Next up is Algeria.
Actually it isn’t at all, it’s Albania but the cheeky monkeys over at the Foreign Office (from w'hence I'm drawing my list) have deemed in their infinite wisdom of all things foreign, that the following list structure is an appropriate one to use.
A - - - > B
C - - - > D
Wherein A is Afghanistan, B is Albania, C is Algeria and so on. Why they didn’t use the tried and tested method of a list that runs from top to bottom and then should a second column become necessary, continuing the alphabeticisation from the bottom of column A and continuing the list, is beyond me.
I suspect there was a strategy meeting about it.
So, this means you get Algeria and not Albania. How you feel about this is all up to you, and irrelevant to me.
Right, so, ALGERIA. I have no preconceptions of this country and I almost wish I had, because after writing a page and a half of A4 (TYPED!) attempting to say something interesting about Algiers and its neighbouring towns, I decided what I’d written was too boring because the coastline of the north of Algeria is also too boring.
It’s like Blackpool in Africa.
I did however look at as many Photo Spheres as I could hoping to find something to inspire me to like the coastline. It doesn’t help that apparently no-one in Algeria can seem to take a photograph worth a fuck. A generalisation yes, but based upon the evidence on offer via Google Earth and the fact that all the photos I could find make the coastline look more like a wet weekend in Rhyll than some exotic sandy paradise.
Popping into town there’s (what is rapidly becoming) one of our usual suspects in the inside of an electronics store, with laptops on sale for various prices from 37,500 somethings to 45,000 somethings. Bargain if you ask me.
I’d love to say the interior of the Museum of Modern Art was beautiful, or fascinating (I’d also love to say which town it was in but I can’t remember and I’m not looking for it now) but it’s just a bit unremarkable. It looks like what you would get if you turned Hoxton Hall into a shopping-centre but as this is neither particularly interesting nor funny I’ll be surprised if it survives the edit.
Deep into the desert things get a little better. About 500 miles due south there is a courtyard that looks like it is made entirely out of peach bath-bombs. It probably isn’t but I would give my right bollock to go there and see it rain.
Zipping back up into space and somewhere else we come across Mount Tahat. One of the great unknown wonders of the world, perhaps? We’ll never know because the only Photo Sphere available in this region takes us into a dwelling.
The dwelling appears to be built from shiny black rocks, which appear almost lacquered, or perhaps painted with Dulux Trade black gloss, and is carpeted with something that invokes in me memories of my (probably great-great) Auntie Gladys, who was over 150 years old when I was six. The roof is dark corrugated iron and there is a little hatch in the metal which allows a beam of light to enter and be immediately swallowed up by the black walls, reflected into nothing.
The overall effect is that of having been swallowed by a slug.
There are some rugs on the wall which look like, if you are to continue the imagery of the previous sentence, bits of carrot.
I think I’ve found the funniest place name in Algeria. The region of Tit allows us no street view, and perhaps even more so than with Bum and Pukh, I feel like this is a shame.
Last chance Algeria… Oh dear. Near to the border of Libya, someone has had the bright idea of using the 360-degree panoramically-zoom-enabled camera (not its real name) to take a picture at the bottom of a canyon, extremely similar to the one where James Franco spends almost a working week stuck under a bolder.
Unfortunately the only effect that can possibly come out of this is a mind-blowing brain-headache as the words I’M STUCK IN A CANYON resound over and over in one’s brain. And will do for the rest of the day.