Found in Translation!

The airplane that was supposed to show up at noon didn’t do so until 2 PM, and it was a chartered Lebanese “Flying Carpet Airlines” B-737. It was kind of nice to go into a “foreign” airplane for a domestic flight. At 2:30 PM, we were on board, and the plane was full of Kurdish young men who didn’t know Arabic, and the Lebanese crew didn’t know Kurdish. One of the crew was a nice friendly old man who wanted to say “how are you?” to them in Kurdish, so he asked them in Arabic: “What is Kurdish for ‘Keef Halek?’”, and the problem was that nobody knew the others language, so I (came to the rescue, blah blah blah, and) gave him the (magic) word: Chony!



The travelers thought that I was Kurdish for a moment, but then I explained that I am from Baghdad and said the sentence that I’d keep saying all the time whenever someone in Sulaimaniya is impressed with my beginner’s Kurdish language: “Kurdi kem zanim, bess feyr abem” (= I know a little Kurdish, but I am learning!).



We flew a couple of rounds above Baghdad, and I got the chance to see our district, bathing in the afternoon sun; and got a glimpse at our house, where my laptop and luggage were forced to stay behind.



Then, horribleness began! The weather was pretty cloudy just north of Baghdad so we had terrible air bumps all flight long, and the barometer at my Casio watch read 940 hPa (mb) after the good ol’ 1007 it read while on the ground in Baghdad.



To make a long story short: It was like “Pirates of the Caribbean”, but no Keira Knightley…



And then, we landed.