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.

Plagiarism? Piracy? Not here.

If there's one thing I keep struggling with in Iraq, it's the idea that copyrights, for anything, mean nothing.

It's all fun and games when you're driving by the Max Toast's golden arches or picking up a fresh copy of Sex & The City II from the bazaar.

But in my opinion, many people here have a totally different, and from my view, incomprehensible opinion on personal rights to one's own work and information.

Here's a quick story for you. Just a few days after arriving with Iraq, Jon and I had a meeting with the Hawler, a local paper here. The editor gave us a bunch of their weeklies to flip through as we were talking and as Jon started checking out the first of the stack, he stopped dead. "This is my picture!"

The editor leaned over to check out the page.

"I took this two years ago, in Erbil!" Jon was incredulous. The paper had been printed two weeks before.

The editor took the paper, looked at it and laughed. "We should have at least given you an attribution!"

[Jon's snap of his snap published without permission, attribution, or compensation.]

Similarly, after publishing a recent blog on the Huffington Post, I got a message from a Kurdish journalist thanking me for writing the post and letting me know that he was going to translate it into Kurdish and publish it in his magazine. There was no question of permission or consultation, just a friendly FYI over Facebook that it would be printed for Kurdish readers in a local magazine. Blog posts are often reposted with attribution online -- they're the type of content that fall into the hazy milieu of things that should be spread quickly and easily, but written by people who are often working just as professionally as print journalists or photographers. It's not uncommon to have a blog republished on five or 15 other sites. So in this case I swallowed my usual objections and asked politely for a link to see where my work was being placed. I got the link to it today, which, considering it's for my article, I have no problem showing you guys here:

[You can see a larger version by checking out Page 2 at this link: http://en.calameo.com/read/000206241ef82f5e7d7a6]


But as you can imagine, with two such recent run-ins with copyright infringement, I find it a little hard to swallow that cavalier attitude toward taking people's work, online or in print. Plagiarism is plagiarism, no matter what you're stealing or how you're using it, if you don't give the owner credit.

I'm having a hard time explaining the importance of this to our students. For our first assignment, we asked each of them to create an interactive timeline about their family history, to get the basics of telling stories in a visually engaging way. We asked them to collect stories from their families, as well as family photos and pictures of artifacts from their homes to help them tell their story.

Imagine my surprise when, as each student stood to present, they proudly showed us their family's stories accompanied with some of the most iconic photos from the last 20 years in the region. There wasn't any shame there -- many students had used the same photos as each other in their timelines. It wasn't like they were trying to hide the fact that the photos were stolen from the Internet. It was just that there was nothing wrong with it. We requested all the students remove photos that weren't theirs from their family histories.

During the second draft presentations, same thing. Internet photos abloom, all across the timelines. Again, we said, why would you want someone else's photos in your family history? Take them off.

So now I'm wondering how to make this lesson stick. It's hard in a place where journalism is undergoing a sort of Renaissance, where papers are plentiful and successful in their own ways, to explain that it's this sort of glib attitude toward the value of people's work, toward reusing it without proper attribution or compensation and in the process devaluing it, is a huge contributing factor to what's killing American newspapers.

I'll be the first to admit I am definitely a hypocrite in this - somehow it seems way worse to me to see a photographer or a journalist struggling to pay the bills have their work directly stolen, than to see a movie or brand be pirated. Having a face on that money lost, that career waylaid, makes it harder to be blase about piracy and plagiarism. It would be hard for me to see someone's picture on the back of a book jacket before I photocopied from the book's pages. 'Cause I'm right there with them.

I want to tell my students, take these people's work, and you're taking their living, and then no one can enjoy the fantastic pictures they shoot. But I'm not sure how to make that lesson sink in yet, and I'm a little afraid that when it does, it's because the journalism industry here will have been troubled by this attitude just as the American industry has, and that Iraqi journalists will be struggling to pay the bills because of it.

Creator of U.S. Kurdish library dies, what a fantastic woman.

Some two years ago I started having phone conversations with an elderly woman named Vera Saeedpour, who was one of the U.S.'s eminent scholars of Kurdish history.

I called The Kurdish Library in New York to get some basic information for some research I was doing. When I asked if I could speak with the curator of their collections, she laughed and said "You got her." I soon found myself in an hour-long conversation with this remarkable woman: a razor sharp, twice married mother of five who changed how the Kurds' story has been recorded in history.

