Symphonic Annoyance

Baghdad roads are very crowded since some of the high ways, and most of small streets are blocked by concrete walls. Since about one year and eleven vital cross roads are partially blocked cause they are trying to build bridges at the site. They only work in the morning, at the peak of traffic, crowd, heat, and annoyance.


Some, fortunately, still find a place to play football in spite of everything.

Since our present days are ugly and irritating, we try to find our calm in history.

Fathers are trying hard to find work. Many college graduates are self employed in some hard works. In a lecture of one of the known professors of psychology in Baghdad he said that most of his students now work as self-employed in Al Shorja (the central ugly messy trade centre).

The 1980s Brazilian made Passat is still widely used in Iraq and it is known for its sudden unexplained troubles. When it suddenly stops, with no life in it, the driver and his friend got to push it under the annoying symphony of the angry cars in the blocked road behind them and their irritating loud horns.

I reached home and slept like a dead. Woke up at evening dazed with my cup of black tea watched the politicians accusing each other of stereotyped words that made me sick: sectarian, loyal to Iran, Ba'athist, Saddamist, Sunni, Shiit.... and so on forgetting that we, the normal Iraqis, are living under the same hot sun, and hearing the same ugly symphony since years.