I’m driving

So tonight I figured I’d been to Camp Prosperity enough times that I could drive there on my own. It’s really not far – about as far as from my house to the Forest Hills T station (in Boston) or from ANU to the Casino (in Canberra) or from the capitol to the 16th street mall (in Denver). But there are two checkpoints – which take up time. Plus you aren’t allowed off compound by yourself. Luckily I’ve got a buddy in my class. So I put in a Motorpool request online and turned up and they just gave me the keys and said bring it back later.

It was a Toyota 4-runner, but armoured so the doors were really heavy and the glass is extremely thick and hard to see through – especially at night. It with it being that heavy, it is a little different to drive. It may not seem like a big deal to you, but the last time I drove anything was almost two months ago. So I enjoyed every minute of it – even being stuck while half a dozen MRAPs pulled a U-turn in front of me.

So I’m not supposed to take photos most places around here, but here is one I found online of the entrance Camp Prosperity – that I drive through twice a week now for my Arabic lessons:

 

Baghdad Bridge

Yep. I found the bridge club! And man are they serious.

This isn’t casual bridge they way I played when I was a kid, sitting in to make a foursome at my parents’ bridge parties when one of the parents had to go home to take care of a sick kid. This is full-on. I showed up for the first time on Saturday, and they were bidding shit like 6 No Trump and slams and doubling. It was nuts. I almost walked out. I come from a world where 3 No Trump is pretty gutsy.

Anyway I learn that many of them are newbies, which I have to consider myself since it has been years since I played and I never played this hard core. Anyway, half of them are newbies and so there is a debrief after every round where we dissect the bidding and the playing. It’s great. They meet Mondays and Saturday nights. Tonight I played my first couple of hands, with George (one of the old-timers) sitting over my shoulder, advising. Carl is the other pro – 40 years of very serious and probably competitive bridge. Amazingly complex bidding codes indicating hidden hands and all kinds of stuff. I’m going to learn a lot.

Let me just say for the record that I think bridge is one of the most interesting card games there is. It really exercises your brain without being exhausting (except in the beginning). It’s like doing sport, where you are having fun but you are also getting good exercise. Anyway, I’m a fan of bridge and I am very excited to have found this little group.

And yes, I’m a nerd, and proud of it!

 

Iraqi weightlifting

So the big news this week, aside from the daily drama that is the Iraqi election, is that the Iraqis triumphed at the Arab weightlifting tournament in Amman, Jordan. Congratulations Iraqis!

This caused my Iraqi colleague Lydia to exclaim in a email to the department: “I told you, weightlifting is big here. [She was talking about it just a few days before] My great grandfather was a champ!  It didn’t help him though when he stayed back and tried to fight the invading Ottomans. He was shot three times and bled to death.”

Also, it rained.

 

What to do when you are bored at work…

Got this email from my sister this morning and busted a gut laughing. Couldn’t possibly email to everyone. Don’t know where she got it or I’d give them credit. But I had to share it:

What To Do When You Are Bored At Work…

1. Kill a few Flies

2. Put them in the sun to dry for one hour.

3. Once they are dry, pick up pencil and paper… Let your  imagination flow.


Here are a few examples…

 

My new name – Safaa’

So I started Arabic classes on Tuesday, with about 50 of my closest friends. Well, they aren’t all my friends yet, but it is a huge class. Our first assignment before we even started class was to come up with an Arabic name. I asked one of my colleagues on the press office to help me. She said that Caryn is like Karen, which is actually a derivative of Katherine, which means pure. And the Arabic word for “pure” is Safaa’ so my name should be Safaa’. So there you have it. From here, forever after, I will also be known as Safaa’ – and our instructor said it was a beautiful name. So I felt pretty good about that too.

