I don't think that's sound construction...

It's been awfully busy around here as classes have been thrown into high gear, but I thought I'd throw on a quick snap to give you a feeling for something that's left my mouth agape more than once in the last month.


Here's a half-finished, half-flooded townhouse just waiting for a good family to call it home.
**Correction: I was informed by one of my students that it is actually perfectly normal and common practice to flood wet concrete to make it stronger. So apologies to the family who will live in this very sturdy home one day! But it still is sort of a freaky weird picture so I'm leaving it up.**

With new buildings on the rise at a blazing rate in Erbil, it seems there's always some oddball thing or other to see in a semi-finished house. My favorite? Only three walls of a townhouse done with the kitchen tiles already in place.

I've yet to get a good photo of this kind of stuff, but one of the most disconcerting things to see - yet very commonplace in this area of the world- is the use of long sticks to prop up whole concrete building skeletons as they're being built. Picture a whole floor level, held in place by a couple of cinder-block columns and hundreds of sticks wedged between the floors at various angles like toothpicks... a method used even for high-rises. If that seems like an iffy practice, you're right. There's a giant commercial building just down the road from us that collapsed when it was only three-fourths done.

Electric wiring is also a major problem here. Electricians seem to favor haste over prudence, leaving exposed wires or giant bundles of cables on the outsides of buildings. One of the bar-owners in town just lost everything because his brand new house burst into flames after an electrical short.

And while this town isn't short on new housing, there seems to be no reliable home insurance in the region, leaving people like this guy up a creek if construction is faulty.

Hear that, my entrepreneurial insurance-minded friends? If you can figure out how to make it work over here, you could make a killing with the long-term expat crowd at least.