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Vignettes from my daily walks and musings on class distinction, consumerism and Catholic guilt. In Maida Vale and Queen’s Park, gym refugees scurry around desperate to replicate their routines. There is a palpable sense of urgency and desperation in the air; the work out together – stay together couples are testing the limits of their
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Sta arrivando! “It’s coming!”, the man from the ticket office says in reference to a bus that was supposed to have arrived thirty minutes ago taking us from Catania Airport to Siracusa. Though it was my first time on the island, I understood immediately that this would not be the first time I would hear these
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Ne vous déplaise, en dansant l’oranaise … Oran is like going back in time to vintage southern France, and then coming back to the future again after an apocalypse. Less austere than Algiers’ Parisian all whites, Oran welcomes you in with sun-soaked pastels and sandy yellows. Classic early to mid twentieth century pretty. Once, wine was…
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My visit to Algeria was inevitable. Yet I thought it would never happen. I had grown accustomed to not having gone. It was a well rehearsed line. “Yes, my father is Algerian…No, I’ve never been…How come? Oh, well you know. It’s a complicated country, and I think my dad has a complicated relationship with it, so
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Orientalism, or Too Many Arabs… My father’s Arab dad joke about there being too many Arabs, was in the end, a fairly accurate description. Regrettably, urban (though not desert) tourism is virtually non-existent. People breaking the Maghrebin monotony in Algiers were few in number and could be categorised as either well dressed, young sub-Saharan Africans or
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L’Algérie vous souhaite la bienvenue. Our passports were confiscated at border control. Five minutes in the country for the very first time, and already my ‘identity’ was a problem.
Farida F. Alvarez 