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.