10 Things They Didn't Tell You About Iraq

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10 Things They Didn't Tell You About Iraq
Topic Started: Apr 26 2009, 05:49 AM (122 Views)
Sayf Udeen Ismaeel	Apr 26 2009, 05:49 AM Post #1
Icon by meagan_chelsea @ LJ Posts: 7,578 Group: Admins Member #1 Joined: May 2, 2008 Gender Male Religious Views Muslim Political View All over the shop.	1. Plastic flowers are an integral part of life. When I arrived in The Times' bureau, one of the Iraqi staff placed a vase full of plastic lilies on the table to welcome me. The Times' office itself looks like a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with plastic vines trained around the picture frames and an orange plastic shrub flourishing in the corner. The many, many checkpoints in have pots of plastic flowers balanced on the concrete barriers, restaurants are covered in them, and I saw one market stall entirely devoted to selling enough garlands to supply a hundred Hawaiian fancy dress parties. 2. The sandstorms close the airport and empty the streets. That in itself is known about, because it affects combat operations. What they don't tell you, though, is what sandstorms do to your look. After a "sand day" in Baghdad, my hair was so dry and frizzy that it would stay upright if I ran my hands through it. It felt like goat hair. Even my eyebrows went curly; I looked like Susan Boyle. 3. There are tourists as well as terrorists here. Not Western tourists, sure, but tourists nonetheless. People are flooding into Iraq from the Gulf, Syria, Lebanon but most of all from Iran to visit mosques and shrines. Most of them are Shia and, in Kerbala, the holiest Shia place, there are thousands of foreigners and hundreds of market stalls selling candy-coloured prayer beads, Kerbala snow domes, kebabs and tea, and new hotels are opening. The death of hundreds of Iranian pilgrims this week in suicide bombings is a sad sign that there are now so many of them, they have become a target. 4. Baghdad is really green. A river city, not a desert wasteland, its parks and public spaces are now being cared for again, but most impressive are the thousands of palm trees and other trees everywhere. From the roof of the hotel, Baghdad is a sea of palm leaves with buildings in between. Central Baghdad, anyway. I guess Sadr City probably isn't that lush. 5. There are people who seem untouched by the war, and pretty much everything else, too. Driving from Baghdad to Kirkuk, there were clusters of mud brick villages in the desert, where everything was the colour of bleached sand, and the houses didn't have satellite dishes. There were men in grey dishdashes and ancient keffiyehs herding sheep around the occasional palm tree. They looked like pictures of ancient Mesopotamia. 6. They do a weird thing with fish. In the street, there are guys who split a fish and flatten it out, then put it in a metal device that looks like two tennis racquets and put it on the edge of a circular barbecue-type pit of coals. It's called mesgoof, and in Baghdad they do it with carp - James Hider says its full of tiny bones - but in Basra apparently they do it with a sea fish, like a flounder, and it has aphrodisiac qualities. The women make it on Thursday night, I've been told, to encourage their husbands to start the weekend with gusto. 7. Iraqis love disco. This may be an unfair extrapolation, but after a road trip punctuated with Abba medleys, and tales from a friend of the BeeGees on loop while spending time with Iraqi friends, I'm starting to associate Iraq with synths and falsetto. 8. The world's third-largest mosque (after Mecca and Medina) looms on the Baghdad skyline. Started by Saddam, Al Rahman mosque was never finished and it's spooky and vast. It looks a bit like a spaceship, or rather like hundreds of R2D2s of different shapes and sizes clustered together. Cranes tower above it, and the Shia and Sunni militia have fought over it. If anyone ever finishes it, it's going to be magnificent and hideous in equal measure. 9. There are loads of shops selling furniture and homewares who have their merchandise out on the street. The best are the shops that only sell headboards. They specialise in huge, carved wooden things which look a bit like the brontosaurus ribs Fred Flintstone eats in the opening credits of The Flintstones. 10. It's so fattening. After a few days of eating sheep, rice, bread and chicken, I knew my descent into morbid obesity if I stayed here was sealed when we were in a traffic jam. A boy knocked on the window of the car selling not gum or tissues, as they do in so many places, but dozens of bags of candy floss which he was carrying on a stick. We had just eaten an epic lunch with five types of starch, and were all stuffed to the point of incapacity. But one of the guys bought two bags of candy floss anyway, and offered me some. I was so full I literally thought I might die if I ate it but I figured in war-raddled country of where they put plastic flowers on their checkpoints and disco on the stereo, dying of a surfeit of candy floss would be kind of a suitably kitsch way to go, so I took the risk. This time, I lived to bite another day. http://timesonline.typepad.com/inside_iraq_weblog/2009/04/10-things-i-never-knew-about-iraq.html How true are these? What are your thoughts?



Redneck	Apr 27 2009, 04:18 AM Post #2
Posts: 264 Group: Members Member #48 Joined: May 25, 2008 Gender Male Political View Liberal Facist	I'd assume most are true. The resillience of human beings is amazing. Throughout history terrible shit has gone on and people have had to live their lives through it. I didn't know the reason behind the plastic flowers, but I have worked with Iraqi's and they do love their plastic flowers. Oh and that cooked fish, is awesome. I tried it at some cultural festival last year because it smelled to good to pass up.



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