She told me how she, a young Jewish divorcee pursuing a degree at Columbia, had met her neighbor across the air-shaft after her apartment was robbed, and how they started having conversations by talking out the window to one another. How one day he brought her a cake and he was so dressed up she thought he was a delivery man and almost chased him away. And how soon after, they fell in love.

I will never forget what she said about their marriage: "The only thing we had in common was a sort of sadness."

Her marriage, while short (he died just a few years later) introduced her to a new passion. Previous to meeting her husband, she had no idea what a Kurd was.

Shortly after they were married, they were both studying when he interrupted her and asked, "What does predatory mean?"

When she asked him why, he brought over the Oxford English dictionary and showed her the entry for "Kurd," which, she told me, described them as "a tall, predatory people."

She looked at him and said, "but you're not even tall."

Soon after, Vera lobbied to have the definition of Kurd changed in the Oxford English Dictionary and sowed the seeds of what would be a lifelong mission to change perception of Kurds on a global level. She amassed arguably the best Library on Kurdish history and modern culture in the U.S.

I was shocked to find out today that Vera died at the end of May. I feel great sadness over this, because in the last conversation I had with her I promised to come visit her in New York the next time I was there.

In reading over her obituaries, I found that I was definitely not the first to hear Vera's epic life story... in fact some of the quotes included in those articles are ones she told to me verbatim.

But I also learned something about Vera from these obituaries that I wish I could have laughed about with her. Her maiden name, like mine, was Fine.

I'm a sucker for signs, but it's nice to think that I'm carrying her mission in some small way.

If you'd like to read more about Vera Saeedpour, head over to the New York Times.

This Is Iraq

I'm excited to share with you all the first video The Tiziano Project has produced in Iraqi Kurdistan. Produced by fellow mentor Grant Slater, this is one badass explanation of why we've come to this region now.

This Is Iraq | The Tiziano Project from The Tiziano Project on Vimeo.

Journalism 101: Who, what, when why and how

Today was our second class at the Tiziano Project. It's been really rewarding to see all of our hard work toward organizing this workshop materialize into students who are excited about learning from us.

I've been lead teaching the last few classes, which have concentrated on the basics of journalism - how to interview, write an article -- and social media techniques to easily display that information online.

I have to admit, while I'm passionate about sharing my knowledge, I knew that today's lesson wasn't going to be fun and I felt a little bad about subjecting my students to three hours of hardcore basics. Today's class was a lesson I reviewed over and over again through j-school and each time I did, all I could think about is how I wanted to break all the rules my professors were giving me or how I wanted to get on to the fun stuff.

Now I feel bad for sighing and yawning my way through those classes. Standing up in front of the students, I hated knowing I was about to bore them to tears.

Luckily, the students all took it in good stride, and asked a lot of great questions.

And in a really neat way, teaching reporting to people who speak English as a second language made me focus on how to drill down on those raw components of journalism that will translate into any language: How to build trust with your sources and your readers, and how to tell a story clearly, truthfully and powerfully.

When I was a kid, I used to live in an area of Los Angeles where wildfires burned through annually. Every year my family would evacuate and watch from a hotel TV as reporters stood in front of burned homes just a couple of miles or blocks from my house.

Once, a reporter announced on camera that my whole neighborhood was on fire. Another time, a reporter announced that my elementary school had burned down. Neither were true. But there was an excruciating period of waiting, in that hotel room, where we didn't know for sure what we were coming home to and we didn't know whether we could believe what we had just watched on the news.

It was these seeds of uncertainty, of anger, of a childlike certainty that the people I was watching could do better, that made me want to be a journalist. I didn't want to watch or read something and wonder if it was true, to sit and wait until I knew for sure. I wanted to see things for myself, to know what true. By being a journalist, I could be the first person to know things, and I knew I could trust myself to report stories to other people with honesty and accuracy.

So while today's lesson may have been dull as all hell, I'm glad that I now have the chance to pass on my childhood resolution to others who really want to learn.

Classes start, our dog is found, a darn good day!

Classes officially started today at The Tiziano Project. We got to meet our first group of students, a talented mix of aspiring photographers, videographers and journalists who are sure to knock our socks off with their work during the next two months.

