The Change (Finally) Happened!

So, Prime Minister Designate Haider Al-Abadi has a Doctorate degree in Electrical Engineering from Manchester... So hopefully he will:
1- Respect Masters and Doctorate graduates and appoint them in the State.
2- Respect knowledge and intellectuals.
3- Do something to our Goddamn electricity!
4- Make Manchester United visit Iraq 

Explosion Nearby...

At 3:13pm today, a huge explosion about 500 m away took place on the main "New Baghdad" street. It shock the house and the whole area. 
It was a car bomb. 
The fire was about 2-floors high. Initial reports said that 4 were killed and some 13 wounded, although the numbers might be much higher. 4 people we know were injured.

Eid? What Eid?

Ramadan (the Muslim month of fasting) ended, full of sorrow, full of terrible events. Christians, the natives of Mosul, who've been there for about 1800 years were displaced for the first time in history this month by ISIL, which committed other atrocities not only against the other minorities in the city, but against sites considered as holy to the city's majority Sunni Muslims, such as Prophet Younis (Jonah) mosque, Prophet Sheet (Seth) mosque, and Prophet Jarjees (Georges) mosque; all sacred to Muslims an Christians alike. 

And then came the Eid (the feast), with no real sense of happiness; although many people (especially in Baghdad) have found a breather in it, as they took to shopping streets which were turned into pedestrian streets for the occasion, with some young men carrying small drum-like instruments. But one would still sense a feeling of unrest in the air, amid the tension of the security forces and the unorganized traffic jams created by different road closures. 

I really find no sense of this Eid, with many people suffering, and with a third of my country under terrorist occupation, while the world is looking on, totally uninterested, at the misery of this nation and its people.

Anyways, for several times when Eid comes for the past decade or so, one cannot really do without recalling a verse by Iraqi-born poet Abu Tayeb Al-Mutanabbi asking if Eid will "be the same and even with more sorrow, or will you be the sign of new things?", and I guess, with the current circumstances that the answer would be more sorrow.
Hopefully not.

Back to Writing Again!

Or as the song once said: "On the road again".

Back in the last days of 2005 when i started to write on my first blog, the situation in Iraq forced me to write, because i had no other window to express my ideas and opinions. I continued writing for 4 years, when i got eventually to busy/too lazy to maintain the first blog. 

Then, so many things happened to me during the 5 years between 2009 and 2014, but i wrote only three time on this blog, back in 2011.

Unfortunately, and after years of pseudo-stability, the situation in Iraq deteriorated sharply and crazily. The conditions in Syria, and the appearance of the extremist group ISIL, which occupied about a third of Iraq in a night's day, have changed everything in Iraq, hopefully not forever, because they are all bad changes, filled with blood and misery; that in addition to the extreme stupidity, complete absence of professionalism, stubbornness and selfishness from the Iraqi gov't side. 

Here we are...  caught between Charbdys and Scylla, like Ulysses... But the hope for Iraq's return, unlike Ulysses, is so, so far away. 

Perhaps the most that we can do, like William Dean Howells once wrote: "... is to hope for the best till we know the worst. Of course, we shall make the best of the worse when it comes."

Turkey: The Day I Lost My Way...

I have recently returned from a 4-week visit to Turkey, spending most of the time in the Capital Ankara, and three consecutive weekends in Istanbul. 


I liked Ankara, for it was quiet and tourist-free, and the weather there was less humid and a bit cooler than Istanbul. 


During the 1st weekend i spent in Istanbul, i followed the advice of a friend who went to Istanbul a couple of times earlier; who suggested that i stay in the Asian side of the city, where hotel and food prices are much cheaper, and he suggested the district of Üsküdar. 


I went to Üsküdar, which doesn't really have that much hotels. The one i picked was a bit far from the seafront at some backstreet called "Tembel Haci Mehmet" and had an elementary school right across the road. The hotel's name was Yavuz. 


Now before i went out, i made sure that i took the hotel card, and put it in the cellphone holder, so that i don't miss it (!)... 


