About town

Today we threw caution and security regulations to the wind and gorged ourselves on what Sulaimaniyah has to offer the thrill-seeker and pleasure-lover.  It took about 20 minutes.

Actual contents may differ

We began with a visit to Nawroz Tourism Park, whose ferris wheel can be seen across town like a beacon to hedonism.  The pictures of log-flumes full of people howling with delight on the sign were clearly more figurative than actual, and seem to have been taken at Disneyland or similar.  It was hard to tell if the park was open or not, but we didn't go in as unfortunately each of us was carrying a cylinder of gas, forbidden under park rules.

We didn't miss much, as the dodgems were all grounded, the zombies in the House of Horrors had all gone to work for the Iraqi government and the ferris wheel hadn't revolved since before the french revolution.

On our way back we found a good place to join Santa for a drink but apparently it isn't love time until well after dark.  No matter, for soon we found a cafe serving turkish coffee (the kind that you have to eat with a spoon) and delicious cakes.  Best of all, it was outside the four walls of this compound.

The smiles are in honour of being outside Pak City

It's actually been an excellent weekend, as last night we had a fabulous thanksgiving dinner with the cooking directed by the mother of the Child Protection manager by live TV link-up from Plymouth, Massachusetts.  We also drank home-made mead (a kind of honey wine), which had absolutely no effect on us, as the pictures below will prove.

Shake 'n Bake Apartments

We live in Pak City, a clump of nine high-rise apartment blocks that were built in about three days as a convenient method of laundering some of the grubby cash floating around these parts.  The flats are spacious, airy and well designed, and much nicer than most of the places I've lived.  Occasionally, though, you get a reminder of the fact that it took two Turkish families their lunch break for a couple of weeks to knock these buildings together.  Shutting the bin in the kitchen had the side effect of causing part of the doorframe to fall off.  The buttons for the lift on our floor were put on upside down, with the result that for three weeks I pressed down and couldn't understand why the lift would insist that I picked up an Armenian family on the tenth floor before heading downstairs.

Going up

I tend to take the stairs these days, partly for fitness reasons and partly because I harbour a secret fear that the lift will get stuck and the 'call operator' button will turn out to have been drawn on with a crayon.

Finally, and this is no fault of the builders, the blood from some long-forgotten meat has leaked and frozen in our freezer, so my peas rest on what you would get if Fergus Henderson started producing ice lollies.

The latest pudding at St John, London

I'm still here because Iraq has changed its mind on how it issues visas, so to go anywhere other than Kurdistan requires a phenomenal amount of effort on the part of one's admin department.  I'm told that the trick is to fly to Basra and from there to Baghdad, because for some reason Baghdad no longer recognises the Iraqi embassy in Jordan.  If you don't believe that there can possibly be such ruinous lack of communication within different parts of an organisation then you've obviously never tried to order a credit card over the phone with Santander.