Well, it's been a few days since I left Iraq now. My closing thoughts on the country are still forthcoming, but the last few days, in limbo between destinations, have been interesting in their own right.
Iraqi Kurdistan wasn't the place I expected it to be for a lot of reasons; where I expected to find slums and beggars and giant piles of trash, I instead found hotels and parks and fountains; where I expected to find anger and anti-American sentiment, I instead found free meals and warm smiles.
The only thing I didn't find was an ATM.
It was my second day in Arbil and my fourth in Iraq when I realized that the contents of my wallet were down to 10 Turkish cents and a lot of month-old receipts that weren't going to do me a lot of good. More importantly, I realized that I hadn't seen a functioning ATM since I crossed the border.
So I did the only thing that seemed logical: panic.
After letting me vent for a bit, Roman decided it was time for a pep talk. Basically, he told me to quit acting like a dumbass American who sees value only in the form of a green rectangular slip of paper featuring a number and an historically important dead guy, and to start acting like a dude who had just hitchhiked from Cappadoccia into the heart of Iraq, repeating "yok para" (no money) like a mindless drone, to anyone and everyone who would listen.
(For his sake, I'll choose to forgive the irony then, that the next night he would tell me about how he had spent nearly a year's wage on a brand new second car that he didn't need. Welcome to the other side, my former commie friend; capitalism- where the grass is so green, it's probably artificial!)
The wisdom of Roman's words didn't hit me immediately; I was a little too busy being pissed off that no one would tell us which direction the exit to Arbil was in and that literally every single soldier who spotted us would pull us aside and interrogate us for 15 minutes, before deciding that we didn't matter.
We did make it out of Arbil, however, and after being offered an absurdly plentiful meal by a friendly restaurant manager (white shirt, above), enduring a brief but horrific bout with food sickness (I won't go into detail for your sake, but know that the memory will always conjure images of a cement truck) and then setting up camp in a nearby mountain, I started to feel very differently about my lack of money than I had just hours ago. I was beginning to come around.
Waking up to this might have helped:
Now, 4 days after my mini-breakdown in Arbil and seated comfortably on my bed in a $5 hostel in Aleppo, Roman's words are dogma. Why? Because I managed to get here on a grand total of 75 Turkish lira cents.
(Where did that 75 kush go, by the by? Try a public bathroom attendant who tricked me into thinking that the gas station bathroom would be free and then ambushed me on my way out. Hell, I'm not even sure the bastard actually worked there.)
Hitching, camping, relying on the kindness of strangers, and eating groceries out of our bags (yeah, I know that should count towards the total money spent, but hey, this is my blog, I make the rules); that's how we did it. My wallet was literally empty besides change the entire time; and man was it a good feeling. Even the burdenless feeling of having so much money that you don't have to care, can't compare to the burdenless feeling of having no money and still not caring.
And it allowed me to learn to become comfortable with being in a state of constant dependance towards strangers, from the aforementioned restaurant manager and his free meal, to the various truckers who gave us free rides, to a great Kurdish guy named Khalil (red shirt, below) who put us up for the night in a prayer room (after making us promise that we weren't homosexual and weren't about to go gay it up in a sacred area).
At the same time, I've been thinking about the various possessions I accidently left behind as I departed Istanbul in an emotionally wrecked stupor (to this day I couldn't tell you why I found it so hard to leave, I can only say that it felt like being gutted and having my intestines drip out on the floor before me): 4 T-shirts, a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of pants, and a towel.
Yeah; so, I was a little overwhelmed with my first big emotional goodbye.
The moment I realized that I'd left all that stuff behind was almost worse though; I couldn't get over it. Yeah, it was just stuff, but man, that was a lot of stuff. To lose it on my first stop? It reinforced the fear I had been carrying with me from the minute I waved goodbye to my family in the airport in Minneapolis; even as I walked through the metal detector, I had been certain that I would lose something important at any moment and be completely screwed.
Well, thus far I haven't lost anything of import, only what I left in Istanbul and an Arabic guidebook I forgot while hitchhiking, swiftly replaced in a bookstore. I haven't lost my wallet, my camera, my iPod, or, God forbid, my passport. But I will; I'll lose one of them at some point in the coming year and beyond- there's not a doubt in my mind.
And yet, somehow, I'll be okay; some part of me might even be happy. I'm reminded of the scene in The Darjeeling Limited (a movie anybody interested in India needs to see), when in order to catch a departing train, the three brothers in the movie are forced to toss their copious luggage aside and fling themselves onto their moving metal target. In the context of the movie, it served as a pretty heavy-handed metaphor for unburdening oneself and embracing the uncertainty of life. In other words, if all of your energy goes into holding on to the past and the present, you're probably going to miss the next big opportunity that comes along. These days, I'm starting to get that.
And if I finish this trip naked, all the better. Figuratively speaking. Here's some pictures:
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