If you want an Arabic name, let me know and I’ll see if I can figure it out…

He’s funny. He’s a young man, born in Iraq, but moved to the US when he was 10 and stayed there until getting an undergraduate degree in microbiology. Upon graduation he came back to Iraq to help rebuild the country and works as an assistant to some big guy in armed forces and as an interpreter. He’s probably late 20s and has a great sense of humour. He also really understands us Americans and what gets through our little pea brains – so that’s good. I think this will be fun. Inshallah, I will learn something …

Yours…  Safaa’

 

A big week & complicated elections

Holy mackerel! What a week. The embassy website is my responsibility and the woman who has been doing it just left, and my new webmaster is still going through the clearance process, so the updates have been in my hands. And in the past 10 days we launched a Facebook page, Hillary Clinton gave a major speech on internet freedom, Vice President Joe Biden visited Baghdad, President Obama gave a State of the Union speech and Ambassador Hill made major visits to universities in Sulimaniya and Baghdad and a visit to Halabja, coincidentally on the same day that Chemical Ali was executed (in part for killing so many people in Halabja). I’ve been completely insane. Oh, and did I mentioned that one of the committees related to the Iraqi election recommended disqualifying over 500 of the candidates? Or that a bunch of major bombs went off in Baghdad, killing over 30 people and injuring over 100 and damaging hotels and the major forensics department. Hmm, when I line it all up like that, no wonder I’m exhausted.

Today I got an email from my sister saying that a friend of hers was asking about whether my sister had heard from me. My sister told her about the blog and apparently her friend didn’t even really know what a blog was (“she didn’t really know what they are, or why they are named that”). Well, if you are reading this blog, you have an idea of what it is, but here’s a short description about the name. “Blog” is short for “web log” – which makes a reference to a ship’s log of sorts, where people recorded the notable things of each day at sea. It became a sort of open/public “diary” and then evolved to logs/diaries on all kinds of topics – not just people’s lives.

Well this one is about my life, obviously, and I will say that I have definitely felt “at sea” a bit these past few weeks. But I haven’t been very good at recording daily notable events. I’ll try to get better about that.

I am dying to talk about the election here in Iraq. It is so unbelievably fascinating – the election law, the way it is being implemented, the many sides to the issues, the real commitment so many people have (Iraqis, Americans, the UN, other countries) to making sure these elections are transparent, credible, and legitimate. I cannot express how historic it feels to be here at this time. In 2005, many Sunnis didn’t like the election process and boycotted the elections. As a result, they were not included in governance. In the provincial elections more recently, they stepped back into the election process and the result was greater distribution of power. Nothing is perfect, but it was an interesting demonstration of how the system can begin to work. Now all of us are hoping that the Iraqis will be able to make their way through the spectacularly challenging mine field that is this election, to carefully elect a government to take this country into the next phase of its development. I’m not sure I’d want to be an Iraqi election official at this moment. This is exceptionally difficult work. The problems (and the potential solutions, which all have their own problems embedded in them) are very very very complex, and potentially lethal.

I have some knowledge about what the problems are, but I’m not qualified to speak (and certainly not publicly) about this since I am not intimately familiar with either the election law nor the debaathification law. I also haven’t yet seen a media story that seems to cover all the aspects of the challenges.

Let me see if I can identify a few things without getting into trouble….

Oh man, I just wrote about three paragraphs of explanation, but I really don’t think I can post it publicly. The risk is too great that what I think is a basic, unbiased explanation of the situation may not, in fact, be perceived as such. I do fundamentally agree with the US position that we have no desire to interfere in Iraqi elections (either intentionally or unintentionally). And so I will leave those paragraphs aside until well after the election.

But trust me, this is more complicated and interconnected than the world wide web and more chaotic and anxiety-ridden than if Jackson Pollock painted Geurnica. It is not insurmountable, but it is in many ways like diffusing a bomb. It’s possible, but by no means guaranteed.

Library of Congress image

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (depicting bombing of Spanish village during Spanish Civil War):

Try your hand at being Jackson Pollock (paint with mouse, click to change colours) https://wbx-files.s3.amazonaws.com/jacksonpollock_by_miltos_manetas.swf

Okay, so I can’t really say anything, but I don’t think it would hurt to refer you to a couple of New York Times articles. Please note that I don’t think these tell the full story, but they are pretty clear on what they do talk about.

Iraqi Commission Bans Nearly 500 Candidates – Anthony Shadid (15 January 2010)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/middleeast/15baghdad.html

Barred Politicians Mostly Secular, Iraqi Says – Nada Bakri (22 January 2010)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world/middleeast/22iraq.html

Yikes, how did it get so late?  Ciao for now…

p.s. Check out our Facebook page. There is a very interesting discussion by Iraqis (mainly students/young people) about diversity, mutual understanding and tolerance in response to the Ambassador’s announcement of a new scholarship program bringing non-Kurdish students to study in Iraqi Kurdistan.

