Talk about a grueling flight. I left DC around 6:30 in the evening, arriving in Heathrow around 7:30 AM (had a very amiable seat partner but no sleep) and took off from London at 1 PM. Landed in Amman at 9 PM and took off for Iraq at 12:30 AM! It was a rather dizzyingly low on sleep time
I think the bags under my eyes grew bags. They were breeding, I tell you. My amiable seat partner was a music comp student turned economics person and we had a very nice discussion about music and business. Much better then the two very drunk Greek boys from my first cross Atlantic flight. Heathrow is a monstrous airport in the best of times, and it is currently undergoing an expansion project. The bus ride to the next terminal definitely exposed the underworkings of the airport industry! I finished a novel and a half in my layover time. I had considered going into London, but was so dead tired that I deemed it the better par of sanity to stay put. The fly over London was quite nice though, I didn't realize that the Thames gets so small at times. I made a game of “spot the estate”, and by the time we flew over the Channel, I was up to 6. After an exhausting layover in Amman, we boarded our flight to Sulaimaniya at 12:30 AM. It took over two hours for the flight to work it's way through passport control as they only had one person working on foreign passports (terrible idea that). I got to the waiting area where a hoards of family members were waiting to collect their people, and saw noone I recognized. On the verge of panic and meltdown inspired by a lack of internet and cell phone I worriedly hung about the door. About 10 minutes of this later, a man came up to me and said “Haji Rasul?” After that I just gave up the very difficult task worrying and we set off for Sulaimaniya. I've discovered that you must have a great deal of trust in the goodness of strangers when you travel. He deposited me in a grateful heap of very tired Joanna at Haji's house where I collapsed for quite a long time.
I'm back in Iraq. I keep repeating this to myself in a mantra like way. I'm back in Iraq. If you had asked me at Christmas last year, or even May of last year, I would have said that there was no way I would ever return. Maybe to visit. But to live? Yeah, no. That plan took a nosedive when I was offered the job here. I took one look at the articles being written about the American economy and the serious lack of job creation and said yes. Fast forward several months and I'm sitting in a white and chrome office with Kurdish floating by my head in an incomprehensible babble as I prepare for my English class. I sit trying to decipher the difference between copy write and trademarked so that I can explain it to my class of company board members. I've yet to be allowed to do the rest of my job, a combination of office assistant and English/cultural adviser. Maybe this will pick up when the companies license to practice business in the States comes through. I've got a list sitting on my desktop of things to buy when my first paycheck comes through. First on the list is cell phone so that I can actually communicate with the friends that I have here in Iraq. I go back and forth from the office to "home" with no deviations. I have a basement apartment in my bosses enormous townhouse and while there is a bit more pink involved then I would like, it's not so bad. I spend about two hours every evening helping his kids with their English homework and try to figure out how to get Rosetta Stone working properly again so I can continue my study of Arabic and I hope to pick up French as well this year. It won't help for this job, but it definitely will for traveling later in life. So here's hoping that a healthy dose of motivation and sticktoitiveness will be coming my way soon. Adjusting. It happens every time something new comes along. At least this time around things are semi-familiar.