I took a 5 km walk to the ancient Haydarpaşa train station (the last train station of the Orient Express from the Asian side), in order to make my train reservation back to Ankara, and after making that, i took the ferry to the European side, where i went to different places, the last of which was a cinema on İstiklal Caddesi. I went out and took the metro back to the shore and i took the ferry back to Üsküdar. 


I arrived there around 11pm, extremely tired... And then, i realized that i lost the road back to the hotel. It was getting rather late so shops were already closed except a couple of them who were getting ready to close. To add e-insult to e-injury, the battery of my GPS-enabled phone on which i stored the hotel location had died about an hour ago, so i was officially lost!


I went into a kebap restaurant, and asked them for directional help. Some thought the place was closer to the sea, and some thought that it was near the big mosque. I asked them if they had a cellphone charger, and then i would tell them where it is. Luckily, they had one, and after a couple of minutes, the phone was back on, and it located the hotel as some 500 metres away further inland. 


One of the workers there said to me: "Listen, hop up behind me on my scooter, and i will get you there!". Now for some reason, the young man seemed trustworthy. Stories ran through my mind quickly about how tourists were robbed and all that jazz, but the idea of being able to re-trace him to the restaurant if bad things happened seemed rather encouraging. I thanked him in advance and said to him, "OK, but just FYI, i never rode one of these before!"


Vrooom it went through the main street in Üsküdar, as i was following on my GPS device, and three minutes later, we stopped before the hotel door. I thanked the young man again, and bid him farewell, and went into the hotel laughing at myself for this scooter ride and road-loss i had. 


Now, after i went upstairs to the room, that was the time when i found the hotel card, right where i left it, in the cellphone pocket! Sometimes you miss things that you put right under your nose, don't you?!


This hotel card reminded me of something i heard a long time ago, about an Iraqi who went to Japan. He stayed at a good hotel, and there was a complimentary set of matches in his room with Japanese writings on it. He thought that the set of matches must have had the name of the hotel, so he put the matches in his pocket before he went out and about in Tokyo. By the end of the day, he wanted to go back to the hotel, but how? He decided to show the set of matches to a taxi driver, who nodded the famous Japanese respectful nod and they were on their way. Now, our Iraqi friend, like many Iraqis (including me), had a little sleep in the cab. The driver woke him up, and the place had a scenery different from that of the hotel area... But there was a sign in Japanese, with a line in English which made things a bit clearer to him...
"Fujiyama Match Factory"...
:)

Why "The Long and Narrow Road"?

I have chosen the name of this new blog from this poem by Aşık Veysel, one of my favorite Turkish poets. The sentence "May friends remember me" is also from his poetry. Here is the English translation for the poem which gave the blog its name: 

I'm on a long and narrow road,
I walk all day, I walk all night,
I cannot tell what is my plight,
I walk all day, I walk all night.

Soon as I came into the world,
That moment I began my fight,
I'm in an inn with double gates,
I walk all day, I walk all night.

I walk in sleep - I find no cause,
To linger, whether dark or light,
I see the travellers on the road,
I walk all day, I walk all night.

Forty-nine years upon these roads,
On desert plain, on mountain height,
In foreign lands I make my way,
I walk all day, I walk all night.

Sometimes it seems an endless road,
The goal is very far from sight,
On minute, and the journey's o'er-
I walk all day, I walk all night.

Veysel does wonder at this state,
Lament or laughter, which is right?
Still to attain that distant goal,
I walk all day, I walk all night.

Translated by; Nermin Menemencioğlu.

Preface

So, here i am…
Back again to writing, after a long long halt…

It is honestly nice to be back and continue, not from where I stopped some several years ago, because many things have happened since then, but with a new start that I hope it would be interesting to you as readers as much as it would be to me.

Some of you might wonder about the image of the blog… It has 4 squares, 3 of them with large writings: English, Arabic, and Turkish; and one with a smaller size: Kurdish. This is because I can fully deal with the first 3 languages, and to a lesser extend with the fourth, hence the size difference.

For those of you who want a window to my older blog, please drop me a line, and I'll see what i can do.

I am back to writing because I feel I need it. I need a window, or let’s say a podium, from which I would be able to say what I think about, freely, as I used to be, with no fear except from God.

And as I always used to say:
“No one tells him what to think!”

So, welcome (or welcome back) to my blog!