I'm Alex, from Serbia, and I got the rare opportunity to travel to Algeria. Well, as you might know, you need a visa and a green card to enter Algeria. Well, lucky me, my grandmother invited me and my family to her house in Oran, the second biggest city in Algeria. And now, I decided to share the experience of being there, and suggest you to visit it, too, if you get the chance. :)
Well, this trip happened from 16th July to 5th August, on my summer vacation, so, as an introduction, I will type down one part from my diary...
"Here I am, sitting on the roof of my grandmother Milena's house in Algeria... It's a beautiful night, a lot of stars, fresh breeze, peace and quiet. Nobody's out on the streets, except some small number of people walking from one to the other part of Ain-el-Turck. Ain-el-Turck is the part of Oran where grandmother lives."
Oran may not be the most beautiful city, but it's definitively very interesting and fascinating. Houses look poor, unfinished, dirty and mostly in the color of the sand, but, in fact, people may be richer than it looks. They drive nice cars, have fascinating interior of their houses with latest technology etc. But, I have to mention, that that is the fact with people that live in houses. People who live in residential buildings are in many cases very poor.
French and Arabic are spoken in Algeria, and very small group of people actually speak English, and when they are speaking English, it's not good enough, so you have to try hard to understand what are they saying. Because of that, I decided to learn some French, just some basics. Well, at first, French sounded strange, like mumbling, everything sounded same. Now I can recognize some words and sentences. I guess I can sign up for some French language course back in Serbia.
Next important thing in Algeria is that it's a Muslim country, so that is also interesting to me. Muslim country means that you can't wear clothes that expose too much body. That doesn't mean you should cover yourself up with scarfs and long-sleeved clothes, and to expose only eyes. I'm talking that you should respect their religion and wear T-shirts, longer skirts, not wearing too short shorts, tanks etc. I don't mean to scare you :) I'm just suggesting what you should do, because there may be some fundamentalists, and that could cause troubles. Well, I didn't have any problems, but if you're a woman, you should get used to guys whistling and talking to you on French that you're beautiful when you're passing on the street. I can just say this: "When in Rome, act like a Roman".
Basically, city looks dirty. A lot of blue garbage bags on the edges of the roads. Well, I can say, they sure don't care about ecology and environment! And if you're going to the center of Oran, feel free to avoid a lot of holes in the road, open sewer systems that smell a lot etc. That's the worse part.
Well, yes, not everything here is so bad and awful... I'm talking about historical part of Oran and Algeria, stunting monuments, old fascinating French and Spanish buildings, hotels "Royal" and "Sheraton", beautiful countryside and seaside, old French school that became French consulate, two big harbors, fortress Santa Cruz etc...
The only problem here is that Algerian government just don't care about tourism. Algeria has too much tourism potential, that is not used... I mean 1000km of coastline, and just a small number of hotels and arranged beaches etc. If they'd care about tourism, they would clean up the garbage, arrange the beaches, allow visa free travel etc.
That was the introducing to my traveling to Algeria... :) Thank you for reading this post, and I'm very happy if you liked it. Please comment and follow and I will put my next post about beaches, Santa Cruz fortress, going to hotel Sheraton and other places :)
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