I led a couple of lessons today about how to create a timeline on Dipity and how to start a blog on Tumblr. If you're interested in trying out some of the lessons yourself, check out our Tiziano Project Classroom, which has our full curriculum for the workshop, free tutorials for Dipity and Tumblr and will be regularly updated with all the things we teach during our workshop. Part of the nonprofit's goal is to be collaborative with other people and organizations who are teaching new media journalism, so feel free to use these tutorials to teach yourself or others how to get off the ground as a new media journalist.

Also, about 48 hours ago our housemates lost the house's beloved English Spaniel, Sam. Sam is a former bomb-sniffing dog that is just about the cutest thing you'll ever meet and has a whole house full of burly men melting whenever he trots by.

We were so worried! each of us went out in shifts calling his name all around our neighborhood, worried that the poor puppy wouldn't last long in the more than 100 degree heat of the past two days.

But much to our delight we got a call this afternoon that Sam was alive and well and we got to pick him up this afternoon. He even got a little chubby from all the food his temporary caretakers fed him.

Welcome back Sam!

Why Kurdish Journalists Can't Write

Since my arrival in northern Iraq, I have been continually surprised by the amount of support The Tiziano Project has received from locals. I have heard again and again, from people on the street to editors and heads of news organizations, that the press around here needs some help.

There are virtually no independent news organizations in northern Iraq. This may not surprise you. But what might is that freedom of the press is not Kurdistan's biggest media problem.

There is an audience for news here in a way we can't imagine in the U.S. Historically, the people of this region have been great readers. I was speaking with someone just today that told me that there's an old saying that goes: "The Egyptians write, the Lebanese print, and the Iraqis read."

This man remembered reading books as a child that simplified complex issues, like the theory of relativity. And everyone in his family read voraciously. But as he grew older, things began to change. Foreign books were banned or hard to come by. Papers were forced to publish positive articles about the regime. These lack of freedoms are the things we as Americans often imagine as Iraq's state of affairs under Saddam Hussein.

Then the U.S. invaded and handed power to Iraqi Kurdistan to become an autonomous region. (Kurdistan is part of Iraq but is run by a separate government than the rest of Iraq. Okay, poli sci lesson over).

It's at this point where, ironically, a whole new slew of problems started for the media in Kurdistan.

Anyone remember back to America's own journalism history? How cheap printing and distribution allowed for hundreds of opinionated people to start their own presses and share their views with the rest of the country? And then a few politically motivated heavy hitters began backing the newspapers they liked or made their own to make the news what they wanted people to hear?

That's what's happening in Kurdistan right now.

As soon as the limits to what could be printed here were lifted, everyone had something to say. Then, just like in the States, these papers started to solidify or dissolve according to how much money they had behind them. And in this region, that money comes from political parties. Right now, I'm told that there are dozens of newspapers printed daily, and that there are at least four major newspapers that are openly backed by political parties. (This applies to broadcast media too, but I'll stick to discussing newspapers here.)

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The affiliations for each paper are clear - people know what slant they'll get depending on which paper they pick up. And these political parties can also protect journalists from criticism - or worse - if they publish articles on societal problems or expose corruption within the government.

The real problem with many of the papers here, people tell me, is that there are some real ethics issues within the papers themselves. There are a lot of published criticisms and accusations that are unsourced, poorly researched, and written to pick a fight rather than to promote public discussion. This, no doubt, has to do somewhat with the papers' political affiliations, but many attribute it to simply bad journalism. There's a thirst here for meaningful political and societal criticism. Of reporting that goes past finger pointing and parses crucial issues in a way that will help the majority find a solution.

In my conversations with people here, I haven't quite drilled down to why this is so hard for journalists here. One would imagine they would want to avoid tabloid-style accusations and commentary lest they end up like a recent Erbil journalist who was assassinated after he published a satire piece about President Barzani's daughter. While the journalist's death was publicly condemned, many have said that the journalist wasn't operating ethically to begin with - publishing highly critical but poorly sourced articles for months under a nom de plume, concluding with an immensely insulting (in this culture) article that in American terms translated to "Your Mama" to Barzani. He, along with everyone else around here, knew insults like that weren't to be taken lightly.

