Good grace endures in a city crippled and afraid
The armed guards sit beside the concrete barriers, sipping coffee as they 'protect' our hotel.
No one in the hotel expects for a moment that these security measures will serve as much protection.
I ask the guards if they could stop a truck bomb. The nervous laughter that follows comes from men not wanting to consider the possibility. 'You are safe,' says one.
If that was truly the case, these men would not be here. None of the guests can seriously envisage a scenario whereby these men would lay down their lives for the hotel and its guests.
And no one blames them. They have taken the job not out of consideration for the hotel's security but because they need the money in a country where unemployment is near 50 per cent.
I did not see Wednesday's Mount Lebanon hotel blast that killed seven people, but I witnessed another one soon after.
My driver tried to get there, but traffic in Baghdad, a city where the traffic lights don't work and where policemen gamely try to direct reluctant drivers into some sort of lane discipline, is such that any plans to travel in a particular direction are purely wishful thinking.
'Many blasts,' my driver said. He was right. But there is little news of who carries them out or what the casualties are, unless the dead and injured are foreigners.
The Iraqi suffering is going largely unmentioned in the world's media, not because of callousness or cold-heartedness nor because of any lack of empathy.
Much of the problem lies in the fact it is difficult to travel around the city to get first-hand information and many journalists from the western media do not speak Arabic.
By the time we got near the blast sites, darkness threatened. This is not a city to go out in at night under any circumstances. People vanish from the streets and if their relatives are lucky they turn up at the morgue behind the university.
But amid the fear, the grace and humour of Iraqis, men and women, is remarkable. Living in such conditions they could be excused for being short-tempered, easy to provoke and at the very least openly hostile to foreigners. The opposite is true.
Each of my mundane inquiries - 'when will the electricity return?', 'how do I get there or here?', 'when can I operate the internet?' - has been met with polite charm and consideration for my obvious lack of knowledge about life in Baghdad.
Baghdad remains a dangerous place but the people have not yet succumbed to the bitterness such a life can induce.
