Erbil pub crawl

Our first couple of days in Kurdistan haven’t been easy. After the initial shock and awe of the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, we relocated to a better place and started trying to find ourselves a new home.

Day one of looking was a lesson in frustration. Our new Kurdish friends, or shall I say, Jon’s new Kurdish friends, said they would help us find a place in Erbil. This consisted of popping over to offices that were mostly closed and returning for hours at a time to drink chai at an un-air conditioned office where our new friends sold security cameras. Drenched in sweat, apartmentless and with new phones that didn’t work properly at all, we returned to the hotel defeated.

Day two was slightly better. We got the Internet working and managed to make contact with a relocation service who, conveniently, had space in their own villa that we might rent. We headed over with high hopes.

The office was run by a Texan who called himself Cowboy and invited us in for our first beer in the country. It was, I thought, perhaps the only place in Kurdistan where having nudie calendars on the wall was socially acceptable. We checked out their digs and agreed to meet up later at the Deutscher Hof, obviously the only German restaurant in town.

Shortly after checking things out we got a potential offer from the local university to stay in their teacher housing. But by the time we were able to pass our contact info along to the right person, he had gone for the day. Unfortunately, that meant that we’d have to wait till Sunday (weekends here are on Friday and Saturday) for the head decision maker for these things to tell us whether it was a done deal. The only thing left to do was keep looking and wait, so we decided to use our newfound weekend night to make the official bar crawl across Erbil’s expat pubs, mostly found in the Christian district of Ankawa, where alcohol isn’t a problem.

Our first stop was T-Bar, where we had our first pseudo American noshes in days (my pizza was a long roll of French bread with Mozzarella and canned mushrooms on top). Apart from the security scanner and a locker where you can check your weapons at the door, T-Bar reminded me of a bar I went to in Fort Wayne Indiana. when I was working on a grad school project. Brand new but already a little seedy, where everyone knew each other but Jon and me. Like many places around Erbil, T-Bar was packed but felt weirdly suburban.

Next, it was on to the Deutscher Hof, where apparently they were having a barbeque and Salsa dancing party. Here we met Cowboy and his friends, who were, it turned out, responsible for the nudie calendar I’d seen earlier. Apparently they operate a logistics group that often has to grease the hands of touchy officials. In a Muslim country, those yearly issues of scantily clad women were worth more than gold for their business. The guy told me that he kept stacks of them in his trunk just in case and that all the border controls knew him and wanted to be friends with him to get their own copies of the calendar. The first year they made the calendars, 500 copies ran out almost instantly. And as a result, he’s gotten himself out of lots of potentially rough situations.

While of course I generally condemn the objectification of women, I had to admit that his little business scheme was brilliant.

The salsa dancing classes were a somewhat pitiful sight. Of the 50 or so people at the bar, only four were women. I was determined not to dance. The bar owner, Gunter, a sage businessman dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, obviously knew what a little fresh meat could do to liven up his party and repeatedly returned to ask me to join the rest of the group onstage. I politely declined.

There’s a saying about Alaska, where there was once (and may still be) 40 men to every one woman: “The odds are good but the goods are odd.” I think it’s safe to apply the idiom to Iraq. I don’t know why, but in my head I keep comparing Erbil to a really hot dry version of Ketchikan, Alaska, where Dolly Arthur, with as much of an eye for money as the gold miners and and loggers became Alaska’s most famous (and I’m sure quite wealthy) whore, cause the pickings for women were so slim.

We ended our night at the Speedway, Erbil’s go-kart track and bar where, it seems, many expats tend show up at as the night is winding down. Group by group, all the people we had seen through the night started filing in, ordering up hard liquor and settling in with a hookah or two at each table. We didn’t last long there before deciding to call it a night. No biggie, we’ll be doing the same circuit again for the rest of the summer.