Ah. Home sweet Algiers. Today was pretty long, mostly just the train though. I got up and hit the last spots I wanted to see, the cathedral and the park in front of the citadel overlooking the port. Then I went to hit up an internet café, only to discover that everything was closed for Friday. I took a walk through a street market and circled back to the hotel. The receptionist allowed that I might use the computer at the concierge provided that I could get it to work. I had an hour to kill and nothing better to do, so I got to work. After tweaking Microsoft's beak over the pirated copy of windows (register later!), I got to work on the connection. It was a two-layer thing, where they had a cable connection, but only access to the Internet through a ISP from there. After fiddling with settings and much restarting of the router and the computer, everything clicked and the Internet roared to life. It was a beautiful thing. I responded to my e-mail, especially the three from my mother all concerned cause I hadn’t e-mailed her in a couple days. Then I left for the train station.
On the way, I happened by the carcasses of a pigeon and a rat sitting in a pile of rubble near a streetlight. Of course, 'dead rat in Oran' sets off all kinds of literary alarm bells, so I took some pictures. I arrived at the train station at the same time as the army woman and her son pulled up in a cab, at which point all of my suspicions about traveling alone being more efficient were confirmed. We took long enough getting their ticket situation sorted out that there weren't three spots together on the train when we got there, so I found a place to myself in another car. Every once in a while, the kid would come back and visit me, but he spoke very little French, so our conversations were pretty funny. His hands were dark from henna, so I asked him why they were dyed. He understood the question, but had no idea how to answer it. I also established that he likes pizza more than couscous.
Every once in a while he'd start speaking in Arabic and I'd have to remind him that I still didn't understand (That is, I hadn't picked it up since the last time he tried). He was consistently disappointed. Once time I responded in colloquial English. I think he got the idea. I didn't have anything amusing in my bag (not even a deck of cards), so I wanly tried to interest him in a game of rock paper scissors. He didn't take me up on it and eventually went back to his seat. When we got to Algiers, I got off the train quickly and waited for them. They had to wait for a taxi, so I ended up walking to the hotel.
And now, like I say, I'm back! Same room and all. I was very excited to see that my yogurt was still in the fridge (and I wondered whether it was intentional or an oversight). The guy at the front desk asked me if I felt the earthquake, and I sad 'no, what earthquake?'. Apparently there was one in Oran the night I arrived there. Nothing major, just 4.8. Funny though that I was there and awake and didn't even notice it. I'll chalk it up to growing up near a quarry (or something?).
I'm mostly in endgame mode right now, thinking of packing and timing and taxis and connecting flights and last things I want to buy and how much money I have left and how to spend it quickly enough so there's none left but slowly enough that it lasts and yeah. I'm at the point of the trip where I can be pretty sure I've survived it, so it's a sort of victory lap. 300 pictures and 10 000 words later I'm ready to take it home.
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