But when I go on vacation, there’s time to breathe again. Last week I was in Moscow and Riyadh. Here are some photos.

From Hot + Cold, posted by Jonathan McKay on 5/11/2011 (Showing 15 of 31 items)

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*An ACS case is someone who needs assistance from the consular section of an American post. In this instance, my passport slipped out of my jacket in a taxi in Casa Blanca. Luckily the taxi driver returned it.
**FIGMO is originally a military acronym describing a condition similar to senioritis. It literally means “Fuck it, I got my orders” and has been widely adopted in the state department to describe apathy and the end of one’s tour.

I felt sad to be there. Even though it was the monument to a dictator. Even though it was the commemoration of a bloody war . Tough to describe, but it stands testament to how fast civilization falls apart if left untended. It’s been only seven years, but the welding joints are giving way and the cladding is disintegrating. Weeds have grown up in the cracks; piles of rubble dot the landscape. Built by a tyrant then walled off by a superpower- the Hands of Victory are an odd but somehow fitting testament to the recent history of this country.

But Saddam is dead, and we are packing up.

At one point one of us asked- “I wonder what this place will look like in 10 years?”

Nobody answered.

Here are some similarities:

1. The Skybox effect: Most multiplayer FPS maps box players into a small space. At the borders, walls or locked doors prevent further exploration. Often, players can see into areas out of bounds to create the illusion of a wider area, but these areas can never actually be reached. Often, they are 2d paintings set far enough away from the player to look ‘real’. In Baghdad, we can see parts of buildings in the surrounding area, but they are entirely off limits. Since we can’t leave the compound and explore, the skyline is permanent and unreachable- a skybox.
2. There are counter-terrorists everywhere.
3. Low Polygon Count: All the buildings are box or L shaped. The buildings themselves take a single motif and repeat it 10 or 20 times to create the building. There is very little vegetation, and the environment is so controlled that nothing is out of place.
4. Numerous stacked cargo containers and jersey barriers
5. Indestructible Terrain: This one took me a few days to realize, but it is a weird and unavoidable part of life. Everything either completely new or built to last (or both). I don’t even know what sort of technology goes into the buildings and walls, but even the ground doesn’t bear signs of use. There are no weeds spouting in the cracks- nor are there any cracks. In the NEC (New embassy compound), there are no sagging beams or loose doors. There are no stains and no weathering. The 1000 little things that you never noticed that create the ‘character’ of any real place are gone.

I’m waiting for the day when I’m strolling past people in uniform, people armed to the teeth, only to hear the compound wide intercoms announce “Counter-terrorists win.”

Dear State Department: Why would you book me in a hotel that charges more for 30 minutes of internet than I paid for a night’s hotel stay in Damascus?

Dear Mariott: I refuse to pay $9 for half an hour of internet on principle.

Dear Mariott clerk: please don’t direct me to a closed Starbucks at Le Meridian.

Dear Le Meridian clerk: please don’t direct me to a non-existent Starbucks, especially when this non-existent Starbucks is at the gay meeting spot of Amman at 10:30pm.

Dear kind bi-guy: thank you for letting me know that there isn’t a starbucks here, and that I might be in the wrong place for this time of night. But seriously, you let your car run out of gas?!

Language Training

Imagine taking a college language class. Now cut the class size to four. Increase the class hours 5-fold, and study nothing but one language for 11 months. This is FSI language training. Instead of paying for the teaching, and materials, imagine getting paid room, board, and full salary. Class gets out every day at 2:30. In addition to the cushy lifestyle, FSI language is generally effective: After 6-10 months of training, most FSI students speak the language better than an undergraduate majoring in the same language.  But there’s also more of an incentive: if you do well enough you’ll get paid again for the achievement. A 3/3 in Arabic or Chinese earns a cool $10 grand per year.  If there is a job better than learning a language at FSI, I haven’t found it.  Even for an awful student like me, teachers and administrators would work with me to meet my needs and learn the language in the fastest way possible.

Functional Training

Take the first two years of university. Now take every introductory lecture from every introductory course, and cram them into a non-stop series that lasts anywhere from a day to a month. Add in every mandatory safety/ethics/harassment lecture you’ve ever taken and this is functional training. It’s an impossible goal from the outset, because no two jobs are similar. In ‘pol/econ’ training, there were 25 students going to 25 different countries. In Iraqi familiarization, citizens from 17 different countries were going to jobs from driving to reporting on Iraqi foreign relations (me) to Government Accountability. It’s incredibly difficult for course coordinators to even articulate goals for the course that will apply in a real sense to all of the students, so the majority of don’t apply to the majority of students. About 20% off the lectures are useful and applicable, but this means 80% are not. So it’s good news that as a junior officer I only have to spend about 10% of my time in functional training.

