Last day... by myself

Who has two thumbs and is staying in Kurdistan?

*This girl* (Me)

Jokes, jokes. I'm not actually staying, but I am the last one here!

Angèle and Florence left this morning at 3am, and my flight is at 7pm. Rachid is at work, so here I am by myself at the apartment.

OPEN HOUSE! 

But being the good girl I am, I did not throw a rager nor invite the whole neighborhood to get tipsy with me before my flight.

Instead... 

Keeping myself busy until Mohammed picks me up for the airport. 

I can't believe it's already been three weeks! So much has happened, what an unbelievable experience. Don't want to get emotional, but I'm gonna miss it a lot here. 

Big shout out to Angèle, Florence, and Rachid for hosting me and making this the best time anyone could have in Kurdistan! Feeling blessed. Hashtag. 

Now, I'm heading back to Doha, waiting 9 hours at the airport, and then swoop! 16 hours flight to LA. Cue that P. Diddy, I'm coming home!

Make sure to stretch before

You know what you should never do?

Eat a full Kurdish meal and set off for a three hour hike right after.

Oh sorry, did I say hike? I meant climbing a "hill", that some of us could easily consider a mountain.

We lost half the group on the way up, I stepped on numerous cow dungs (apparently it brings luck, I'm set for a good five years), and nobody thought of bringing water.

Somehow, half the group still managed to be like this:

While the other half was more like:

Which half was I? You could say I was somewhere in the middle.

But nevertheless, we made it to the top!!

Mmm, drenched in sweat. 

Beauty! 💯

All photos are courtesy of Florence, hence why I'm in them 😏 Thanks Floflo! ❤️

Getting high at Bazian

Ha, ha, just kidding.

We had get high up on scaffoldings to paint our last project in Bazian, at the children's Cultural Center.

Sidenote:
It's been raining this whole week so we've been struggling to find the right time to paint without it getting washed off an hour later.
On Tuesday, we were battling rain and hail. We had to hold up a banner over our heads to protect the wet paint. We lost the battle. Over four hours of work, wasted away, right in front of our eyes...

Hakuna matata, no worries, it's in the past.

This morning at 7am, we woke up to a beautiful sky and and shining sunlight. Perfect! We're off to Bazian to finish our last mural. We get in the car, driving 10 minutes, when all of a sudden...A STORM IS SUMMONED UPON THIS EARTH.

Straight up showers, a tsunami on the road, the grey sky lights up every so often as lightning erupts from above.

We barely left home to go paint, and we already have to head back. Stupid, stupid water falling from the sky.

To drown our sorrows, we head to the Bazaar! (See previous posts: Bazaar is a market place in Sulaymaniyah). We go straight to the gazo pastry shop, and eat our pain away.

Dramatic morning, but long story short, the sun came out again! And we made it to Bazian on time! 

Even Mr. Rachid painted. And what a splendid job he did.

Who wants to see the before and after pictures? *The crowd goes wild* That's what I thought.

Drum rolls please!

BEFORE

AFTER 

But of course, it started to rain again an hour after we left Bazian. We are crossing our fingers that the paint was dry and nothing leaked. Otherwise, it's going to be round 2 tomorrow morning.

CURSES!

Extracurriculars

This post consists of zero actual photos, therefore I will only be using memes and gifs.

Woohoo!

Besides working on mural paintings, we are taking time off for ourselves and advantage of the many activities offered in Sulaymaniyah.

So much time in our schedule for extracurriculars!
So much room for activities! 

1) Monday night improv class

There are a few NGO's here in Kurdistan, so a good variety of foreigners can be found. On Monday nights, a group of them gather for improv night! And we know a friend of a friend of a friend's cousin who invited us to join.

Angèle's mum, Florence, couldn't remember the name of the guy who was in charge of the event. She claimed it was Scan. Must be a Scandinavian.

We arrive. "Hi I'm Stan!"

*Chuckle*

Ah yes, a stand up American guy!

Not gonna lie, we were all nervous about improvisation. Florence was rusty on her English, I was still extremely jet lagged (arrived the night before), and Angèle hates acting. Who's idea was this...?

