Beirut

I am reluctant to write too much about what life in Beirut is like, lest I am accused of selling out or murdered by a bitter humanitarian worker who was sent on a deployment where you can't watch rock legends live in concert or drive an hour to go skiing with a sea view.  Therefore I won't mention the Guns n Roses show or the quality of the snow in the mountains.

On my first weekend in Beirut a colleague invited a few of us to watch her judge a tattoo contest in a nightclub.  No tattooing was conducted – instead the contestants revealed their tattoos and explained their origins in the Lebanese mixture of English, French and Arabic.  The more attractive or drunk ones danced about a bit.  There was a stunning likeness of Lenin on one fellow’s shoulder, rubbing cheeks with Che Guevera, and another had Lenin on his chest.  I don’t know if the Beirut tattoo scene is a hotbed of communist thought; in fact the second one could also have been the Argentine footballer Juan Sebastian Veron so I won’t speculate further.

A few days ago the prime minister of Lebanon and his entire cabinet resigned, leaving the country without a government.  Political turmoil is so familiar here that people barely noticed.  Our security detail sent us each a text message warning us of celebratory gunfire from some factions and the other kind of gunfire from the other factions, and advising us to "avoid areas associated with political tension", so I guess we all have to leave the country.

I play football twice a week with a nice group in Burj Al Borajne, where Hezbollah hang out.  Sometimes we hear deafening AK47 fire coming from behind a wall just beyond the touchline, but no one is bothered - it is just an arms dealer testing his wares.

I spent a pleasant couple of days at our office in Qubaiyat, in the hills by Lebanon’s northern border with Syria.  When our field office here has visitors they are put up in the guest rooms of the Convent de la Paix, and I was disappointed not to pass gaggles of giggling trainee nuns on my way to breakfast.

Garish decor in my bedroom at the convent

We are distributing winter clothing and shelter kits to Syrians who have crossed the border in search of a land where bombs don't keep falling on their heads.  Our logistics manager got sun-burnt at a winter clothes distribution recently which made us wonder whether a bikini and flip-flop distribution would be more appropriate, but it still gets cold at night in the mountains.  To try and make it look like I'm actually doing useful work and not just smoking shisha and dancing on bars, here are some photos of a recent distribution in Qubaiyat.

Field Manager Suleiman briefs the team before the mayhem begins

Outside the school and distribution centre, before
this area resembled the mosh pit at a Slayer concert

UNICEF clothes - high on quantity, low on fashion quality

Tarps in hand, boxes of age-appropriate clothes on their way hopefully

Inspecting the wares

2 blankets per child - some of the larger families
had trouble getting all this stash home on the bus

The end of Jordan

On a spare weekend in Jordan I visited Petra, recently voted one of the seven modern wonders of the world along with Ankor Wat and the Taj Mahal tandoori on Peckham High Street.  Modern is stretching it a bit when it comes to Petra which is pretty old by most standards, but it sure is a wonder.  After wandering the mile of the siq, the narrow crack in the rock where it is impossible to proceed without singing the Indiana Jones theme song, the moment where you catch a glimpse of the Treasury, presumably where Petra’s ATMs were, is magical.  The most amazing sight of the day, though, was the lady taking a photo of her son at the opening of the siq with her BACK to the Treasury and lots of tourists in the background of the photo.

Is that an ATM up ahead?

The Nabateans constructed some amazing tombs for their kings in the cliffs, and very efficiently installed a great many cold drinks shacks, souvenir shops and public lavatories nearby.

What the Nabatean kings would have looked like had they been entombed before being actually dead

An impression of a sacrificial victim on the altar at the High Place of Sacrifice

After Petra it was off to Wadi Rum to follow in the footsteps of TE Lawrence and roam the desert with tea towel on head.  Camping with the Bedouin was pretty good, and the scenery is stunning, but the selection of tourist sights on offer are limited to places where Lawrence may or may not have performed various functions.  Our guide also seemed to have little grip of the distinction between the historical character and the film; I think he believed that Lawrence was followed at great speed by a camera crew as he led the Arabs into battle.  Most disappointing of all was that we didn’t even learn where he got the inspiration for Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

This proves that ancient man had no imagination

The next day in Amman it was back down to earth.  The lock to my flat broke and could not be opened from the inside.  I called someone at the office, she called a man and he eventually turned up under the balcony and called for the key to be thrown down.  I reminded him that the door could not be opened from the inside.  He picked up the key, mounted the stairs, opened the door from the outside, came in and shut the door.  There were now two of us locked in the flat.  I was secretly hoping that he would call a friend who would do the same thing and soon the flat would be swarming with prisoners, but we were able to spring the lock quickly and safely with a carving knife covered in butter.

The next day I was called suddenly to Beirut to my great dismay, as I had just purchased a family-sized carnet of bar vouchers for the British Club in Amman.

Amman

After many months of sweating in inhospitable, insecure field locations, I've at last landed on my feet. As I wait for a visa for the inhospitable, insecure land of Yemen I'm holed up in Amman, where the draft beer flows, the range of cheeses in the supermarket is comprehensive and the football pitch at the British Embassy club is of the latest third generation astroturf.

This is actually a place people come on holiday, and the exotic Petra and admittedly inhospitable but still fun Dead Sea await, provided the Yemeni Government are decent enough to delay my visa for long enough.

Last weekend my friends and I visited the car collection of the late king Hussein, who spent so much time buying and racing cars that it's amazing he found any time for ruling. He was the rally champion of all Jordan, which brings the Roman Emperor Commodus to mind.  He lost his first boxing bout, his opponent then accidentally cut his own head off while shaving, and Commodus curiously went the rest of his career undefeated.

