The first picture is of a mosque in Ghardaia, Algiers that supposedly inspired Le Courbusier (right). The second is what an oasis looks like...and improbably set of palm trees surrounded by rock and dust (below).

I don't think the Gideons left this

Found in the hotel nightstand drawer where the Bible and Book of Mormon (Marriott only) usually are:

Mmmm, brik

So I found out what a Brik is.

Sometime after the Stroganoff triumph, I tried the Algiers hotel restaurant again and saw that an option was something called Brik Tunisienne. I ordered one and was served a bizarre tan pouch filled with minced something, oozing yellow liquid, and a soupcon of Raid (tm) flavoring. Not encouraging. I figured it was some sort of prank the Algerians were playing on tourists and a passive-agressive dig at their wealthier neighbors to the East.

The Algerians were not that crafty. (Sounds like the beginning of a wonderful spy thriller.) It turns out that Brik is an actual dish consisting of pastry dough wrapped around various meats or fishes and an egg yolk fried to a golden brown. Quite common in the fast food places here and often super cheap. The Raid (tm) was an Algerian addition. Perhaps they were craftier than I had given them credit for. (A wonderful epilogue to my novel.)

Tunisian keyboards...

Suck...the letters are in a weird order for no apparent reason. Also, all the helpful things like numbers require the shift key to be pressed and relatively rare things like the ampersand and semi-colon do not. Period requires shift, exclamation point does not. So from not on, all my posts from Tunisia will be extra emphatic!

Nothing says "wish you were here" like banknotes

Algeria has a soft currency. By that I mean both that the banknotes below 1000 dinars are tattered into a velvety texture and that it is nearly impossible to change them for the hard currencies you converted in the first place. They are also not supposed to be taken out of the country leaving one with the problem of having to estimate to the dinar how much cash is needed at the end of a trip. Too much and you are stuck with lots of velvety souvenirs for your family, too little and you are without money in a place where credit cards are not accepted outside of the western hotels and ATMs are scarce and usually do not accept foreign bankcards.

I knew none of this. So I made it to the airport with a mountain of dinars, congratulating myself on having, for once, withdrawn enough cash from the one working ATM in Algiers. After learning all about soft currency from the slightly surly man at the currency exchange counter (more aptly titled the "buy lots of semi-useless cash counter") and getting rejected by the lady at the post office/Western Union who had apparently cottoned on to the scam of wiring oneself money to be picked up in a hard-currency country, I managed to change some cash with, shall we say, a non-official banker who was lurking around the bank counter. The rate was predictably terrible, so I decided to keep some cash for a duty-free splurge. Duty free is located after the passport control checkpoint where an officer asks if you are exporting cash, but who, I found, does not press the issue if you pretend you don't speak French. That checkpoint should have been another warning sign. My plans to arrive in Tunis sporting the latest fashions and reeking of overpriced toiletries were not to be since the duty free shops don't take dinars.

It's not a good sign when a shop that just has to travel 200 meters to the exchange counter won't even risk taking dinars.

At any rate, the only thing that kept you all from getting some very lovely banknotes as souvenirs was the old lady at the kitch shop who was willing to take local currency. She was however a little concerned that I had not seen the prices of her goods as I gathered up as much schlock as I could fit into my backpack. She kept empasizing the price tags as if she knew that it was a bit of a rip off, but hey, based on the value of the currency to me in an hour when I boarded the flight to Tunis, it was all effectively free. After I was done, I guess she decided she had met her daily (weekly?) quota because she promptly shut down her store and left. Hope you all like coral necklaces.

The folly of Tripoli

So it looks like my visa for Libya is in indefinite bureaucratic turnaround. Apparently my visa was approved by the immigration office (the normal tourist authority) and passed on to the Foreign Office (which I guess is a special treat for American applicants) who have refused to either approve or deny the visa, which has the same effect as denying the application. My agent says that they investigate each application and issue a ruling on a case-by-case basis, which means that LIBYA has decided that I am not the sort of person they want visiting. I am not sure what to make of that.

