IRAQ: Baghdad, the city of war, begins each day hoping for peace, writes Michael Jansen
While most journalists covering events in Baghdad move into fortified, guarded hotels, I moved into an airy flat on the fifth floor of a building on Abu Nawas street on the east bank of the Tigris.
The front veranda commands a sweeping view of the grassy park across the street, the gleaming river, and the Republican Palace compound where the US made its headquarters in April 2003.
Next door, armed guards sit smoking outside the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Iraqi Communist Party.
A few hundred metres to the north the grey facade of the Ishtar Sheraton blocks the view of the Palestine hotel, enclosed in four-metre high cement block walls and razor wire.
A German colleague, Karin, rented the flat last March expecting to return in April. But she did not.
So when we arrived late last month ahead of the US handover to the Iraqi interim government, we had to set up house and office in a city awaiting a spasm of violence which did not come.
After we made a list of urgent supplies, our gentle driver, Rafid, took us to the always-open Ward (Rose) supermarket in the Karada district.
The market was thronged with shoppers pushing carts up and down narrow aisles between shelves heavily laden with Indian basmati rice, Syrian jams, and Turkish olives.
Iraqis had to live on home produce for so many years that they prefer foreign imports beyond the means of 90 per cent of the populace. We have dollars to spend, but many middle-class Iraqis living in crumbling houses sell prized possessions to buy food.
At a street stall, we spent $2 on Iraqi apples, peaches, tomatoes and cucumbers.
Cherries and grapes from Iran and bananas from Guatemala are more expensive, but are on sale even in poor neighbourhoods. Half a dozen leaf-shaped loaves of Iraqi bread costs a few cents.
Rafid made for the street lined with shops crammed with satellite dishes and electronic equipment, to connect us with the Iraqi internet provider and a satellite receiver so we could follow the news on television.
As soon as the isolationist Baathist regime fell in April 2003, the flat roofs of buildings and houses blossomed with cheap satellite dishes to satisfy the Iraqi market, starved of outside stimulus.
An Iraqi wit composing a fable about Don Quixote visiting Baghdad calls the dishes "Iraq's windmills".
Although Iraqis were promised round-the-clock electricity by June, when the temperature rises to 48-50 Celsius, power is in shorter supply and more erratic than ever.
The current fades and the generator in our building breaks down so often that our landlord gives us current from his emergency generator to run our computers.
Most middle-class Iraqis have generators or buy electricity from neighbourhood systems but these also fail. Besides inflicting suffering on the population, the lack of electricity deprives millions of factory hands and artisans of work.
Here political power comes from an electrical socket, as well as from the barrel of a gun.
The ordinary telephone functions well, but mobiles and the internet are often overloaded sending us to Internet cafes filled with Iraqis.
As evening falls, we stand on the balcony to watch the sun sink behind the green domes of the palaces across the molten sheet of the Tigris.
Black and grey Indian crows fly up from the carob trees in the park when a pair of Apache helicopters, machine guns protruding from their long snouts, swoop low over the flats.
Wild dogs bark at the thud of exploding ordnance.
Awake at dawn, I sit watching the moon hang like a silver tray over the power plant at Dora. There is no smoke pouring from its four stacks, an ominous sign that there will be no power this day.
Two US army humvees pass on patrol up and down the empty street.
In traffic, Iraqi vehicles keep their distance from humvees, a favourite target of bombers and snipers.
The sky lightens. The garbage truck hoots insistently at householders who have not put their rubbish in the rusting drums on the corner.
A posse of sweepers makes its way along Abu Nawas: public works employment for poor men and boys.
The sharp rap of drumming on metal announces the seller of bottled cooking gas.
Cars swarm along Abu Nawas at 7.45 a.m.
Baghdad, the city of war, begins each new day hoping for peace.