Excuses, excuses.

I've had a high learning curve as an instructor in the last few months and I've quickly learned that one of the hardest parts of being a teacher is corralling students into doing what they're told, making sure they do it and shooting down excuses. This can also be the most hilarious part of the job.

In short, it feels a little like this:

[via The Daily What]

Sigh.

WTF Iraq: Pizza chef with a license to kill

Seen at a local pizza place:



"This pizza chef has a license to kill."

This Pudgy pizza chef is debonair, clever and heartlessly cruel in a kinda sexy way. While that may make for a dashing date, I won't be trying whatever he's dishing out any time soon.

Blind and love to read? No problem here.

A while back, one of my students, Dilpak, mentioned that her brother is doing something pretty awesome in local journalism - his paper has created the first braille newspaper in all of Iraq. According to Dilpak, each paper comes with a two sheet insert with the highlights of the day's news punched out in braille so blind people in the area can read it.

Last week, Dilpak brought in a couple of copies and I'm kind of obsessed with them. Here's what they look like.





These also make me wonder how non-western languages are translated into braille. As I understand it, Braille isn't phonetic. It directly converts letters from a given language into a series of dots. So who decides how to convert non-standardized languages like Kurdish into braille and what dialect do they use? I did a little Googling and didn't find a real answer. In fact, I found remarkably little information on how Braille alphabets are formed across languages. If you have any ideas or expertise on the subject, I'd love to hear it.

Visa: The final installment

It’s been a couple of weeks since we got back from the visa office, but I did want to give a short epilogue to our epic quest for a Kurdistan visa.

Final visit to the visa office: 1.5 hrs, Four three-month visas APPROVED!

After waiting an hour in the reception of the director’s office in the hopes that he would sign some magic paper to help us along, we shuffled into the hallways dripping with sweat and hating our lives. We got a magic paper but it was still at least 100 degrees inside the building and we had four or five more offices to go to.

Just as we thought we were going to melt into the floor before our visas would ever be approved, one of our students appeared out of nowhere. As it turns out, he spends a lot of time in the immigration office helping foreign students get their visas. He took our paperwork and dashed away. We ran to keep up with him as he hurried from office to office, repeating, “just one moment! Just one moment!”
A half hour later, he handed us our stamped visas with a sly smile. Visas for everyone!

A day in the country

This weekend I had the privilege of going on a real Iraqi picnic. When I first got here, I was surprised to see families and friends parking on the highway just outside the city, spreading blankets on the shoulder of the road and firing up their grills for a good old fashioned barbeque.

It’s so dry and hot here that any patch of grass or open land is fair game for a little mini retreat for a couple or family – I’ve seen them camped out on the grassy medians in the middle of wide boulevards, on flowery parking lot dividers at the mall, and on hillsides off busy streets.

So I was pretty excited when my student, Sahar, invited me on a field trip with her sister out to Shaqlawa, a town about an hour and a half away that is a popular vacation spot, especially for Southern Iraqis.

We checked out the other picnic spots on the way, where people park their cars after nightfall and small bonfires burn deep into the evening.







Then we entered Shaqlawa, a cozy little town that seemed a world away from the heat and dryness of Erbil. The mountains make the region noticeably cooler than Erbil and the deep red dirt is often spotted with tiny white flowers. It’s a world of soft rolling hills, trees (it’s been so long since I’ve seen lots of trees!) and a main street with dozens of candy shops, spice and fabric shops with their wares draped over the doorways and tumbling into the streets.

We planned to return after nightfall, when Sahar promised me the town would be bumping. We headed out to a graveyard and ancient church where Sahar swore she had heard voices screaming at night that stood at the front of a natural cave. We climbed up the hillside to the mouth of the cave, where people light red candles and wedge them into the rock face in the hopes that their wishes would come true.




Unfortunately we learned that the candles were available back down at the bottom of the hill so we saved our wishes for next time and headed down again for our picnic.




Finally we headed back in to Shaqlawa, and Sahar was right, the sleepy town’s main street was packed with people, sitting at neon-drenched restaurants, bouncing in huge trampoline beds, shopping for hats and trinkets and dancing in the streets with each other. Even at 11 at night, the streets were full, mostly of tourists who had come up from Baghdad and surrounding areas to escape the heat and intensity of the city.

Security situation in Erbil

If I've talked to you personally, you've probably asked me about how safe it is in Erbil, what kind of security concerns I have, what daily life feels like, if I ever feel threatened. Well, I've tried to reassure you as much as I can, but the other day I came across a video that perhaps describes things here better than my words. This was shot in Israel, but it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the security situation here as well.



Sidenote: Larry King tried to question Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu about this video, shot in the West Bank. As The Daily Wh.at reports, the conversation was an epic fail for both men.

Turkish Embassy FAIL

One of our mentors, Grant Slater, tried to cross the border today from Northern Iraq to Turkey so he can film the second half of our project being conducted in Diyarbakir.

After a 3-hour trip to the border, Grant was denied entrance into Turkey. He had flown into Erbil from Jordan so there was no Turkish visa stamp in his passport. Apparently you can leave Turkey from the border but can't get back in unless you're making it a round trip.