At any rate, the agent is refunding the visa fee and the easiest way to do that is by Western Union. So I have the dubious distinction of having wired a large amount of semi-traceable cash into Libya and receive a payment in return. That's going to look good.

So in lieu of my actually visiting the SPLAJ, I will just spend the next two weeks in Tunisia composing bittersweet limericks about the experience. Any suggestions?

Seriously?

A cab driver told me yesterday that my face looked Algerian. So let's add that to the list of exotic enthicities I have been attributed:

• Maori
• Hawaiian
• Spanish
• Cook Islander
• Filipino (at least that one was close)
• Mexican
• Inuit
• Navajo (seriously. but perhaps that person had never met any Navajos)

Anything else I am missing?

Schooled at trivia!

Here's a story for anyone who has ever suffered a defeat in the unwinnable fight that is a trivia matchup with me:

I was wandering around the Islamic art museum in Algiers today when one of the ticket takers approached me. After meandering through a conversation in my rusty French, I find out that he is so very excited to have an American in his museum because he is eager to play a game of state capitol trivia. No joke.

Suffice it to say, there is a guy named Mohamed in Algiers who knows a lot more geography than I do.

Stroganoff!

Some of you might be aware of my experiments last fall with Beef Stroganoff. (For those who aren't last fall I experimented with Beef Stroganoff, that is to say I experimented with making Beef Stroganoff not that I used Stroganoff in scientific exploration or Stroganoff and I decided to try illicit substances...though my experimentation did in fact involve mushrooms).

Well, upon arrival in Algiers and at the very hospitable Hotel Suisse, I found out that Beef Stroganoff is on the menu of the house restaurant. (That is to say that the chef [that is to to say the line cook {that is to say the reheater in chief}] has also experimented with Stroganoff.)

The dish was passable and the soupcon of Boyardee was homey. The strangest part of the dish (which is saying a lot since I am in francophone North Africa eating a New York interpretation of a Russian dish) was the potato things accompanying. It appeared as if the chef/cook/reheater had taken the trouble to carve the potato into octagonal tubular shapes. They were the length of a potato and slightly tapered at the ends, implying that they had been cut from an oblong potato-y thing. Seems like a lot of work when regular slicing would do just fine. Perhaps the Algerians have a dislike of potato maximization.

Things Brought

So here are some or the things I brought that have made it through the great backpack cleanout of 2009:

• Domke FXC camera bag (doubles as a walkaround bag for the day and the super loud velcro closures deter pickpocketing)
• Kindle (I am accepting reading list suggestions)
  Fake wedding ring (worked last time as a general reducer of street whistling)
• Shamwow (or really, ShamWOW! tm...a miracle dryer of handwashed items and skin...everyone is getting ShamWOW! for upcoming holidays)
• Moneybelt (not the inside-the-pants waist pack style, but an acutal canvas belt with a hidden zipper compartment, stuffed with dead presidents and whatever the gansta sliang for euros is)

Backpack detritus

I have gotten a lot of questions about what I am bringing on this trip. As little as possible is the most concise answer. Everything is jammed into an old Osprey pack I bought before my last round the world thing in 1999.

The good news is that the pack has a lot of theif resistant nooks and crannies. The bad news is that those nooks and crannies accumulate a lot of travel junk. I am in the midst of the backpack equivalent of a high colonic. Expelled so far:
1 50 cent peice from the Cook Islands (acquired 2002)
2 brochures from a safari lodge in South Africa (acquired 2008)
3 airport luggage tags (acquired 2004-2006)
2 passport pictures (hairstyle indicates 2006)
sand (acquisition date unknown)
raffia ribbon (?!?)
lipstick cap (I don't wear lipstick)

There's an appropriate metaphor in here I think...

So much for anonymity

After a relative blissful decade of being relatively un-Google-able, I decided to start a blog to keep folks updated on my whereabouts. I am sure this will come back to haunt me sooner or later.