Misty Mountains of Masif

On Thursday after school, I shot hoops with Lona, the Danish teacher who is married to a Kurd. I ended up going to her house on Masif Road and making origami butterflies, dragonflies, and frogs that flip and jump, with beautiful watercolored paper. Masif Road is where a lot of the International School kids live. It is supposed to be the safest place in the region, and as we drove through it, I oohed and ahhed at the sculpture of a giant vase and another of a young girl, at the cool, cave-like rock structures next to the cemetery, and at the traffic light that designates the heart of Masif. They were all signs of a city trying to be not just inhabitable, but attractive. We passed by a large construction site which will house a shopping mall and cinema. Wow, a movie theatre in Kurdistan- unthinkable! 

The best part of the drive to Lona's house were the mountains. Masif slopes up into the mountains, so that the peaks are at eye-level and seem only a stone's throw away. From this view, the mountains were a lovely icy-blue shade, brushed over by snowy-white clouds, and dissolving into the mist so that its peaks seemed to be floating unsupported in mid-air. I asked Lona if she and her husband spent hours sitting on a hill and watching these misty mountains and eating nuts, chucking the shells into the grass- because this is what I would do if I lived here. In fact, said Lona, they do often do exactly this- picnic on a grassy spot near the mountains and eat nuts. Kurds have a real passion for nuts- cashews, pistachios, pumpkin seeds, almonds, you name it- and if they are ever bored because, say, the electricity is gone for the next few hours, and there's no heat or water, as happens on a regular basis everywhere in Kurdistan except at our school, then they will just take out a bowl of nuts and start cracking and chewing. My favorites are the pumpkin seeds- large, white, flat teardrop shaped seeds that are deliciously salty. Really, if I lived here, I think I couldn't get enough of pumpkin seeds and the misty mountains. 

But really, I would never live here. Lona said things break easily, and get fixed un-easily, and they were avoiding having a second child for now because having a baby in Erbil was not safe, to put it bluntly. They had struggled to get permission to fly out of Iraq for the premature birth of their first son. I spent the day and night and the next day eating homecooked meals- a mix of Danish and Kurdish-, painting and making origami creatures, talking with Lona and her husband, and playing with their adorable baby son, Yunis, who is going through his selfish terrible twos stage, but is generally, and genuinely, a happy, cheerful, and curious child. Her husband works as a PR guy for the KDP party (mainly with journalists), so we talked a lot about the political situation here and about religion, and I learned some useful Kurdish phrases. Can't wait to go back and see the misty mountains again and eat more pumpkin seeds!