 

I’m fine – UPDATE

Okay, I’m still fine. Turns out it was allegedly three bombs in all. I remember hearing the boom and feeling the first blast wave rumble the building and the three of us that were standing talking looked out the window, south across the Tigris, and saw a huge cloud of black smoke just mushrooming at that moment from behind one of the large hotels. Everyone in the office came to our side of the building to watch the smoke and ended up seeing, hearing and feeling more blasts. All within ten minutes. It was crazy. You could see the flames come up from behind the building on one of the later blasts.

It looks like quite a few people were killed, and it is devastating to think that they were friends or family of people our colleagues know. A few of my Iraqi co-workers were chattering frantically on their mobile phones even as the 2nd and 3rd bombs were exploding.

BBC has a video and a map, but I have to say that the map doesn’t match my experience. For example, my office is located in the green area just above and a little to the left of the Hamra Hotel. But that looks like one blast and I know for an absolute fact I saw two separate pillars of smoke and an explosion that was to the east of the Hamra Hotel. There is no way it could have been the Sheraton, I couldn’t have seen that. But the other location where I saw smoke across the river isn’t on the BBC map. I’m baffled. Perhaps more will be revealed. But 36 dead and 70+ injured is more than enough.

Oh, and “Chemical Ali” was executed today.

 

Kirkuk – it’s the little things

Okay, okay, I’m behind by over a week now. But not much has happened this week except me catching up on work from when I was away, some rain, new machines/exercises in my workout routine, and, oh, yeah, the vice president was here.

But as far as narrative is concerned, I’m still in Erbil. So… The way the helos/flights work around Iraq is like a local bus or train. There are stops, and often you have to change vehicles. Our first helo Thursday morning, a Huey, got us as far as Kirkuk. Upon arrival, we were advised that the helos that were supposed to take us the rest of the way hadn’t left their starting location due to weather. So we hung around in the waiting room. And hung around. and waited. Yes. No. Yes. No. maybe. wait. come back. yes. no. hmm… well… yeah… no.

We arrived in Kirkuk in the morning and didn’t find out until late afternoon that we were stuck. Luckily they assigned some guy to drive us (5 of us) around to the DFAC for lunch and back to the waiting room. It was just a long big room with a bunch of wooden benches in it. With lots of service men and women sleeping on them. Along one side was a low long desk with administrators behind it at desks, sorting out the flights. At one end of the counter was a big sign saying “Rotary” and at the other end a sign saying “Fixed Wing”. This is where you signed in for your “helo” or “plane”. Or, as we learned the next day, where you beg and plead to get on a plane that you weren’t manifested on 48 hours in advance.

This photo is taken near the desk. I learned from our “handler” that the saying “Hafa Adai” is how you say hello in Guam. I forget the name of the language. Oh wait. There’s the internet… : Chamorro language.

This photo was taken outside the “latrines”. They are a lot more civilized than the outhouses you remember from camp. These were trailers with half dozen toilets and sinks in them, with running water. Had to get it for my sister and friends in Denver.

This photo was taken across the path from the previous one. Can’t have an army base without one of these I reckon.

Okay, so we’re stuck in Kirkuk for the night. We get driven over to the PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) office on the other side of this MASSIVE base:

Miles and miles of CHUs housing thousands of troops. And here’s where the little stuff comes in. The RRT (Regional Reconstruction Team) in Erbil was very different because they lived in a neighborhood, in houses. This was a military base and had facilities very much like what we have at the embassy: a gym, a DFAC, CHUs, etc. But everything was just a little different. The gym equipment was really beat up. The DFAC was enormous – probably 3-4 times the size of our DFAC. You could barely see the food lines at the other end when you walked in. The building was as big as a football field. I honestly don’t know how you can get that much space under hard cover (able to with stand rocket attack). It was a huge warehouse. And the sinks were different. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that when you enter the DFAC building back at the embassy, there is a little foyer where there are about a dozen sinks and everyone is required to wash their hands before entering. Our sinks have the motion sensors on them so you just put your hands under the faucet and the water starts, allegedly. I’ve been here for a month, and there has never been less than six of the twelve sinks out of order at any given time. In Kirkuk, the sinks were controlled by a pedal on the floor – much smarter, none of those sinks were out of order. There were two entrances with about two dozen sinks in each. Even with all that extra space and food, the food was definitely not as good.

