Lingering outside the ice-cream shop
For a reporter last here a year ago, during perhaps the deepest of Iraq's despair, there is a palpable change: visible in such mundane things as sidewalk rebuilding projects and people lingering outside a favorite ice-cream shop, audible in the tone of families returning to neighborhoods they'd fled in fear.
Iraq is a different place now: The grip of horrendous daily violence has loosened; the government is showing some signs of being one. And Iraqis – once among the best educated, best fed, and most widely traveled people in the region, practitioners of a river- and desert-fashioned joy of living – dare to hope.
"Here we can taste again the flavor of life," says Rawaa Fadhel, on his second visit in as many weeks to Abu Nawas Park with his fiancée. "For three or four years, we have stayed in our houses and lived with this pressure," says the employee of a Pepsi bottling plant. "When I go back to my neighborhood, I will feel like my hands are tied again. But six months ago, we didn't even have this," he says of the park, "so it's a sign of progress."