But people have another major problem with Kurdistan journalists, and it's the first thing they'll tell you about. Kurdish journalists don't know how to write. I can't read Kurdish but I'm told that many articles are so badly written that they don't make any grammatical sense. An editor recently told me that he hires twice as many copyeditors as journalists at his paper to catch all the errors his writers make.

But it's not their fault.

Why? Remember that Kurds have been suppressed in this region for decades, and in some neighboring countries, the use of Kurdish is still illegal. Many adults in this region grew up speaking Kurdish but learning academically in Arabic. When Kurdistan became an autonomous region, they happily turned from the Arabic of their "suppressors" and busted out with Kurdish signs, Kurdish taught in schools, and Kurdish literature, songs and poetry that is celebrated. Kurdish is celebrated, but until now, not widely written by Kurdish people.

To make things even more complicated, Kurdish itself is a sticky business. Kurds have been geographically separated in recent years into four separate nations, and the language has grown apart into dialects that are almost totally different languages in themselves. In some places, Kurdish is written in Arabic-style lettering. In others, Latin letters are used. Even in parts of Iraq, Kurds can't understand one another. This is common for many languages with regional differences - such as German, where Swiss German, Austrian German and Bavarian German are radically different from one another. The Germans solved this by instituting a universal "High German", which pretty much all German speakers can understand.

Unfortunately, there is no "High Kurdish". Though all schools in Kurdistan now teach in Kurdish, textbooks must be printed in separate dialects according to region. And poets and literati who insist on writing in "pure" Kurdish, which uses latin letters that represent the roots of Kurdish from the Ottoman empire (before Arabs introduced Arabic lettering), are not understood by the vast majority of Arabic-schooled Kurdish speakers.

So, Kurdish writers are left to wing it, to make up the grammar and spelling and proper usage as they go along. I can only imagine this could make for some really compelling literature -after all, it was the flexibility of the English language that gave Shakespeare such leeway for brilliance in his day- but when daily news depends on clarity and brevity, overcoming a basic problem like an unstandardized language is no small feat.

As a news editor, one of my main jobs is to make sure that writers comply with standards - standard dictionary definitions, standard grammar, standard AP style. I double check sources, question iffy statements and make sure that everything that comes from the publications I edit are watertight so that people can get a straight story they can trust. As I learn more about the challenges of writing here, I can only admire the tenacity of the journalists and editors who are trying to apply Western standards of journalism in northern Iraq. Keeping the "six honest men" on the straight and narrow is hard enough without inventing a language as you go.

Neighborhood Fun Park

A couple of snaps from the local amusement park, just a few blocks from our house. Complete with bumper cars, a 3-D movie hall, and the most iffy ferris wheel I've ever seen. My favorite part? The bird sculptures all over the park.

WTF Iraq: Grassy Patches

As the team settles in, we've begun to explore our new neighborhood. There's one thing I keep noticing that defies explanation: The grassy patch.

This is a yard, culled from stolen land from the empty lot next door or across the street, tended lovingly by young kids who long to play trucks and soccer on the 7-foot-by-foot square of lawn, and often appropriated by dads who just need a little time to themselves at dusk.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Grassy Patch.

The ugly side of northern Iraq - Kurdistan Visa office

The Tiziano Project team has been busy preparing for our classes, which start next week. We've met with lots of officials, decorated our new digs with key purchases from the bazaar, and I even cooked a mean risotto last night to make up for all that felafel we've been surviving on. But one thing hasn't been going so well for us: Trying to get a three month visa for Kurdistan.

Let me say first, for being in Iraq, they really have their stuff together here. But the visa office is one place that still looks and functions like a war zone. A dirty amalgamation of tin shacks, shipping containers and horribly crowded and disorganized offices inside three floors of an un-airconditioned building... welcome to Iraq. Most of the officials speak very little English and each office, while technically numbered, may not actually be numbered, or numbered in arabic, or not numbered in order, or instead labeled something nonsensical like "Come in. Out Go."

Since I wasn't allowed to take any pictures, I went old school and drew a series of diagrams for what the typical process is for getting a one-month or three month visa. So far, after three days, we've only managed one month.






This story is obviously to be continued. Luckily the blood tests are good for six months!

Grant arrives, we explore the citadel

With our third mentor, Grant, in from a stint at the AP in Jerusalem, our team is now complete. That, combined with our impending move to a new house in Ankawa, things are starting to shape up with The Tiziano Project.



