Our house in El Biar

These photos were taken from the roof of our house.  (Except for the one of the yard.)  Our neighborhood is called El Biar.  We can't really see the Mediterranean, but it is just beyond the trees.  If you enlarge the pictures you can see the flat, sea-level part of town. 

Our embassy is about a 15 or 20 minute walk from the house, depending on my motivation.  It is downhill to the embassy, an easy walk.  The sidewalks are fairly narrow but largely intact, so I don't have to always be looking down.  

Tipasa ruins

Photos from Tipasa.  Old rocks to some; Roman ruins to others.

Amphitheater.

 main east-west street

 main north-south street, north end ends at the Med.

 Looking west toward the end of the old town.  City wall is visible at the top of the hill to the north end of the ridge.  Below it and a tad bit south is the site of the Byzantine church.  The people in the picture are waiting to get picked up by little motor boats, which for a small price take folks on small tours of the bay.  Bigger price, bigger tours.

 No docks, just helping hands while one jumps to the rocks. 

 Mosaic floor.

 What was once the courtyard of a wealthy homeowner's house.

 Look closely, there are four pits that were used in making fish sauce, a Roman favorite.  Whether or not it was garum or one of the other kinds I don't know.  But four vats with fermenting anchovies, or whatever fish they used, must have added a nice ambient odor to the little town.

 These four arches are reconstructed, at the large church on the hill.

 "Downtown," from the church on the hill. 

 This is the nave, looking more or less east.  The French used a lot of the stone for other construction projects during their tenure here.  All the capitals sitting on the column bases I guess were just stacked there at some point.  One of the policemen monitoring the site.  Mostly they seemed to try to get the kids not to pose for the pictures on the edge of the cliff.

 Steps up to the theater.

 View from the top of the steps.  All the little columns supported a wooden stage.

Tipasa trees

This is not one of the trees, but I just liked the house on the sea, nothing around it, around 200 miles south of Palma de Mallorca.

 These carvings are on dead olive trees.  As I understand it, they were started in the late '80s, interrupted by the civil war in the '90s, and started again.

 And this is the artist who does the carving.

 Windswept pine above, and palm below.  There are lots and lots of dates for sale in the local markets, so I'm wondering what type of palm this is.

 From the hill where the Byzantine-era church is, looking out over the Roman ruins.  The last two pictures are of old olive trees, which become works of art in their own right.

Algiers to Tipasa

My first trip outside Algiers was to Tipasa, which is a small city on the Mediterranean about an hour's drive west.  It is the site of an UNESCO Heritage site, the ruins of the Roman city as well as a Byzantine church.  Tipasa itself was a Phoenician (Punic) trading village, then a Roman city, then Vandal, and then Byzantine.

These few pictures are along the way to Tipasa.  The first one shows the mountains to the south.  The Atlas Mountains run from Morocco through Algeria to Tunisia, and in Algeria form a barrier between the fertile strip of land along the Mediterranean and the Sahara Desert. 

 These are two photos coming into Tipasa, with Mt. Chenoua, just under 3,000 feet high, in the background. 

The next series of photos are at or around the tomb of Juba II.  You can Google Juba.  His father (Juba I, of course) had the distinction of being defeated by Julius Caesar shortly after Caesar left Egypt during the civil war.    As a result of that loss, Juba I's son, J-II, who would have been about 6 or 7 years old at the time, was taken to Rome by Caesar and displayed in Caesar's triumphal parade.  J-II had the good fortune to become friends with Caesar's great nephew Octavian, and years later when Octavian had become Emperor Caesar Augustus he installed J-II as a client king of Numidia, then Mauretania, which he ruled from what is now Cherchell, Algeria, which is on the west side of Mt. Chenoua, Tipasa being on the east side.

 The royal mausoleum of Mauretania, built by J-II for he and his wife, Cleopatra Selene.  By the way, similarly to J-II, Selene (daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra) was taken to Rome as a child after the defeat of her mother and father at Actium (city on the Ionian Sea, northern Greece, 50 or so miles from Albania) in 31BC.   Augustus facilitated the marriage of Selene and J-II.

