E got his hair cut today. Fresh! Looks niiiiice.
And we got to have a little adventure as well. One of the best Saturdays so far, to tell the truth. We went out with a driver to another of the military bases in the IZ to do some shopping, to see what there was to see, and perhaps to snag some authentic local food if we were lucky. Wonder of wonders, we did all that and more! It almost felt like a "normal" weekend day. (I won't go into all the asides that come to mind as soon as I typed that sentence.... all the reasons why it isn't in fact normal, only "normal," but I'll let the punctuation do its job.)
So after shopping in the palace that has been converted into a double-layered hexagonal mall of sorts, we stopped at the barber. To my relief, this barber's shipping container (since that what serves for buildings around here, almost as often as not) was air conditioned. Ahhhh. A nice break after the mall. Which was not.
And I picked up the Cosmopolitan sitting there on the coffee table, but after thumbing through a few pages I had to put it down. It's so much about sex, and here I am the one woman I've seen for the last hour in any direction....sitting in this air conditioned container with foreign men on my left and foreign men on my right..... I couldn't do it.
Instead I started talking again with our driver. Our driver (as you know from our previous adventures, drivers are often our best guides/interpreters of the local scene as well as Arabic conversationalists) had started chatting with the man on his right. He had come in from the shop next door. Perhaps for a haircut himself. Or perhaps just for a bit of cool. They were talking about the lack of electricity. (These containers on the military base can run off of generators the USG provides. Off our mini-grid though, power is unpredictable at best.)
I listened for a bit, and our driver brought me into the conversation, saying, you know, before the dictator's time, they had everything here. Now, after he is gone, they can't even run their lights or air conditioning. It's a very difficult life. The line of discussion ran through the current leaders of various parties. Who is making what separatist kinds of statements, who is allying with whom against whom. But it kept centering back to: who is going to get the power going again so we can get back to work?
It's basic stuff. That's what I read about in the papers too. Iraqis protesting the lack of services. Still I was surprised to find these concerns so real, and so close at hand. In a country with so many resources, happiness--and perhaps even some amount of peace--depends on when regular people can get the kind of electricity and basic services they had decades ago but haven't been able to re-establish.
And we got to have a little adventure as well. One of the best Saturdays so far, to tell the truth. We went out with a driver to another of the military bases in the IZ to do some shopping, to see what there was to see, and perhaps to snag some authentic local food if we were lucky. Wonder of wonders, we did all that and more! It almost felt like a "normal" weekend day. (I won't go into all the asides that come to mind as soon as I typed that sentence.... all the reasons why it isn't in fact normal, only "normal," but I'll let the punctuation do its job.)
So after shopping in the palace that has been converted into a double-layered hexagonal mall of sorts, we stopped at the barber. To my relief, this barber's shipping container (since that what serves for buildings around here, almost as often as not) was air conditioned. Ahhhh. A nice break after the mall. Which was not.
And I picked up the Cosmopolitan sitting there on the coffee table, but after thumbing through a few pages I had to put it down. It's so much about sex, and here I am the one woman I've seen for the last hour in any direction....sitting in this air conditioned container with foreign men on my left and foreign men on my right..... I couldn't do it.
Instead I started talking again with our driver. Our driver (as you know from our previous adventures, drivers are often our best guides/interpreters of the local scene as well as Arabic conversationalists) had started chatting with the man on his right. He had come in from the shop next door. Perhaps for a haircut himself. Or perhaps just for a bit of cool. They were talking about the lack of electricity. (These containers on the military base can run off of generators the USG provides. Off our mini-grid though, power is unpredictable at best.)
I listened for a bit, and our driver brought me into the conversation, saying, you know, before the dictator's time, they had everything here. Now, after he is gone, they can't even run their lights or air conditioning. It's a very difficult life. The line of discussion ran through the current leaders of various parties. Who is making what separatist kinds of statements, who is allying with whom against whom. But it kept centering back to: who is going to get the power going again so we can get back to work?
It's basic stuff. That's what I read about in the papers too. Iraqis protesting the lack of services. Still I was surprised to find these concerns so real, and so close at hand. In a country with so many resources, happiness--and perhaps even some amount of peace--depends on when regular people can get the kind of electricity and basic services they had decades ago but haven't been able to re-establish.
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