And the doors… At the embassy, all the doors weigh about 500 pounds because they are blast-resistant. So I get a workout every day just going in and out of buildings. But in Kirkuk, the base is so large that the main living and working quarters are far enough away from the perimeter, from anything really as the base is way out in the middle of nowhere, that they don’t feel the need to have super heavy doors. Also, I suppose it is because the whole place is temporary. That’s another thing. Because of the temporary nature of everything, there is no permanent housing and everyone lives in CHUs. I think I explained these before, but CHU stands for Container Housing Unit and they are basically shipping containers split in half. Lucky for us, Kirkuk is one of only two PRTs/Bases with wet CHUs (meaning they have bathrooms internally as opposed to having to hike through CHU-ville to a shared bathroom (much like the latrines). Here’s my CHU and my little part of CHUville:

Another thing about being temporary and on a base is of course the fact that there are virtually no paved roads, so the dust and dirt from the hundreds of MRAPs and other military vehicles driving all over is staggering. But we made our way through some of the dust to the shops not far from the runway. They were cheesy touristy places, but I got some great stickers. I will digress for a second to discuss a shameful practice of many of the troops I encountered. They call these shops “haji shops”. The use the term to mean they are run by Iraqis, but it is an extremely derogatory term when used this way. It is so common that I don’t think that half the people I heard use it even realized how derogatory it was (and might have been embarrassed if they had). The term “haji” in the Islamic world is an honourific title used to refer to someone who has made The Haj – the pilgrimage to Mecca. As such it is usually used for older men as a term of respect. US Servicemen, however, have made it into slang for all Arab people. It’s shameful and was extremely uncomfortable to listen to. I heard a few people use the term in Baghdad, but not as many. Okay, moral lesson over for today. Here are the pix:

The next day our “show time” was 745, but the C-130 we were trying to catch was also delayed, and we didn’t end up leaving until after noon. Here’s me trying to get some work done on the not very comfortable benches.

The best part of the whole trip was being able to catch a helo from BIAP to the NEC rather than having to hang around all day to catch the Rhino up Route Irish. TRANSLATION: The best part of the whole trip was being able to catch a helicopter from Baghdad International Airport to the New Embassy Compound [was new last January - the embassy used to be in the Palace] rather than having to hang around all day to catch the armoured shuttle bus up the dangerous road through the red zone between the airport and the green zone (international zone) where the embassy is.

This is Route Irish:

The guys blog this image came from has got some pretty good and representative photos that capture my experience here really well. He’s also got some great signs. There are funny signs all over. I keep forgetting to take pictures of them. So check out this blog post from two years ago.

This particular day we flew low over Baghdad and I remembered to snap some photos. Don’t forget to click on them for a closer look.

So I think that catches me up.I’m perfectly happy to be back amidst my heavy doors, my new weight machines, my cranky sinks, and my better food – for now. But I am keen to get out again. Next up looks like it will be Basrah in the south and then Tikrit, northwest of Baghdad. Then possibly Najaf – one of the holy cities (the other is Karbala).

I love this job! But just know that the majority of things that I love about it are things that I can’t really talk about on this blog – the details of my work, the wonderful Iraqis I work with, the fascinating complexity of the challenges here. I do feel in my element. So all you folks out there that are worried about me, don’t be. It’s highly unlikely that I would be hurt or die here. But if I was, just know that it would all have been worth it to me.

 

I’m fine

Just a quick note to let you know I’m fine. The bombs were across the river from us. Spectacular visual from our office – flames and smoke. Could feel it. Don’t know if we know any of the casualties. Will update later.