We also visited the Roman amphitheatre and Citadel. The latter is most useful as a vantage point for the Giant Flag - no one is quite sure why such a big flag is needed, but its flagpole used to be the tallest in the world before the big-flag-loving Jordanians trumped it with one in Aqaba and then themselves were beaten by a big flag in Tajikistan, the new world leaders in massive flags. That's probably enough about flags.

Outside the Citadel we had various bitter arguments with taxi drivers over the price of the ride - we eventually found a taxi man who refused payment as our destination was so close, thereby proving all the other taxi drivers in Amman to be outrageous liars.

We looked for the national gallery of fine art, but couldn't find it. In my limited Arabic I asked several people for 'the museum of pictures' and all confidently directed us into nearby shops. They would then stand and watch us go, forcing us to enter the shops, where we would ask the proprietor, who would beamingly point us to another shop. Thus did we pass a pleasant Saturday afternoon.

In Amman, the trucks carrying gas cylinders play ice-cream van music. No one has been able to explain this phenomenon.

The King's Harley - Wadi Rum background helpfully provided

If you were the King, your number plate would look like that too

This was hidden behind a Porsche GT and had no blurb, but looks like it isn't
due to be invented for a few years - not sure where King Hussein got it from

How a Roman orator would have looked in the Amphitheatre

Big flag - disappointing lack of wind

Skiing

The Kurdish winter is bitterly cold, so thank goodness I was able to escape it by going up an icy mountain in France for a week of knocking over frozen trees with my face.

Most of my holidaying companions parallel-turned their way out of the womb and think nothing of weaving between spruces as they hurtle down sheer cliffs, but as the closest I'd come to skiing was playing 5-a-side at a sports centre that had a dry slope I signed up for ski school.  I had the misfortune to have borrowed a skiing jacket that was the exact same blend of red and white as the tops sported by the instructors of the Ecole de Ski Francais, and spent the whole week peering nervously over my shoulder, expecting to see a class of French 5-year-olds formed into a wobbly train behind me.  As it was, the only time I was mistaken for an instructor was when an English couple thought I was coming to help them teach their small son to ski, and watched in horror as I wrestled him to the ground in front of them.

Ski school was a lot of fun, although in the most part I think my class resembled the school for retards annual day out.  A would crash into B, knocking him over; C and D would help B to his feet and both fall over in the process; E would come hurtling down the slope and knock A into the pile of bodies.  Our instructor had been instructing in Morzine for 45 years and by the end of the week he could keep most of us upright most of the time, as long as we kept well away from each other.

Patrice and his class - combined experience 45 years and one month

Ski lifts are a source of constant danger, as getting off a four-man lift involves skiing in a straight line down a little slope while essentially forming a quarter of an eight-legged beast.  If any of the beast's components are unsteady on their skis, or waggle their poles a little too enthusiastically, spectacular falls can ensue.  Onlookers will be hoping that the next car will deliver its four-headed beast straight into the chaos.  I was involved in my share of ski-lift accidents, managing at one point to snap my pole between the legs of the unfortunate fellow to my right.  The prize, however, goes to one of my companions, who planted his pole onto the ski of a small child and glided off elegantly while the child went into a tail-spin and buried himself head first into the snow right in front of the next four people to arrive on the lift.

We stayed in a luxury chalet, complete with hot tub and chalet boy and girl who attended to our every need.  This was brilliant, although the hot tub was out of order and the chalet staff toasted the new year with some chemical that required them both to be rushed to hospital just before they were supposed to cook our breakfast.  The man next door came to our rescue and by 9.30am I was terrorising the children on the slopes.

My rusty schoolboy french was wheeled out, with mixed results.  I confused the words 'oreilles' and 'oiseaux' when describing a lost hat, baffling the man in the bureau de lost propertie, who couldn't understand why a hat needed flaps to protect the birds.  On a ski lift with three English people I accidentally answered the question "are you from Morzine?" by saying "yes", was too embarrassed to recant and had to spend the rest of the ride pretending to be a monosyllabic Frenchman.

A day with Kurdish military intelligence

Not sated by the 24/7 party lifestyle here, I've signed up for a bit more in January.  I've been here for two and a half months without the Kurdish government being very bothered, but my desire to come back for another month has led to a flurry of official paperwork, cross-examination and blood-letting (HIV test).  The Kurdish intelligence service demanded an interview, where peculiar questions were posed.  I gave details of the full names of my mother, father and sister, so I apologise if you get arrested by a dark-skinned man with a bushy black moustache in the coming weeks.  They were also interested to learn which floor of my apartment building I lived on, which is clearly of great importance to national security.



One half-day in the bowels of the intelligence building wasn't enough, and my colleague and I were summoned the next day.  Turns out that another NGO operates here with a very similar name (in fact the same name with "in Kurdistan" tagged on the end), and the employees were found to be smuggling gold after a routine fact-finding government raid.  Cue lots of questions of the nature "why were you smuggling gold?"  Eventually the fact that we weren't dressed in fur coats and carrying ivory canes convinced them to let us go.



Elsewhere, life has carried on.  We're busy ordering winter clothes to send to the chilly youngsters in the refugee camps, so job-lots of Ugg boots and Hely Hanson ski jackets or similar should be on their way there soon.  On a conference call last week somebody in Baghdad gave a long account in arabic of something, so I passed the time by practising my arabic writing in my notebook.  One of my colleagues noticed and said "wow, you're taking notes in arabic" so I showed him what I'd written.  "Yesterday I went into town and saw a big dog and the king of Jordan" wasn't what the guy on the call was saying, but I think my linguistic skills earned me a little respect nonetheless.



Photography is not welcomed in military buildings so I don't have any shots of the intelligence officers. Instead here is a photo of a bottle of handwash that just turned up in our bathroom.  Good to get some romance in the bathroom.

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.