Helo Trip

Today a group of us went to one of our project sites to see how it's coming.  The site is a bit outside Baghdad.  For transportation, we had two helicopters take us out around noon and bring us back a few hours later.  

I get really jazzed over riding in a helo.  They remind me of bumblebees: there should be no reason the damn things can fly, but they do.  And they're an assault on the senses: noisy, bumpy, cramped, and windy.  Kinda like an old British sports car, only with better technology.  And they fly low, so you can look down and see what people have piled up in their back yard.  Maybe even land there, too!

One of our helos was an older Huey, the same kind that you see in all the Vietnam movies.  The other was one of the new Blackhawks.  Both belong to the State Department, not the military, and so they're painted American Blue ... a nice, deep, dark cobalt blue.  All the military helos are a dark, dull green.

The trip didn't take long, but it was fun.  We flew low, a few hundred feet off the ground, lazily zigzagging along, changing altitude, and every once in a while throwing it into a steep bank.  I took a ton of pictures.  Most are variations on the same thing.  Here are a few that you might enjoy:

Here's the cockpit for our Blackhawk.  You can see the other helicopter out in front of us.

This is the Al-Rahman Mosque, otherwise known as the "mother of all mosques".  Saddam Hussein ordered the building of the largest mosque in the world.  It wasn't finished when we stopped construction in 2003.

We flew over a park that was teeming with people.  Kids, families, strollers, thousands of people wandering around having a good time.  Friday is like our Saturday, a day off, and just like us, they like to go to the park.  What's really wonderful is that they can go to the park now.