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HEADING FOR IRAQ

Kuwait City, April 1, 10:40 a.m.

We're spending one more day in Kuwait, waiting for our paperwork to be processed. Very early tomorrow we expect to board a C-130 for the 80-minute flight to Baghdad. From the Baghdad airport, if you're lucky, you get a helicopter ride to the Green Zone. If not, you wait for space to open up on the "Rhino," an armor-plated Wnnebago.

In the meantime, photographer Michael Mulvey and I are exploring the wonders of Kuwait City, not heretofore known as a tourist mecca. The country is roughly the size of New Jersey and has a population of about 2 million. Only about a third of those are actual Kuwaitis. The rest are expats imported from places like Pakistan and the Philippines to work the service jobs.

So you get the predictable dichotomies, such as gleaming office towers flanked by slum apartments.

We took a drive last night down the palm-lined boulevard along the Persian Gulf in search of local color. We passed one brightly lit restaurant after another--Chili's, Ruby Tuesday, Fuddrucker's. Finally we found something authentic, an Italian place run by, I think, Indonesians.

The food was good, yet the wine list lacked a certain something. Liquor is illegal in Kuwait. But our host, a U.S. Army captain, said the rumor going around is that the emir might someday approve offshore bars for tourists. For now, though, that bottle in the hotel mini-bar that looks like champagne? It's actually sparkling date juice. Haven't tried it yet.

Still, some people find a way to have Western-style fun. Here's the lead crime story from today's editions of the Kuwait Times: "Motorway cameras recorded a man driving a high-powered German car (costing about 20,000 Kuwaiti dinars) at speeds of over 200 kilometers per hour on the Fahaheel Expressway with a bottle of Red Label whiskey in his hand while kissing a woman sitting in the passenger seat."

Our evening was far less exciting.

Posted by Doug Swanson  at 1:37 AM (E-mail this entry)