Oran

A great tour of any city starts with great tour guides.  These are ours, Mohammed's sons, both eloquent in English and ernest students of history: Walid, a graduate student, and his younger brother, Faras, 18, in the middle of his senior year in high school.

 They point to the far mountain, near where the original Oran began centuries ago, and the long history of occupation by Ottoman and Spanish is reflected in the great forts there, which we'll visit another day.  Meanwhile we gaze over a teeming port of ships, silos, warehouses and a waiting fleet of tankers close at sea. The alluring beaches are a few miles away beyond the mountain.

 On the sea-side the road bends around a large park with a bandshell, the high school soccer field, and on the other side of the promenade, the high school of the boys.

 I'm sorry to say that this is the American embassy in sad disrepair.  Why?  "I don't know." is the answer.  And the Algerians can't do anything about it, as the land belongs to the U.S.

Anyone walking a city is walking history.  This is a monument to I don't know what, but I like it.  I like the Arabness of it, the balance, the color.  The French had such a strong presence in the land -- 2 million in 1962 when they were all decreed to leave, that you think you're walking in Paris, what with the tall doorways, the iron balconies, the motifs and even the lay of the street, in spokes, not grids, leaving some intersections the meeting place of three  streets and corner buildings greeting the traffic like proud dowagers.  

Yet Algerians want to make their own mark, as in this new bank building.  They remain proud of the beauty of their buildings, from whatever source, and are beginning to renovate some of the more historic French ones..

 A central square around an angel of peace dedicated to the first Algerian liberator.

 The opera house.

 Ambiance.

 An old church, transformed to a library.

A portrait in a hotel lobby of the same hero of the peace angel in the square. Their George Washington, or maybe Simon Bolivar.

 I asked if this were the Champs Elyse of Oran, and they laughed, and said, yeah, maybe.  But let us know that it is the area where the French refused all Algerians entrance.

We leave them and head to another Mohammed's house, Djelloul's friend who will accompany us to the Sahara the next day.  We'll stay at his cousin's house, a 5 story walk up to a modern apartment.

Till then!