Then I busied myself snapping less sensitive subjects. It was a pity I didn’t manage to get the Post Office, because the central Post Office in Algiers is one of the most amazing buildings I have ever seen. It’s as gloriously ornate as the wildest orientalist imaginings, with towering walls of white swirling arabesques, soaring domes with their squinches and pendentives, impossibly convoluted woodwork and dazzling faience. I crept in and bought a stamp for a postcard home.
Dazzled by the post office, I rejoined the throng in the hot, hot street. I swirled amongst them for a while then sat at a table beneath the shade of an orange tree and ordered a café au lait, a jus d’orange and a pain au chocolat, while I leafed through a newspaper to find out what was going on. The food in Algeria is delicious… the combination of French and North African is as good as it gets. The newspaper reported some unpleasant incidents out in the country. Algiers is safe though… there had, after all, been no mention of an armed guard, and I was free to stroll wherever I wanted in the city. The only danger is the traffic, which is truly anarchic… but everybody has adapted to this and I never saw a casualty among pedestrians or motorists. Of course there are a lot of cars about and it costs pennies to run them, as Algeria has enormous deposits of oil.
Now the city is beautiful; the centre was laid out by the French and is like a gleaming white Paris against the blue of the Mediterranean. But it’s far from pristine, housing something like five times the number of inhabitants it was designed for, which gives it that appealing air of dilapidation that you find in say Havana or Cádiz. You have to hand it to the French, whatever else they got wrong in their colonial adventuring, their architecture was good… as was the legacy of the coffee and patisserie… and the wine. Vin gris is what I stick to; it’s similar all across ex-French North Africa, and in spite of its unappealing name is a delicious light, fruity rosé. Algeria is nominally Muslim, but wine drinking is enjoyed.
