Friday, March 14 - Baghdad

If you’re in Baghdad long enough, you’re bound to go stir crazy. For security reasons, foreigners – especially those of us who live outside the Green Zone – have to make careful calculations before we go anywhere. A five-minute drive often requires five hours of planning. There have been days in the past two weeks when I've never left my hotel and the walled-off neighbourhood around it. (I’ve heard the area has been dubbed the “pink zone” by the U.S. military, as in slightly safer than the rest of the city, which they refer to as the red zone.)

Today was one of those days. My translator had the day off, as did the security staff I’d been sharing with a colleague, and it wasn’t like I could just go for a walk or hail a taxi and ask to be taken to Sadr City.

(In another sign of how Iraq is really going, I asked my driver whether I could have lunch at the Chicken Inn, a restaurant on the edge of Firdaws Square – the spot where Saddam’s famous statue was yanked down five years ago – and he looked at me like I was crazy. Five years on, and even that square isn’t fully “liberated.”)

To kill time this week, my colleague Charles Levinson from USA Today and I have passed many an hour playing games on the X-Box video game console he wisely brought in with him. But when you do the same thing day in, day out, even beating an American at NHL 2007 starts to lose its edge.

Tonight Charles and I decided it was time to break out. Eating room service every night at our hotel had become tongue-numbing. Would-be kidnappers be damned, we wanted to spend our Friday evening eating dinner in a restaurant.

It was after dark, but together we were brave. We headed out of our hotel and walked to the end of the street where we’d heard another hotel was serving better food than ours could muster.

We ran into a concrete wall. The hotel and its restaurant had been taken over by American security contractors. Ink-stained wretches were no more welcome than an Iraqi off the street. Our plan appeared to be foiled.

Still we had come this far. One of the guards told us there was a decent restaurant just outside the pink zone. Heartened, we walked in the direction he pointed us.

The sight of two foreigners leaving the protective bubble, alone and on foot no less, caused induced shock among the Iraqis manning the last checkpoint between us and the rest of city.

“You’re going out?” a burly guard asked, a you-must-be-crazy grin spreading on his bearded face.

“Laish laa?” I responded. Why not. “We just want to go to the restaurant. It’s good, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s good. You can go.”

“Really?"

“Yes, but maybe some snipers will see two foreigners and then... bang-bang-bang,” he said pointing his own gun at the restaurant to demonstrate visually just how easily that might happen. Bang. Bang. Bang.

“Really?”

“Maybe.”

Charles and I huddled. Standing under a spotlight at the end of the pink zone, we felt like explorers who had walked off their map. “I feel like we’re at the edge of our universe,” Charles cracked with a nervous laugh.

In some ways, we were. Though the neon lights of the restaurant were only a few hundred metres away – albeit across four lanes of traffic – there may as well have been a mountain range between us and them. Dinner out simply wasn’t worth the risk of snipers and bang-bang-bang.

Disheartened, we returned to our hotel and ordered room service. Things went so badly tonight that I even lost the post-dinner hockey game.