This seemed pretty arbitrary to us, so Jon tried to call the Turkish embassy in Erbil to have them help us sort this out.

When he called the number on the embassy website, the receptionist was very friendly and listened to the whole situation. Then he said, "I'm sorry sir, we don't have a reservation for a Mr. Slater."

"What?" Jon didn't understand. "Who am I talking to?"

"This is the Erbil International Hotel, sir."

That's right, the Turkish embassy's official point of contact in the capital city of Northern Iraq is the impostor Sheraton hotel beloved by over-moneyed expats the region over.

Grant eventually crossed the border and got to Diyarbakir safe and sound, but we never found the number for the real Turkish Embassy. In short, #TurkishsolutionFAIL.

WTF Iraq: Shrink-wrap Taksi!

I am so excited to share this one with you. One of my favorite things about Erbil is that we have to take taxis everywhere, which means that going anywhere means a new chance to see some bizarre local taxi decorations. I've seen some crazy stuff here - fringed curtains, handles, mirrors and seat belts covered in teddy bears, a hot rod with "Need for Sped" etched on the back window. But I keep missing those photo ops and with it the chance to share them with you.

Luckily, I finally took enough pictures to show you some cab awesomeness.

Here's what you need to know about Erbil's taxis (or Taksi, as most of their roof lights endearingly announce.) Almost every car has a broken windshield. I've asked a lot of people why their windshields are broken and gotten a wide range of answers, but most of it seems to boil down to heat, dust storms and rocks falling off of all the construction trucks prowling the city.

Next, you need to know that although their windshields are janky, every cab driver seems to have an insane resistance to using their cars. Or rather, to allow their cars to look used. In most cases, they never remove the factory shrink-wrap on any part of the car. I've seen 3 and 4-year-old cars with shrink wrap still on the hoods.

Normal wear and tear on upholstery, knobs and anything else you can touch inside a car is not acceptable for these guys. Instead, taxi drivers cover everything with plastic, tape, shrink-wrap and bubble wrap. Then they add as many stickers as possible to make the cars look new. Anything that says 2010 is great. Even if it's for a random appliance or grocery item, not the car they're driving. Grease pen on the windshield? Great. Looks like they just drove off the lot. Better yet - 2010 emblazoned on the outside of the windshield with a crack 'n peel. Blinker signals and windshield wipers are bubble-wrapped for their own safety. And since it never rains here, there's no reason to take the TOYOTA plastic wrappers off the windshield wipers.

But really, why am I telling you all this? Pictures are so much better. Enjoy.

Happy Fourth of July!

Yesterday our motley group of American housemates celebrated our nation's independence at a fancy hotel somewhere in the outskirts of Erbil, Iraq.

We'd been looking forward to the party for weeks, or at least I had. The flyer our housemate Darshak showed me had a picture of a big straw hat like the kind they wear in New Hampshire parades, details written in red, white and blue, fireworks promised and most importantly, the words "AMERICAN BARBECUE!"

Even though I knew I wouldn't even smell a pork rib within 50 miles of the event, I kept my hopes high.

We piled into a taxi and headed out toward the hotel, which was way, way outside of town. Security was tight and once we got to the hotel on top of a huge hill in the middle of nowhere we realized that the barren hillside was in fact peppered with personal security dudes, armored land cruisers and the occasional serious looking man in fatigues. The army guys looked at us a little funny when the five of us spilled out of the cab in front of the lobby.

[Jon taking a snap of those armored cars in front of the lobby]

The party was, like any Fourth of July celebration, in the backyard. I'm not sure where they found this, but Friends of Kurdistan had a 5-story-tall flag strung up from the hotel's roof.

There were hundreds of American contractors, dignitaries and families milling about and I can assure you that the small talk was just as awkward as it is back in the States. But some things just weren't the same. There was an egg toss and tug-o-war, which was great:



But somehow there was still too much absent from this party. Like music, or loud rowdy people drinking copiously (though somehow I have a feeling that had to do a lot more with the overpriced cash bar).

But worst of all? NO BARBECUE. Not a single marinated hock of beef. Nothing that even resembled American barbecue. There were lamb hamburgers, but no cheese. There were hot dogs, but no ketchup or mustard. And there were absolutely no hamburger or hotdog buns of any kind.

God bless America and their six-packs of fluffy hot dog buns.

So I'll admit that the whole thing was a little weird. They set off the fireworks a little early and I can safely say that in any country there are always a few random fireworks that go off at the end after the finale is over. Then afterward, everyone filed out and went home. It was a work night in Iraq.

I wish I had some great insight between Iraq and the United States, some great wisdom to share about spending our independence day in a place that we "set free," about what that means really. About the words America uses in places like Iraq, like freedom and democracy. What that means to us and to Iraq as nations. But no one got drunk enough to have that conversation at the party last night. Maybe we can start that discussion here. Anyone have that conversation at a rager last night? I'd love to hear what you were thinking as the fireworks blasted.