December 25, 2004

X-mas in Baghdad

Was actually pretty nice.

I didn't find a gym. In the US I can pretty much social-engineer my way into anything. Here you don't screw around. A sign as simple as "no parking" in front of a building will be followed with "deadly force authorized", there is no sneaking your way into anything here. It's approach slowly, ID (on lanyard around your neck) out, hands in plain sight, no fast moves, be polite. After the Basra suicide bombing all the guards are a little on edge.

Speaking of that bombing, it cost me my food. Last time I was here we ate at the Baghdad palace cafeteria, now the US Embassy is hogging the whole thing. So we we're eating at the camp of a large military contractor a short car ride away. I went by yesterday for breakfast and my badge no longer worked -- "active duty personnel" only now. So I went to the Pizza Inn for breakfast (yeah, there's a Pizza Inn here, it's doing great business over by the PX). It's not clear yet what we'll do for food going forward.

I drove around yesterday in what would be a nice big 7 series BMW back home, but is a beat-to-death car here that hasn't seen a service interval in years. We've got a bunch of German cars, and all of their dashes are lit up like X-mas trees with "service interval" or "check engine" and "headlight out" "taillight out" "ECU" "wiper fluid low" "..." every service indicator is lit. What's weird is that every time you get in the car you have to check the wheel wells and under the vehicle (for bombs), a procedure I'm happy to follow. I hopped into a Mercedes here the other day and noticed the door was kinda heavy. A brief inspection showed that it was lightly armored, the guy driving it for the last two months didn't even notice. I swear that opening a car armoring shop here would be like having a license to print money, armored cars go for $100k and up, many costing over a quarter of a mil -- and there is no end to demand in site.

We'll have our own gym finished in early Jan, meanwhile I found a nice run that takes me up two levels of security. So, aside from finding a gym, that's about the best x-mas present I could have gotten.

I'll actually need to get to work today (it's 4-something a.m., jetlag denies me sleep right now), we had Friday off and Saturday was X-mas so I haven't done much yet. I'm not particularly optimistic about this place anymore. I understand that our counterparts are difficult/impossible to get ahold of, meetings are hard to schedule, and enthusiasm is low. We'll see what I can make of it.

Oh yeah, we had a nice X-mas dinner here at camp. I brought in a bunch of food from Amman on my way over (like 10 kilos worth) that was pre-bought for me, and everyone had scrounged around here too. We had roasted chicken, beef kebabs, stuffing, mash potatoes, cauliflower, wine, egg nog (kinda), Christmas music from someone's i-pod. It was a nice evening.

When we were onto dessert we heard the booom ... booom .... booom of far off mortars. A newly arrived contractor had just gone outside for a smoke and ran back in terrified, "that was really close!", she said. The rest of us shook our heads. "Nah, those were far off, when they're close you'll feel the air pressure in the trailer change", I replied, thinking I was being helpful. She didn't seem helped. The mortars continued, someone turned up the music until we couldn't hear them anymore.

Party resumed.

Posted by rick at December 25, 2004 06:11 PM