Then we headed up the hill for our first look at the citadel, an 8,000-year-old structure that is the longest inhabited citadel in the world. In recent years, the citadel was overrun by squatters, many of whom were kurds hiding from Saddam Hussein. So when UNESCO declared the citadel a world heritage site, they moved out the squatters to avoid further damaging the building structures.

We're working on a great story about the citadel, but for right now, I wanted to give you a feel for Erbil and what things look like from up there with a few pictures. Don't judge on the quality, just a few snaps with my point-and-shoot as we poked around:



Tomorrow we move into our new digs. It'll be the first time I'll be settled for more than a few weeks in something besides a hostel. Yay!

WTF Iraq: The first installment

This post marks the official start of my new series, WTF Iraq, in which I share with you freaky weird things as seen in everyday life here.

Let's start with these two:

It's so hot Erbil that the bazaar vendors face significant sun damage to their products. That, it seems, doesn't deter them from trying to sell their products anyway. I saw a stack of misshaped Kinder eggs for sale around the corner, ice cream with a whole first layer of ice-cream flavored puddle and now this, a power cord Jon bought in the bazaar for $6USD in the box. When he pulled it out at home, it looked like this:



Needless to say, they're not so good about returns here.

But here's the real freaky weird WTF of the day. Last night, while on a late night Felafel run, we found this sitting in the middle of the sidewalk:



That's right, boys and girls, a coffin. In the middle of the sidewalk, in front of a cell phone store. When we tried to ask the store owner who was inside the coffin, we couldn't get a real answer. After posting it on facebook, we learned that this coffin, as well as two others, are ancient graves from city leaders that were there long before the marketplace, street or sidewalk popped up. Everything else was built around it and shop owners look after the grave site as part of their daily business.

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.

Hello Iraq!

Two small tornados, six passport checks and a 10-hour drive later, I am officially inside Iraq. The day before yesterday’s border crossing was long, to say the least, piled in a car with three Kurdish men, who over the course of many hours asked Jon over and over again how he was doing and telling him that they were best friends, brothers, now. I was for the most part ignored, which was for the most part just fine with me.

After a three and a half hour drive to the border, we easily passed border control and the military guards even kindly let me take pictures in front of the “welcome to Kurdistan” sign. They thought it was pretty funny as I stood there with a thumbs up in front of the Iraqi border. In fact, they all took turns taking pictures in front of the sign with me on their camera phones, all six of them. I am very popular in Kurdistan.

It was supposed to be an easy couple of hours to Erbil, but we ended up making a stop along the way to one of the Kurdish men’s friend’s houses, who had gotten hit by a car about a month before. Within minutes of crossing the border I had my first experience with Iraqi Kurd hospitality. Inside the house, the entire family sat on cushions on the floor while the mother of the house (with a neck brace on) served all of us endless cups of chai and pistachios.

I was shocked to see the women in the family dressed to the nines, covered with spangled silks, sparkles and lots and lots of gold jewelry. One of the girls had just gotten married, and over the wedding albums they explained to me that it is traditional for the man’s family to buy the bride loads of gold jewelry at the time of the wedding. In addition to looking fabulous, the gold serves as a sort of investment dowry, pieces that the new couple can sell off over time when they need money for a house or a car. For now the young bride in this house was dripping with her new bounty, from her hair to her toes. Of course as we left they wanted to take pictures with us too… I felt very plain standing next to these gorgeous women and now each time a woman draped in black walks by, I wonder what is underneath.

When we finally arrived in Erbil after dark, we went straight to an outdoor tea garden where we ate and met up with our new Kurdish friend’s friends. It was a beautiful and elaborate place that served mostly Turkish food.

I’d like to say that our night ended happily there, but unfortunately we still had to check into our hotel. As it turns out, the hotel Jon usually goes to was fully booked… as were the next three we tried. We finally found a room in the grossest, dingiest most disgusting motel I’ve ever stayed in. No, really. The lights wouldn’t turn on and the bathroom had a Turkish toilet that stank up the place like a port-a-potty. Luckily, I was so exhausted that even the smell couldn’t stop me from passing out. I hoped this wasn’t an appropriate introduction to what will be the next few months in Iraq.