The Kurdish people celebrated Nawroz, which was a sort of New Year/Welcome to Spring celebration, and this equaled a ten-day paid holiday at the end of March. Even before I left the United States, I thought, “It would probably be smart of me to go somewhere Western, to alleviate the inevitable culture shock of the Middle East.” So I coordinated a trip with my old college roommate, Ellie, and picked what I considered to be the absolute polar opposite of Iraq: Paris, France. Ellie said, “Seriously, you arrive there, work for three weeks, then get ten days off, paid?” Yes, and I absolutely deserved that, because I had committed to spending two years living in Iraq. I hadn’t known it would be more like “I arrive here, pretend to work for three weeks, then get ten days off.” The start date for my classes kept getting pushed back. I had been putting off traveling to France because of all the clichéd stories about how the French hate Americans and mock them and treat them poorly.