After all, we had a great time!! Lots of laughs, and we got to meet all the Americans and Europeans in the area. All of them. There's so little of us in Sulaymaniyah that we can all fit in a room.

However, improv is still as tricky as we anticipated. And then, some people were so incompetent it made everything so much more painful than it had to be. For example:

I tell them: "What a beautiful day. Look at the flowers."

They say: "Yes! They look delicious, let's eat them."

Duuuude work with me here!

2) Spa!

No. Spa day! Sauna, jacuzzi, steam room, massages, and most importantly, zero paint.

We've been getting up everyday at 7am to work on the murals. One rainy day, since it wasn't good weather painting conditions, we headed over to the Grand Millennium Hotel Spa Lounge.


I got a sports massage, and I don't even do sports! Ha, fooled them good.
Also, turns out that our masseuse, Mariam, is also our yoga teacher! So we saw her the following day in yoga class (spoiler alert).

The hotel is really impressive, especially in the middle of Sulaymaniyah, only tower in sight. The top of the hotel is a moving restaurant. We wanted to check it out, but you need a card key to go upstairs, makes the guests feel important or what not. Whatever, don't even care, it's stupid anyway.

3) Vinyasa Yoga

We went to Mariam's (masseuse) apartment where she holds private yoga lessons. It felt so nice to get back into yoga, it's going to motivate me to start again in LA. Watch out world, here I come.

He really makes it look easy. DOWNWARD DOG IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO. 

Must. Touch. Heels. To. Ground. 

Screw it, tippy toes it is. 

4) Church

Lol jk, it was actually an interesting thing to do in a predominantly Muslim country.

First things first, I'm not religious. I know very little about religious processes and this was my third time at mass. So honestly, I could have attended a mosque and been as lost as I was in this Catholic church.

But let's go back to the fact that there's a Catholic church in Sulaymaniyah. We did our research before attending, and we found out that the pastor of the church promotes peace between Muslims and Catholics by preaching love for Muslims and acceptance of their religion. Very inspiring and progressive thinking if you ask me.

So even though mass was in a total foreign language and we didn't understand anything, it was nice to gather with the Sulaimani community and share this experience with them.


And best part of it was that we got to dress nice and wear our yeezy's (since our boots are covered in mud and paint).

That's pretty much it!

Now, back to paint...

Goodbye Barzinjah

We finished the Rehabilitation Center in Raparin, now we only have Baziaan left. But we kind of left off the refugee camp in Barzinjah in a rush without saying goodbye, so we went back today for a very special ceremony!

We presented the children who helped us paint the murals with official Lafarge diplomas to congratulate them for all their hard work and creative involvement. (Lafarge is the sponsor of this project, aka Florence's husband's company). Go positive reinforcement!

Quick recap: Barzinjah is a small village in the Kurdish mountains, an hour east of Sulaymaniyah. 

The refugee camp there holds over a hundred Arab Iraqis pushed out of their homes by ISIS. Kurdistan Save the Children is involved in the camp to work with the kids to facilitate education and leisure for them. We coordinated mural painting days with the children, enlarging their drawings on the wall and letting them paint it. We worked on two sites in Barzinjah, inside the camp and at the  school in the village.

Before and after pictures, drum rolls please.

At the camp:

This was actually a construction site, and we finished the painting at the same time they finished placing the bricks and cleaning up. Loving how we started on a cloudy day and ended on a beautiful sunny day. Doomsday to resurrection. 

School:

DO YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH TIME IT TOOK US TO 

PAINT THOSE LITTLE LINES FOR THE PALM TREES?!

DO YOU THINK THIS IS A GAME?!?

Don't worry, we still had a great time.

All right, that's the recap.

Like I was saying earlier, we organized an event to congratulate the kids, and of course to have a proper goodbye. Sniff, sniff.

We brought cookies, juice boxes, stickers, photos, and of course the diplomas. Mr. Rachid (Florence's husband) was the guest of honor and distributed the diplomas to 100 children. It got a wee bit hectic but we managed.

I filmed the whole thing, so stay tuned for a video coming to a blog near you.

I did, however, take adorable pictures before and after the ceremony. 

Can I haz?

Go little pals!! 

Killing the game.

But every great thing must come to an end. Until next time, little pals.