The guide said that no one was currently buried inside the mausoleum, although no one seems to know when the bodies were removed.  He also said the main reason for the steel door and locks was to keep people out, not for the obvious archeological site purposes, but only because the mausoleum is in a seismic zone and the authorities didn't want anyone to be accidentally entombed as a result of an earthquake. 

 The tomb seems to be a popular tourist site, and many families were out on an early, nice spring day.  For a small fee one could have a picture made with the camel; it was pretty popular, especially among the young boys.

 The little square holes in the rocks were for connectors, since these stones were not mortared or cemented in place, but carefully hewn and placed.  The dome would have been capped with a more finished material anchored with these connectors.  I assume they were wood, but I don't know.

These last two photos are of crops planted along the coast.  The dried cane ( I think it's cane; I didn't see any up close) I think are windbreaks and not property lines.  Some fields had eight or ten sections.  I wonder how long this pristine Mediterranean coastline property will be farmed; here we were about an hour west of Algiers.  Except for some small villages, most of the coastline was farming, like this.  I saw one new waterfront development, but it was much closer to Algiers.

Algiers

I am settling in here in Algiers.  So far it's been mostly the usual chores related to moving in and getting settled:  check-in at the embassy, necessary briefings, medical office, get my badge, drink beer at the Marine house.  Then go to the grocery store(s), meat store, vegetable market, etc.  All in all it is progressing nicely, I think.  There is a wine/beer/liquor merchant who delivers to the house, $100 minimum order, which is very handy.  The selection is not vast, but certainly adequate.

Everything is more expensive here than it was in Tirana.  I've been told that produce is very seasonable, but we'll see.  I've seen some out-of-season items, like bananas, pineapple, apples, so they must import some things.  So far I have not found much in the way of Italian cheeses -- no ricotta or provolone, and only the bare minimum of grating cheese.  But it may be around the city somewhere.  There is a lot of French cheese, at least brie and camembert and so forth.  Sometimes they have things that are packaged differently and it's easy to miss the first time or two.

I think we're about done with the daily trips from embassy personnel; they've brought the freezer, some bookcases, installed the wardrobes they had ordered made.  Tomorrow they're coming to hook up the washing machine properly so we get cold water instead of hot when it's set on cold.  This building we're living in has four stories, and we live on the first.  The couple above us got here about a week before we did, and the third floor couple got here about three weeks before us.  Our apartment is a 3 bedroom, 1 1/2 bath, with a storage room and a large entry hall.  The embassy welcome kit is basically all we have, which is a pretty bare-bones set of essentials, very cheap.  A few dull knives, two coffee cups, three pans, etc.  Sandra, one of our sponsors, got us some extra plates, so now we have six instead of two.  It will be a lot more comfortable when our air shipment gets delivered, which they say can be two or three months.  Plus the extra time explained in the next paragraph.

Cindy left for Tirana early, early this morning and will return Sunday morning early.  Taylor was spending her spring break in Tirana with friends, and then she was going to come here last Friday and bring Rover.  She got to Rome and they wouldn't let her board the plane to Algiers because she didn't have her passport/visa.  Alitalia shouldn't have let her leave Tirana, but these sorts of rules are not really enforced too much in Albania.  Finally tracked down her passport -- the guy at OPDAT disregarded the instructions to FedEx her dip passport to Embassy Tirana and decided to send it via pouch.  In the process of trying to find it, it was discovered still at Dulles; it was scheduled to leave today.   So the upshot of it all is that Taylor and Rover went back to Tirana, and Cindy went to get Rover and visit with Taylor.  In order to leave the country the embassy had to retrieve her passport from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so we'll be a couple weeks behind in getting our diplomatic credentials, which will impact when we can get our shipments.  All in all, this little escapade will cost us a thousand dollars and cause us not to get our stuff for a few extra weeks.

Here are three photos of the house.  The first is the living room/dining room, which is a huge room.

 The entry hall, the second largest room in the house.

 And the kitchen, smallest room in the house.  Not much in the way of counter tops, but looks of cooking space:  the GE gas range has four burners, large oven and small broiler over; the counter top Bosch range has four gas burners, and the Bosch was mounted gas oven.  I'm going to have to meet a lot of folks to justify all this.  It would have been wonderful in Tirana.