Memories of visiting Saddam's Iraq part 3

Finally that night we reached Baghdad, and it was as if we are entering a new country, the difference between Baghdad and the southern states is so evident in comparison ,while the southern states roads were full of pits and the garbage was every where ,Baghdad was so beautiful with wide roads huge bridges and the sight of the river was simply breath taking. So we got off the bus terminal and grabbed a taxi to hotel Gilgamesh named after the Assyrian king and poet, the hotel was very nice and comfortable so things are getting better and better,i rested my cousin whom was really in severe pain by now and went looking for a pharmacy which was near by. I want a medicine for stomach ache i said, he looked at me for a while after listening to my accent , did you drink any thing on the way Kuwaiti? i said yes , then he started laughing and said the problem is that you have stomachs made out of plastic while ours is made of stainless steel, i smiled thinking what do they teach these guys in pharmaceutical college. OK he said do you want domestic or imported medicine, i told him are you serious of course imported! Here he said , and i remember it was made in East Germany , that will be 20 Dinars , waw that is cheap i thought 20 Iraqi Dinars may be equal to less than 10 cents , AH he said but you are not an Iraqi citizen so you pay 30 U.S dollars or 10 Kuwaiti dinars, say what!! he replied what do you think, this is how we get even you have to pay in hard currency.

Next morning my cousin was feeling much better after that socialist medicine, so we decided to walk , you can smell history in every corner , here were the Babylonians , Assyrians, Akkadians ,Persians and Arabs ,it was exciting and behold there were this nice book shop and i thought yes time for books, so we entered looking for a book about these civilizations but to our surprise most of the books were under the title of Saddam. like speeches of the leader president, thoughts of Saddam Hussein etc..so i asked for a history books, yes he said i have a few and these are popular, Saddam son of Babel, another was, Akkad, socialism and Saddam, i heard of brain wash but this was brain wash with a hard scrub,so i left empty handed and disappointed . Hey lets go to the history museum my cousin suggested,surly they cannot manipulate that,unless they would exchange Sargon the Great head statue with Saddam's and write Sargon reborn ,nah can  they?So we grabbed a taxi and the driver was the same guy whom took us last night from the bus terminal,you my friends again what a coincidence the driver said, this is more than a coincidence i thought and immediately told my cousin to keep his mouth shut and let me do the talking, obviously he was a secret police.As we reached the museum our earlier thought was very close because there was this great poster with Saddam standing next to the statue of Sargon with a sentence in the bottom which amazed me and reads " THIS CUB IS FROM THIS LION"