Cabin Fever

I've been in this compound for three weeks now, with brief excursions to the shops, a Saturday afternoon walk and a trip to a Turkish restaurant where we shared no common language with any of the waiting staff.  Meanwhile on my doorstep is Sulaimaniyah, whose throbbing nightlife Lonely Planet urges travellers to visit before the hordes arrive.

Soon I will be living in a windowless house in Baghdad so I should probably save a post called Cabin Fever for then, but at least then I won't have a sixth floor balcony looking out over town.  Just over the compound fence is Sarchinar football club.  When I watch their Friday afternoon game from my balcony I am reminded of the Far Side cartoon where a cat presses itself against a window through which two trucks have collided and spilled their contents.  The trucks are labelled Bob's Assorted Rodents and Al's Small Flightless Birds.

Venue for Friday's game: Rodents v Birds

Someone else who was desperate to get out was one of my colleagues, who has a hilarious story about his passage to England to seek asylum about a decade ago.  He made the channel crossing sitting on the  roof of the driver's cabin of a lorry, absolutely motionless for 13 hours to avoid detection.  Before his asylum hearing he'd been advised to pretend to speak no English, on the absurd basis that he must have been undeclared in Britain for months in order to learn it.  He duly starred at the judge and shrugged when asked any questions, but his cover was blown when the judge spotted him reading what she was writing down and she threw his case out.  He spent two more years in London, having further adventures, mostly in the pizza restaurant business.  Maybe I'll write more about him later.

I did get out last week to register as a resident of Kurdistan.  You are supposed to have a blood test to see if you are HIV positive and intend to share it with the locals, but for some reason they took one look at me and waived this requirement.  If I thought hard enough I could probably think of a reason to be offended.  I have an ID card that makes me look rather fat and incredibly smug.

Fat and smug