Algiers, Algeria

Unintentionally acting like a spy.

My photos don’t do the city justice. It is beautiful, but I have an excuse.

El Aurassi Hotel is a pretty fancy hotel for a centrally located one.

I sat at the hotel restaurant on my first evening. I was kind of tired and crabby, so I sat in the back next to a vacant grand piano. The restaurant is an ellipse. I quickly discovered that I could hear a whisper at the restaurant bar from 100ft (~30m) away.

Algiers has a lot of steep hills, so you see a lot of views like this one.

I was hiking around the medina/casbah (the old city). I got to the top of the hill, and there were a bunch of government buildings up there. A policeman started talking to me in Arabic.

Everyone in Algeria assumed I would understand Arabic since I wasn’t in a tour bus and didn’t look lost. In big cities, the signs are in French as well as Arabic, and I can read the really basic Arabic ones.

When he found out I was from the US, he did a doubletake. He used French, and told me to go back down the hill.

By the time I got back down to the bottom of the hill, I noticed there were two shady guys in bad suits following me. It probably seemed like I was trying to detect them by walking with no direction. I did see one of them peer out from behind a fruit cart. So, I stopped taking pictures.