My last dawn in Baghdad smelled like diesel and jasmine. The generator across the alley coughed to life, competing with a night-blooming vine climbing our balcony. It was 2010, and I’d spent the previous week shuffling through visa papers while packing cocktail shakers between my clothes—because even fugitives of circumstance deserve stainless-steel style.

We’d survived the worst spikes of sectarian violence (2006-2008) by mapping alternate routes to school and rehearsing which uncle’s name to drop at each checkpoint. My kid brother turned it into a game: “Checkpoint Bingo—collect all five factions and win.” Humor is a last-ditch lifejacket; you cling to it when mortar whines replace lullabies.

People ask why I left. Officially: scholarship in Istanbul. Unofficially: I couldn’t stand seeing my favorite date-palm grove shrink behind blast walls. Creativity wilts when daily life is triage. I wanted fresh air for my ideas—and a bar scene that didn’t close at 9 p.m. because sirens said so. But I never stopped folding Iraq into every recipe.

In Istanbul I met Syrian, Yemeni, and Palestinian bartenders—each with their own exit-wound stories. We formed a chosen family called The Spice Route Syndicate and traded refugee hacks: how to stretch a paycheck, how to navigate embassy phone mazes, how to smuggle saffron in luggage without TSA confetti. Those hacks taught me agility—perfect practice for flipping drinks mid-air.

Yet Baghdad never left me. I carry its dialect in the way I elongate habibi, its architecture in how I stack glassware like mini-ziggurats, its history in my tattoos: three reeds of the Euphrates bending but unbroken. Whenever I present my “Suitcase of Saffron” workshop, I tell newcomers that exile is a verb—ongoing—yet so is return. Return happens every time we cook masgouf or argue about who invented the first battery (hint: ancient Iraqis, Babylon, 250 BCE).

If you’ve only known Iraq through headlines, let me remix the song. Think of the oud strings echoing through Mutanabbi Street book stalls, the scent of cardamom coffee dripping at sunrise, and the comeback spirit of a city that keeps reinventing itself like a DJ looping a classic track. I left to survive, yes, but I write so you’ll stay—mentally—long enough to fall in love. Pack light, bring curiosity; Baghdad supplies the rest.