Why on earth do we say ‘Safe travels’ as a sort of goodbye for somebody going on a plane trip? I understand that maybe somewhere in the 19^th century, travel may have been dangerous, but now it isn’t.  The current fatality rate for flying in an airplane is one death per 22 million hours, which means that on average, one would have to live to be 2,511 years old in order to be involved in a plane crash. I’ll take those odds.

Sitting on a plane is about the safest thing I ever do. On one end on the ‘safe trip’, I ride a motorcycle. On the other, I’ll live in a building that is the target of weekly attacks. If I’m vacationing, I’ll be doing something equally dangerous, even if I don’t always know what the danger is.

So next time you see somebody going on a long plane trip, let’s wish for something they’ll really miss like ‘have a restful trip!’ or ‘I hope the plane ride isn’t too boring!’

When I asked my husband what was going on he said, “Oh it’s just your standard running gun battle.” I said, “Oh, okay.” Then we looked at each other and we both laughed remembering when I went to a playgroup in the US a few weeks back..

New woman at the group: “Can I ask what it is like over there? I mean I don’t want to pry but I am interested. You read the news and stuff but I wondered what it was really like.”

Me: (Trying to be casual and not alarmist cause I really love our Mexican town) “Oh it’s just like running gun battles and stuff mostly. Usually not a huge deal unless you’re trying to go somewhere.”

Her: (Eyebrows raised) “Running gun fights?”

Me:  (Foot firmly planted in mouth and trying to backpedal) “Umm, yeah. I guess that is kind of a big deal? But really it’s not that bad. I mean it’s not as bad as when they carjack and make roadblocks or start shooting on the bridge so you can’t get off or they throw grenades and stuff…”

(Her eyebrows are still raised. I am not doing too well here.)

Me: “And…umm…it’s not every day. And nothing has happened near our house in awhile. And our security is good and stuff…” (Original Link)

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the sort of experience I’ve had trying to explain life in Riyadh. I had a similar experience explaining my first visa issuance in Saudi Arabia to a friend. I interviewed an unemployed kid going to flight school in Florida. The Saudi had taken a year off from college, his dad was going to pay for studies, and he had only traveled to Bahrain.

My friend repeated: “Saudi, flight school in Florida, 5 minute in iterview?”

I spent the next 20 minutes explaining why this was perfectly normal, why my student was a qualified applicant, and why there was no reason to worry.

Do you ever wake up and wonder where you are? Not recognize the walls around you- have to search in memory and put the pieces of reality back together? Now when I break off from a train of thought, stop and pause for a moment, I have the same feeling. I’ve been moving so much I can’t keep a sense of place or time.

In my journals, I have this habit of reconstructing a list of where I’ve been and the order I went there, because memory can’t hold it in one horizon. In June I went to Morocco with Dad and Mariah. Oman. Baku over 4^th of July. Dhahran. Doha. Africa- Congo, Kenya+. Jeddah, Abha. Europe: London, Warsaw, Stockholm. Now in DC. This weekend in Dominican Republic. Chicago in three weeks. Another two and I’ll be in Baghdad. I’m sure this list is either missing something, or out of order. I don’t know. I had forgotten I was going to the Dominican Republic this weekend until a chance glance at my calendar.

My future was simpler: “I am going to DC until August, then China for two years.” My focus was entirely on learning Chinese. Every day for the last month I have been getting up and asking “How do I learn as much Chinese as possible today?” The next three years of my life were planned. All that remained was execution. But then I got an offer to go immediately to Baghdad. My Chinese training is useless for the next year, and my ‘future plans’ have been demoted to ‘more old data on the harddrive’. Now the immediate future is just as hard to grasp as the past.

I do want to go to Baghdad, and I am incredibly excited. Yet between the last three months and the next three months, I feel a bit disoriented.

In one form or another I kept getting the same question: “what does it feel like to be leaving?”

In truth, I didn’t know. One plane reservation in an endless queue doesn’t do much to the psyche, and the trip to London was going to be the 10^th weekend running I got in a plane left Riyadh. At that point it felt like my mind had been too many places and was going to be in too many places for much change to register anymore. It’s like I had become location-deaf. I figured leaving Riyadh would only register itself after a few weeks, when I realize that Chinese training is more than a week vacation from visa interviews and sandblaster heat.

But coming to London, the differences once again blast my location-deaf self into realization that my tour is done and I’m starting something new. Perhaps it’s because London, and Europe as a whole, has always served as a layover between the U.S. and the Middle East. I’ve never been to the continent for more than 10 days, and it’s always been going to or from somewhere else. But it’s also how much of a cultural pole the west is, and how far away it is from all the countries I’ve visited recently.

Morocco, Azerbaijan, Congo, Kenya etc. are all very different, but when compared to the U.S. or the U.K. they look a lot more the same. In London (the west) there are stripes on the road, movies in the theatres, internet fast enough to play games, concerts with thousands of attendees, and a native language I have in common with the local population. These are things I’d forgotten how much I liked.