 

Erbil & Suli – tea and smiles

Okay, so now that I have the historical background out of the way, let me talk about the actual trip itself. We flew up to Erbil in a Black Hawk helicopter, making a few stops along the way to drop off and pick up people. The first leg was insane – 10 people jammed into narrow “seats” facing each other (facing forward and back) with barely enough room for knees, nevermind all the suitcases/bags and our boxes of posters, flyers and DVDs about the Democracy Video Challenge. Huge sliding doors were on both sides of the helo and on this flight were closed before we left the ground. I don’t know how to explain this except to say that it is just like you would imagine riding in a military helicopter to be after seeing about a thousand Vietnam and other modern war films. Most of us have seen enough helicopters in the movies to get a sense of what it might be like, and it is just like that. I felt like I was in a movie. I’ve ridden in three helicopters now, a Black Hawk, a Huey (some seats facing forward on the inside and some on the sides facing out, right along the side of the helo, with the gunner sitting next to you) and I think it was a Chinook (also with seats facing out on either side). After three rides, it still feels like a movie each time – especially the bit when we were flying low over Baghdad neighborhoods: so very cool. What was not cool was how heavy my damn helmet was. Though the body armour was heavy it wasn’t too bad. But the helmet gave me a wicked headache after the first 30 minutes.

Anyway, flying out over Baghdad and slowly out into the Iraqi landscape was very interesting. It really is a whole lot of desert. But I was amazed to see how people are squeezing some crops out of the land. Mind-boggling is the use of ditch irrigation (they run ditches around/through the crops and fill those with water). As one of my Ag buddies was saying the other day, “Nobody uses ditch irrigation any more – it’s all drip irrigation or sprinkler/overhead irrigation”. But that’s where the Iraqi “Ag”riculture environment is at.

We also flew over a number of oil operations. I don’t know anything about oil, so I’m not sure exactly what kind of operations they were. I was told recently that although Iraq has heaps of oil, they have no refineries and so are actually a net oil importer. Oh wow, don’t you just love the internet?! I just did a quick search to see if I could find some information on this and discovered some info from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that shows that Iraq is actually the fifth largest oil importer in the world – both of crude and of petroleum. Yes, that would be the whole world! But I also found a detailed energy profile of Iraq that shows it does have refineries (however antiquated) and more are planned.

So in flying over these refineries, or whatever they were, and there were lots of “smokestacks” that weren’t actually smoking, but flaming. Huge flames coming out of them and also out of the ground in symmetrical patterns in some places. In one place, the flames were actually generating black smoke and we had to fly way around it.

We also flew over lots of little small former villages where you could see the remains of the concrete structures – no roofs or walls, but you could see the outlines of the walls. The other crazy thing about Iraq is the persistent haze. Boy I can really appreciate Canberra, Australia now. That place was crystal clear most of the time – you could see for kilometres. Here, you are luck if you can see 2 miles most of the time (the minimum for helo travel). But the strange thing is that it doesn’t really seem like just pollution because it was really bad way out in the desert too. It is definitely haze, and not a duststorm. But it has got to be some sort of generally persistent extra fine dust in the air. I can’t think what else it can be and I have yet to be given a satisfactory answer by anyone I’ve asked.

Here’s someone’s photo that is similar to my daily views across the Tigris:

And this is what is looks like during the day much of the time (sort of not quite daylight):

But it is hazy in the country too. That’s what I didn’t understand. And it is not a sandstorm. This is a sandstorm in Iraq:

Thank goodness I haven’t lived through one yet, but I’ve seen heaps of photos like this and somehow I’m far more frightened of these pictures than of getting blown up by an IED.

But no sandstorms for us on this trip, thank goodness. As we get up near Erbil we begin to see lots of new construction and more modern looking streets and buildings than in Baghdad. The Regional Reconstruction Team is based in a compound that is actually a neighborhood of regular houses secured by, you guessed it, T-walls. Remember what T-walls are? They surround, protect, define, and relentlessly characterize my life:

So yes, it is a fully secured compound, but the coolest thing for me after the massive but very brand new and sprawling embassy compound in Baghdad was that it felt, for the first time, like I had a sense of what wandering around an Iraqi neighborhood might be like. All the offices and residences were all in converted homes, with kitchens, driveways, courtyards, dining rooms, etc. and scattered throughout the neighborhood were little convenience shops selling candy and cheap mobile phones and laundry detergent and booze (yes, there was plenty of grog being sold inside the compound). There were also little restaurants too. And regular Iraqis who lived there (along side the US Embassy staff, security personnel, USAID, and other western aid/diplomacy agencies).

When we arrived we were given little pieces of paper about the size of a third of a business card in denominations of $5 and $10 which we used at the restaurants to pay for our meals. We could pay in dollars too, but since we were given a food per diem, they found it easier to just run purchase orders with these places and give us this monopoly money (instead of trying to reimburse us later). It was very amusing.

