Great Start

Now I've got to write for 5 days worth of posts. Heck well...

Mum came over on the 1st. I'm really glad she came, I've really missed her especially of late. She got me an iPod just before she left Dubai to come here. So now I have a mum and an iPod yay. Trouble is that my PC doesn't work and the damn thing doesn't come with a charger. India came over yesterday to hook it up to his laptop to charge and to give me some mp3s.

Last Tuesday Suzy was pissed off at me because she had told me that she'll call me moments before midnight New Year's night and I didn't answer because I was asleep. Actually, I was passed out, from lots of booze. Wound up in bed before 11 PM.

After India left my place, I started to make my way to Ennie's place so he could teach me some subject that's all in Arabic that I we had a test on today. As I was driving through Qadissiya by the rail tracks (one of the commonly used routes to get from one side of Baghdad to the other), I was about to make a left turn into a wide alley and some crappy Korean car filled with armed men dressed in civies blocks my path. Nothing strange so far, it's quite normal to see convoys with civilian dressed security, and it's quite normal for them to block paths to let some big honcho from the government to pass. Then I turn my head left to look into the short wide alley and I see a white mini-van filled with armed men. Still okay. Some guy is standing waving a handgun. Still nothing out of the normal. Then there's a guy further left of my view staggering backwards with a distraught face only a meter or so away from the standing man with the gun. Getting a bit weird. Then the guy with the gun pops 5 rounds into the distraught man's stomach. The distraught man collapses backwards onto the ground. Disbelief, hell this ain't normal. I look ahead, the road in front of me is clear and I realise I ought to get out of here. I drive half the car onto the curb and peg it. Some car ahead of me sees some cops moments ahead and tells him that something's going on behind us. The cops just stand there. I don't care to provide any information myself since I don't speak Arabic too well, and that could get me into trouble, so I just continue driving. And for the next 20-30 minutes I'm freaking out and the death metal music coming out of the iPod that India had just filled up for me wasn't helping.

Today it took me ages to get to college (about 3 hours). The whole city is covered with checkpoints. I wouldn't have gone had it not been that I had two tests today. Neither of which I was fully prepared for. After taking one cab which I told to take me back home, I called up the only classmate that lives further from college than me. And he's there! He tells me one of the highways to get to the other side of Baghdad is open. So after sitting bummed on the porch of my house bummed that my bike's pedal is bust and beyond my repair, I decide to take another cab. Later in the day I find out that the reason for all the checkpoints is that the Minister of Interior's sis or daughter got kidnapped. I don't care, he probably deserves it, if he thinks that he's so special so as to screw up everybody's day. People are getting kidnapped in the hundreds everyday.

This year is proving to be quite testing on the nerves.