Citadel security personnel, Erbil, Kurdish Iraq.

large

A tale of two cities.

Traversing the border went smoothly enough. On the Iraq side I was treated to tea in a large waiting room, overlooked by some dictator-esque portrait and a 50" plasma TV screen. Of course, being the only Westerner on the bus, my passport was dealt with separately and I was summoned (in the most friendly possible way) into the office to answer a couple of routine questions, before being issued with a stamp and told "welcome to Kurdistan".

I slept most the way down from the border, although I did manage to take a glance across the river at Mosul as we passed it. Somewhere I definitely wouldn't like to accidentally get off. I was then rudely awoken and dropped off on the main road down to Erbil. What a shabby excuse for a bus station, I thought, and now I'll no doubt be ripped off by this here podgy taxi driver because he knows he's my only option. So, even though I shared the taxi into town, I was ripped off because he knew I was his only option. I hope he stubs his toe really hard tonight.

In a stroke of massive ignorance on my part, I thought the Kurdish language here would be written in latin, like the Kurmanji dialect in Turkey, so I was a little taken aback and a little more than lost when my brain-system was overloaded by Arabic script. I had no option but to walk around the citadel, taking a wide berth around a rather bedraggled 'Messi' who was stood in the park yelling at pigeons, while I looked for a hotel.

I slept for hours, once I'd found my bed, so only emerged just after midday. An entirely different Erbil greeted me when I stepped out of the hotel. The streets were flowing with people followed by the smell of chestnuts and shoe polish. The heat was astounding for this time of year.

I took in the citadel, fabled to be the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, where I met this security guard. And then I just walked around the market places taking pleasure in the double takes and the "welcome! where are you from?". And after some hot falafel, generously stuffed into a pita with a rainbow of chopped salad and sauces, I was invited for tea by a group of five English teachers from Baghdad.

In fact, this evening was so peaceful that you almost forget where you actually are... but the tight security and roads signs to cities which carry considerable weight in the Western imagination are a constant reminder to not get too laid back in your new surroundings, despite the successful track record of the region's government security forces.

But the people are as friendly and hospitable as anyone you'd come across in this region of the world.

Although I'm not sure about Messi...