As I said in the previous post, my colleague and I went to a bunch of universities and gave talks on using new media tools (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) for diplomacy and development. It was so great to be on the university campuses. They were just CRAWLING with students. By my reckoning they probably mostly had about 3 times the number of students per square metre of most universities in the US or Europe and probably 30 times the number of students per square metre of Australian National University… It was so exciting and full of energy!

Of course we had full security teams to get there, but they also stayed with us while we were on campus. It was very odd. Sort of makes you feel like a rock star, or the president… All these guys with wires in their ears and weapons somewhere on their persons. Well, not really like a rock star, but it is quite an experience to go places as/with an “entourage”.

I haven’t driven around Baghdad at all yet (except to and from the Al Rashid hotel), but from what I could see from the air on my way out of Baghdad, driving around Erbil and Suli was very different. It is still the developing world, but things are much more developed in the north. Lots of fountains in the streets of Erbil actually, and there were definitely a few roads we drove down that reminded me of Lincoln Boulevard between LAX and Venice – only the shop signs were in Arabic instead of Spanish.

The funniest bit for me was our very first stop. We met with the vice chancellor of the university in his office and were served tea – the first of many many glasses of tea I was served in the two days we were there. You ALWAYS get tea in EVERY meeting. It is usually served in small hour-glass shaped glasses with about 25 spoonfuls of sugar. (at least in Kurdistan anyway). All you folks who’ve been there will get nostalgic over this photo I’m sure:

Although I’d expected to go present with my colleague, the vice-chancellor had arranged for me to meet with library staff. So there was a bit of a kerfuffle about whether we had enough security staff to split up and then I was whisked off to the central library and the office of the library director, which was instantly filled with eight other people, none of whom spoke English. Here I was, my very first hour out in Iraq and I was all alone in a room full of people with whom I couldn’t communicate. It was quite exciting for a bit there, but I just kept smiling and shaking hands and holding my right hand over my heart (a sign of greeting, and gratitude, and honour, and a way of greeting someone of the opposite sex without having to touch them). The assistant to the vice-chancellor did speak English but I’d lost sight of him in the melee with all the library staff in the office and all the assistants and tea boys in the outer office. But eventually, after a few minutes of chaos, we all settled down and one of the university professors whose English was a bit better offered to translate.

My first experience with translated conversation was VERY interesting. I remember being very conscious of what I’d been taught in my Iraqi familiarization course back in DC about working with translators. “Talk to the person, not the translator. Look at the person, when listening to the translation, not the translator. Otherwise you give the respect and power away from your colleague to the translator and that can be emasculating and problematic in the dynamics of your relationship without your realizing it” I tried really hard to do this, but your instinct is definitely to look at the person speaking. You also have to speak much more simply. Not because the translator wouldn’t understand, but because you have less than half the time to say what you want to say. So you have to get to the point without risking wasting time with them not understanding the translation of subtleties of thought. Not a bad discipline to practice, however, for someone as verbose as me.

Everyone was really friendly and smiled a lot so I felt fairly comfortable fairly quickly. And, they got to the point really quickly and had definitely come prepared to talk about what they needed in their libraries and when they could get me for some more concentrated time to help them figure out how to improve and modernize. The thing that actually made me most nervous was trying not to smile and nod too much for fear that I would accidentally be smiling and nodding at something they said in Arabic that wasn’t translated but they now think I just agreed to give them $20,000 in books or computers…

All in all, both the meeting with the vice-chancellor and this large group meeting at the library were a terrific introduction to the types of encounters I was to have over the next few days. Lots of tea. Lots of smiles. Lots of earnest requests for assistance with modernization so that they might join the global society (some of the libraries I saw could only offer their students textbooks and academic journals from 1978 and earlier and had no internet connection or computers – and in two of our presentations, the electricity went out in the middle). And lots and lots of invitations to return, to stay longer, to meet with more people, to see more of their facilities, and to drink more tea.

On the way back, we only made it as far as Kirkuk, then the the helos were downed due to bad weather. But it took over six hours of waiting and being told yes, no, yes, no, maybe, wait, yes, wait, hmm, yeah… no… before everything was confirmed canceled and we had to sort out staying overnight. But that is for another post…