You can go home again

Breathing a big sigh of relief right now. The federal government has shut down but I’m one of the people still cleared to work, however, I got an email telling me to “remain in TDY status,” which I interpreted as “stay where you are until the whole thing blows over.” Fortunately, I learned that’s not the case. What the person meant was “continue as planned and go home as scheduled.” That is a huge relief because I’m due to return to Baghdad at the end of the year and am there long enough to, hopefully, do some paperwork and some laundry and then repack and head off to my three-week vacation. Erbil is nice in its own way, but there’s no place like home.

Beyond school, I’ve never taken three weeks off at once, and it’s a lot of planning. My hope was to get stuff paid for in advance so that I will have empty credit cards once I land. As a result, the thought of having to postpone or cancel the trip was freaking me out. I think in one day last week, I charged four side trips that averaged $200 each, and that’s only a portion of what I’ve pre-paid. With few exceptions, lodging and transport (trains and planes) have all been charged and paid in advance. This is going to be a trip like Alaska was for me: really big and so expensive I really don’t want to know what the total cost winds up being.

It’ll probably be my only grand scale trip, though. I’ll get four long vacations in the year and a half I’m here but the next one is to America and the last one will be my first cruise, so it’ll be paid off before I depart. The remaining one is up in the air but I’m not in any rush to plan it and package tour sounds good to me.

Erbil is still good, too, although I am really chilly right now. Our housing units are on par with Morocco’s but most of the rooms have individual wall AC/heat units. To go from my room to the kitchen, I have to leave a warm fuzzy room with a nice rug and walk over cold tile through a room with cold, concrete walls before I get to the kitchen. There’s a heating unit in there, but since the door to the wide-open hallway is always open, it’s usually not worth it to turn it on.

I spent quite a bit of time in there over the weekend because we had a Christmas potluck dinner and I offered to bring mashed potatoes. Since I was the only one bringing them and you have to have mashed potatoes for Christmas, I bought a huge amount of potatoes. Scrubbing and chopping them kept me warm, and then I went to boil them. There were two giant pots in the cabinet and it took both of them. Although the potatoes would almost all fit into the bigger pot, water did not. I wound up spending about an hour boiling them so I could then mash them. It was warm.

And thank God, there was a potato masher. When I volunteered to bring mashed potatoes, it didn’t occur to me that a kitchen could not have a potato masher. I mean, I own two. But I hadn’t checked before I bought the taters, so I was really relieved when I found them in the third drawer I ransacked.

Fortunately, there was a cutting board. I hadn’t known this until my second morning. I make hash browns and eggs and couldn’t initially find the cutting board but on the second morning, I found it hiding behind the clean dish rack.

 

One of my roommates, the one from Albany, has been here for months and didn’t know about the cutting board. I timed my potatoes so she could have time, room and pots to make enough deviled eggs to feed a refugee camp. As a result, I’d abandoned the kitchen for warmer pastures and didn’t notice she was slicing eggs and chopping scallions on a plate. When I circled back later, she lamented about the lack of a cutting board, I showed her where it lived. She had no idea, poor thing. It was a lot of eggs and scallions.

In other news, I still haven’t seen “The Mule,” but hope to on my vacation. No clue if it’s playing in Oz, but we’ll see. Anyway, in doing a slightly stalker-ish Internet search for a different reason, I discovered that Toby Keith sings a song for the movie and there’s a video with clips from the movie.

I found Karen! She is behind Dianne Wiest, wearing the ivory dress and sitting with her movie husband. I can’t wait to see the movie. Clint Eastwood rocks.

There once was a woman who lived in a CHU. Thankfully, it wasn’t me.

We had container housing units at Hope Village. You might not have seen these, but you can picture them: A tractor-trailer, minus the tractor, divided into a couple of rooms. That’s a container housing unit, or CHU. Hope Village’s didn’t have any sort of plumbing because we had a separate trailer for it, but the ones here in Erbil are “wet,” meaning they have a tiny bathroom in them. But no kitchen or washer and dryer, two things that I really appreciate for a three-week TDY.

Fortunately, I am not living in a CHU. Instead, I’m in a giant house that’s designated for female TDYers here. Right now, there are three of us. The other two are in two of the three upstairs bedrooms, which is also where the washers and a bathroom are. I’m currently the lone occupant of the downstairs, which consists of 2-3 bedrooms (really it’s three, but one is half the size of the others and only contains an iron), a giant kitchen, a bath and a half, an oversized hallway that’s both longer and wider than some bedrooms I’ve had, and 2-3 oddly configured sitting room/living room/formal dining rooms. I think these used to be two separate rooms, because there are two doors within a two feet of each other that lead to the oversized hallway.

They’re nice digs for a couple of weeks and I’ve really enjoyed cooking. Since the temporary employees meander in and out, it’s kind of hostel-like (though absolutely not hostile). There’s a lot of random leftover ingredients laying around, like pasta, spinach and garlic.

Since basically our compound here is literally a couple of city blocks, there are little grocery stores (smaller than 7/11s) that sell the basics, which is perfect for me since I’m a basic kind of person. I got rice, macaroni (I didn’t know about the cache at first), milk and eggs and then loaded up with carrots, onions and potatoes when the veggie guy came.

And I got outside! The coordinator sent out an email for a supply run (my employer would capitalize the “s” and “r” but I refuse to). I didn’t even know where it was but I signed up. I just wanted to go “outside.”

Oh what fun! The outside world! Iraq! Lovely Erbil, Iraq. Which, since most cities look very similar, a lot like anyplace in Turkey, Morocco and Jordan, but who cares, right? I was outside!

