More Algeria pixels

The view from my hotel room. Tizi is full of half finished buildings. Nobody seems to know why


Walking down to the office in the morning. Traffic is insane, to put it mildly


The street below our office window

Tizi Ouzou indeed!

I am sitting on the fourth floor of an office building in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, listening to the constant shrill of a traffic warden's whistle as he tries, with some success, to untangle the mess that is Algeria road use. On top of this building a massive 3.8m satellite dish lean out over the street below, and is the reason myself and another Justin have flown half way round the world. Everything going well we will be pointing that dish in a days time to another satellite and taking over this system and all the complex networking associated with it.

Algeria is an interesting mix of cultures, in a pleasant and laid back sort of way. Not typically African in the more normal sense of the word, it is not really European either. In fact it seems to me to have more of a South American feel if anything. The town we are in is not that big a city, which means it lacks the cosmopolitan feel that one can perhaps find in the capital. It has those typical little first floor sell everything kind of shops that one finds across most of the globe in countries that might once have been referred to as third world. What we call them now, I do not know, but there is certainly more character to them than a Tesco's or Walmart. That said there is precious little to buy other than the daily essentials, at least in the part of town we are in.

We have been running around a bit, building 3 dishes to date and have the skeleton of a network up and running in preparation of the big switch! When that will come, we cannot say, but as there is little to do here we are hoping the sooner the better.