Nasiriyah is behind me…

…as is Baghdad.  At least for now.  

I guess I should recap the last few days since I was pretty much too exhausted to write last night.  Well, that’s not entirely true…I was exhausted but I found a treadmill at Saddam’s palace (where I spent the night) and couldn’t resist taking it for a spin after not running for two weeks…and after that, I was too exhausted to write anything. 

Anyway…

…to intone the Grateful Dead: “what a long strange trip it’s been.”

As we were speeding down the deserted highway out of Nasiriyah en route to Baghdad yesterday afternoon, I taught Pavel a new word: absurd.  I used it to describe the circumstances and events of the previous two weeks we had spent together in Nasiriya.  The whole thing was just so weird…being an American in Iraq, hanging at Saddam’s Palace in Baghdad, having the ever-present security detail, right down to the armed guards outside the ICU…the sick patients, the difficult clinical situations, all the stuff I learned how to do…and the fact that we had just driven past a herd of camels by the side of the rode…

He agreed about my usage of his newly acquired English word after I laid out how our experience illustrated it’s meaning.   

And then, one of our rear tires exploded. 

I looked at him and said, “and that would be our tire that just blew out.”  We both broke out into hysterical laughter at the additional absurdity that we with our six man babysitting team were now broken down by the side of the rode in middle of nowhere Iraq. 

Sweet. 

And absolutely ridiculous. 

And somehow, all I can do at this point is laugh about it all.