Only a few people can go, and since we don’t drive, we all went together in a motorpool ride. Everything’s coordinated and such, so we only had an hour, but that was plenty time to hit the grocery store, what since I didn’t need groceries and all. I did manage to buy these cookies I discovered in Istanbul that are basically Twix bars, brownie mix (we’re doing a Christmas potluck), a couple Snickers bars, milk and juice. Oh, and, quite randomly, a nail file. I’d tried to buy one from both Target and Walmart, but neither would allow the $1 metal item to be shipped to me. And then I found one in Erbil, go figure. Also about $1, but most everything else seemed cheaper. I got a heavy bag of groceries, handed over a $20, and got enough change to go to the coffee shop next door and have Iraqi tea, which, let’s get real, is the same thing as Turkish tea. Not a bad thing, of course.

The downside of the whole “outside” trip was me managing to pull my back getting out of the car, which, since we’re American, was a giant Suburban or something similar. By bad luck of the draw, I was in the back seat and, getting out, managed to step out in massive pain. If I had been anywhere else but on my one shot at being “outside,” I would have gone back to bed. I hurt so bad and basically eased myself through the whole shopping trip. At one point, I went for a bag of rice on the bottom shelf and instantly regretted it.

What it is with backs that makes them somehow susceptible to the silliest movements? I remember two other times when I hurt myself. One was playing softball, when I reached down to get a ball at the backstop and couldn’t get up. The other was when I went to play with Kocur, who was more than delighted that I brought myself down to her level and then couldn’t get back up. So much more convenient to play with her, right?

Yesterday after the “supply run,” I pretty much loafed around in pain. I’d gotten up early and ran, so I didn’t feel bad about that, but I did eat a Snickers, a small bag of malted milk balls (alas, not Whoppers, but he best I could do) and a Twix-ish cookie, but that was over the course of a long day, not in a sitting.

With a little of the scrounging thing, I also tracked down some chicken that clearly had been in the freezer for longer than my two roommates had been here, so they were fair game. I had baked chicken and rice plus spinach.

And Star Wars. For some reason, two of the channels here are playing Star Wars, like all of the way through. They’re different channels, probably run by the same media conglomerate, but very definitely, Star Wars was on one channel and The Empire Strikes back on another, so go figure. For whatever odd reason, they skipped The Force Awakens (though they did Rogue One) and went directly from Return of the Jedi to The Last Jedi. Han Solo, I guess, isn’t out on TV yet so it wasn’t in the mix. But was nice having the Force with me as I spent the day in pain.

One thing leads to another

I’m finally in the part of my job where I am busy, and I am so thankful about that. I’m going from assignment to assignment, which will lead to my first vacation, which we call R&R.

People live for R&Rs here and, since we basically have to take three three-week ones, plan big trips. I talked to people who returned last week from Italy/Spain and Australia New Zealand.

You ask some about their recent or upcoming R&Rs and their eyes glaze over and their voices fill with wistfulness. People seem to live for them.

Not me, of course. I’m weird. I love it here. Not ready to go on R&R, but I am ready for my next assignment, which is at our consulate in Erbil.

For those who don’t know (and it’s OK; I didn’t, either), Erbil is in northern Iraq, and it’s where a lot (but by no means all) of the Kurds in Iraq live. To the degree that some refer to the area as Kurdistan, a T-shirt I am hoping to acquire in the upcoming weeks.

Staffers speak of Erbil as some kind of la la land. Well, la la land before La La Land became a thing. I tell people I’m headed up there, their eyes mist over as well. “You can go outside, you know.”

I didn’t know, and I’m fearful of believing such Utopian propaganda lest I set my heart on wandering outside of the Hundred Acre Sandbox and into … well, Iraq. Real Iraq. The thought of their being a real world outside our T-walls is downright delightful. I would totally love to wander into some kind of sore and buy some Iraqi delicacy, whether it be tasty, crafty or whatever else might lie in store.

There’s rumor of a mall that has a Carrefour in it. For those who’ve been around for a long time, that’s the Walmarty store from Jakarta. We also had one in Morocco (though not my town) and Istanbul.  I want for nothing but the idea of being able to purchase some little trinket, or maybe those knockoff WintOgreen LifeSavers called Polo is the kind of unexpected Christmas gift I’d welcome.

The bag I’m taking up, though, won’t have room for much. I’m allegedly heading up there for three weeks. It’s for work, so I have to do work clothes, after work clothes and workout clothes. Somehow, I feel like the R&R packing will be less, although I will have to also bring swim stuff since I plan on snorkeling.

Oh yeah, did I mention that the R&R is to Australia? I’m going to piecemeal my way through the country. I did Melbourne to Sydney the first time, Perth the second and now I’m planning Cairns to Sydney although I have one flight in there, from Brisbane to Sydney. I ran out of time. Three weeks doesn’t seem like much when you’re trying to bask on the beach and play in the water.

The No. 1 goal on that is to dive and/or snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, and I’m taking the train from Cairns to Brisbane, with three stops in there. I think it’s three, anyway. I made my last reservation right before I started the last three-week assignment and anything that happened before that is kind of a mushy blur now.

When I get back, I’m headed immediately to another assignment. This is what I signed on this tour, to wander from one department to another. There’s just the one department in Erbil, but there are three or four I could possibly work in this tour. I’ve done two of the three big ones already.

I feel a little like a tumbleweed in this assignment, because I bounce around from one place to another. You finish one and head to another. The good thing about it is that when I fly out of here for R&R, I am between assignments. I don’t come back to an overloaded inbox with projects coming due; it’s a clean slate in a new gig.