Shaking Hands and Kissing Babies

Our pleasant stay in Algiers continues while we await news of our visa request for Libya.  A deadline approaches where we will leave the city with or without them in a couple days.  Meanwhile we continue to see the city and build relationships with those we have met along the way.  Today we visited the university here in Algiers and spent time walking around the campus.  Afterward we started toward a meeting point for a Christian man we met yesterday, and I stopped at an Internet cafe to check e-mail.  While standing outside for a moment, the guy just showed up behind us.  As a note, Algiers is a city of around 3 1/2 million people according to the locals, and this is the third or fourth such 'chance' meeting in the last few days.  We were not even near the meeting place when this happened, making it even more strange.  At his insistence, we then proceeded to his church to meet the pastor.  The church is a small run of the mill looking protestant church situated near our hotel.  The pastor was not in, so we sang with our friend for a while in the sanctuary and then left.  We then went to Notre Dame Basilica which over looks the city of Algiers.  Later in the afternoon our other friends showed up and we spent the rest of the day with them talking and seeing the city.  Stacy also spent more time signing with her deaf friends and getting to know them better.  We ended a very active day with dinner together and being serenaded by Yazid and Youseff.  Don't worry, we recorded a bit of it for posterity.