2003 March 18

Life Before Wartime

Salam Pax (not his real name, obviously) has been blogging from Baghdad since last September. Obviously, he's not your typical Iraqi -- when you hear the phrase "Westernized elite", it means people like Salam Pax. He speaks English, works for a foreign company and has internet access at work, has lived abroad, is a fan of Björk and David Bowie, and is cheerfully blasphemous about Islam. But he's still an Iraqi, has a good eye for detail, and all the above just means he's better placed than most to explain what living there is like these days. Go read.

March 17. ... and the cities of Rawa and Anna are so full of people now you wouldn't find a hut to rent, it was pretty safe to be there during the first war and people who have the money are renting placed there hoping that it will be safe this time.
the dinar is hovering around the 2700 per dollar and the hottest items after the "particle-masks" are earplugs, they can't be found in shops and you have to pre-order.

March 9. A BBC reporter walking thru the Mutanabi Friday book market (again) ends his report with : "It looks like Iraqis are putting on an air of normality."
Look, what are you supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee! Besides, this "normality" doesn't go very deep. Almost everything is more expensive than it was a couple of months ago, people are digging wells in their gardens, on the radio yesterday after playing a million songs from the time of the war with Iran (these are like cartoon theme songs for people my age, we know them all by heart) they read out instructions on how to make a trench and prepare for war, that is after president saddam advised Iraqis to make these trenches in their gardens.
But in order not to disappoint the BBC; me, Raed and G. put on our "normal" faces and went to buy CDs from Arassat Street in a demonstration of normality. ...

March 9. ... Because of that we have issued our own curfew from last Friday, headcount at 10:30 pm. with so many people in the house a roll call is the only way to make sure everybody is here. And we are counting on the Americans to attack at night. If they start the attack during the day they would have mayhem on the streets.

March 6. ... Since we are talking about money today was payday. It is amazing what the sentence "we're sorry but you know how things are at the moment blablabla" can do to your paycheck, in one single year I have gone down from $200 to $100 and hit rock bottom at $50, in retrospect deciding to go back to living with my parents was the wisest decision I have made for quite a while. My friend G. is getting half his salary in money and the rest in alcohol, really no joke, but good imported stuff which we wouldn't buy anyway. His fatcat-filthyrich boss turned seriously Muslim and is giving away his stash of the devil's beverages. Good for us, I say.

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