Photo Expo: "The Casbah of Algiers, from Yesterday to Today"

Coin de la mémoire: One of my photos of the Casbah of Algiers featured in the exposition.

A few months ago, a Facebook group that I follow, called "Friends of Algiers: History, Arts, and Culture", announced plans to organize an exposition celebrating the Casbah, the ancient quarter of Algiers, and issued an open call for artistic submissions.

As a longtime fan of the Casbah, I was excited to participate, and sent the organizers a selection of the many photos I have snapped there with my Rolleicord. A few weeks later, I was happy to hear that five of my shots would be featured in the exposition, "The Casbah of Algiers, from Yesterday to Today", to be organized in the Casbah itself at the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions.

The expo opened on February 23, Algeria's national "Casbah Day", earning

In Berlin, Encounters with Hipsters Beyond the Wall

Berlin blur: exploring Kreuzberg last weekend.

Germany was never high on my list of potential destinations, but something about dating a German girl managed to change my perspective. Nina and I are now back in Algiers after a long weekend in Berlin that was admittedly far more fascinating than I had expected.

We stayed in hipster central: the neighborhood of Kreuzberg (in an Airbnb apartment of course—wait, do people still stay in hotels?) Outside of Brooklyn, you would be hard pressed to find a higher concentration of organic brunch spots, screen printing workshops, vintage shops, graffiti posing as "street art", plus flannel, beards, tattoos, piercings, and all the rest. Once an undesirable quarter abandoned to Berlin's Turkish immigrant community, Kreuzberg has been reborn as an edgy arts district (read: overtaken by hipsters). Strolling through the neighborhood gave me an instant taste of just how alternative a city Berlin is—not

A St. Paul's School Alumni Profile

Yours truly in Marrakech, 2012.

In the latest issue of its quarterly alumni magazine, my high school back in Baltimore featured me in its "Voices from the Hill" alumni profile, reprinted below. Many thanks to Alumni director Charley Mitchell for this nice recognition.

Algiers, Algeria is home to Andrew Farrand '03. He's lived there since 2013, after almost a decade in Washington, D.C., punctuated by frequent travels and over a year living in Morocco. His love of languages has led to fluency in French and intensive study of Arabic, with stints in Damascus and Amman—and even a summer in Tanzania studying Swahili. "I owe Catherine Eiff for all that," Andrew says. "She was my French teacher through much of Upper School, and offered me my first trip abroad: an SP exchange visit to France. That trip was when I first realized I had a knack for languages, and that it was a path to a whole world out there."