are still standing and are kinda cool:

Next up, it was off to a lookout point where we could see all of Tlemcen (the photo at the beginning of this post), and back to the hotel for a much needed rest (all that on and off the bus stuff wore us out), before dinner at a FABULOUS Moroccan place. I had lamb cooked in a tagine. It was amazing. Then it was back to the hotel for sleep. No French Downton tonight, sadly.

Next day was a bit shorter. We went to a souq (market), which actually reminded me a lot of those street fairs in NYC where they sell a bunch of cheap clothes and crappy plastic toys. There were definitely a few cool shops with actual Algerian artisan-y things, but mostly I was surprised by how western the majority of the stuff there was. Interesting, though.

Finally, we hit up one last mosque. And not just any mosque. The GRANDE mosque.

I’ll post more photos of this on facebook if anyone is interested. In the meantime, that about covers my labor day trip – very interesting, but I think I’ll steer clear of bus tours for at least a month or so. Overall, it was a great way to get out of Algiers for a bit. It made me even more excited for next month when I’ll take my first Europe trip of my time in Algiers!