Asmara is home to a wonderful institution that was probably built during the 1950s when a lot of American personnel were stationed there as part of the United Nations presence in Eritrea.
It is a bowling alley, a manual bowling alley. When you play there, you get assigned a young boy who skips down behind the pins and resets them after each ball is bowled. It is fair to say it is a nerve-racking experience just making sure he is out of the way before you take your next shot. You can just make him out behind the pins in this grainy pic. And there was a rut in the lane which meant I only got 4 pins. That's my story am I'm sticking to it.
Across the road from the Bowling Alley, however, is an amazing Modernist building. The Lonely Planet guidebook rightly calls it the Zig-Zag Garage. As you can see from the photo it is a mass of triangles and zig-zags.
Asmara is full of Modernist buildings and this service station can hold its zig-zag roofline high amongst this elevated company.
Lonely Planet say '...there's probably no other building like it in the world'.
Reference:
Lonely Planet, Ethiopia, Eritrea & Djibouti ~ Frances Lindsay Gordon, 1st Ed, November 2000
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