Baghdad is different now, my colleagues here told me before I arrived this week.

Just take a ride through the neighborhoods you couldn't visit six months ago, they urged, always with the disclaimer that Baghdad is only better in a don't-get-too-used-to-it sort of way. The consensus among veteran Iraqi and Western reporters is that this place will blow again at the right provocation, so soak up the sights and sounds while you can.

Taking their advice, I took a tour of several districts today, stopping in on a couple of Iraqi families and navigating the new checkpoints and tall blast walls that seal off entire neighborhoods like prisons. Make no mistake, there is still a vicious war going on and just this week more than 60 people perished in a devastating bombing not too far from our hotel. Some of the areas we visited today -- Saidiyah, Shohada, Bayaa -- were still incredibly tense, just not completely off-limits like before.

At a main intersection in Saidiyah, the site of some of the worst sectarian cleansing in the city, four separate forces manned checkpoints to keep Sunnis and Shiites from killing one another: the U.S. military, the Iraqi army, Shiite-dominated police commandos, and the U.S.-allied Sunni militias that the Americans like to call the Sons of Iraq. At this dangerous stretch of road, my driver picked up speed, turned off his Shiite religious music and rolled down the window to listen for gunfire.

We cruised past deserted shops, bullet-pocked villas, newly landscaped roundabouts, a mosque with the minaret blown nearly off and forbidding blast walls decorated with fanciful murals by local artists. At one stop, I asked to take some photos of the artwork; the guards grew alarmed and called for their superiors. We left in a hurry. Iraq is still not a place where you can employ that old photographer's adage about it being better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

Not too long ago, the Iraqi government tweaked the national flag, removing stars that were associated with Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime. Many Sunnis balked at the change, calling it yet another erosion of Iraq's national identity by parties loyal to outside forces, especially Iran.

I didn't realize just how deeply the flag change had cut until the drive today. We spotted two checkpoints on the same street, just a few yards from each other. One was a police checkpoint where portraits of Shiite saints hung under a huge new Iraqi flag, minus the stars. Right across the median sat gunmen from one of the U.S.-allied Sunni militias, inspecting cars from underneath a fluttering old Iraqi flag, the one with the stars. What was the mysterious glue holding the peace between these two warring forces, I wondered, and how long would it stick until those guns were trained across the unguarded median instead of at suspicious-looking passersby?

On the way to Bayaa, we passed through a Mahdi Army stronghold where I noticed something I had never seen in Baghdad: macabre "martyr posters" just like the ones that dot Hezbollah-controlled areas in Beirut and southern Lebanon. Not the ancient martyrs, but local Shiite boys who'd been killed while fighting Sunni guerrillas in recent months. As it was explained to me, simply dying in a car bombing didn't get you a poster; you had to go out with guns blazing.

Rows of baby faces, some too young to even sprout the requisite beards, stared out from the posters. No doubt many of them had met unimaginably awful deaths -- did laminating their faces and posting them at traffic lights lessen the sting for their families? Did their classmates covet the same glory, did it make them more willing to join the Mahdi Army's efforts to "purify" their neighborhoods?

The Iraqi families we'd arranged to meet shuttled us into their homes before neighbors could get a good glimpse and figure out we were not from the 'hood. You'll read about their lives in a story later this week, I hope, but none of them expressed optimism that this fragile peace could endure. When asked about the future, one sweet housewife let out a deep sigh and rose from her seat, saying she needed to get her "tools" before answering. She returned with a fresh pack of cigarettes and chain-smoked her way through a list of reasons why Iraq is lost.

There is great wariness even within the sects. As we prepared to leave a Shiite family's home in Shohada, a formerly mixed district where only a handful of Sunnis remain, my Shiite driver fretted that Shiite militiamen had spotted us and we decided to switch cars for the drive home. The only problem was, the second car was outside the family's gate and required a short walk in the exposed street. Watching the drivers weigh the options made me think that perhaps it was still premature and stupid to have ventured out like this.

But one moment on the drive today restored a glimmer of hope. We'd been driving across the busy Jadiriyah Bridge, where not too long ago gunmen at illegal checkpoints sometimes stopped cars and executed drivers depending on their sect. Today we coasted right along until, suddenly, traffic slowed and then halted.

I stiffened and nervously asked my driver what the problem was.

"Maybe just a clash," he responded nonchalantly in his halting English.

"A clash! Well, don't you think we should get out of here?" I demanded, already sliding lower in my seat like the old days, even though I still didn't hear the bullets. Our guys are tough, but I couldn't figure out why clashes a few yards in front of us didn't unsettle him.

"Oh, I mean a crash, a car crash, not clash," the driver corrected with an embarrassed laugh.

I was even more relieved when I saw the real source of the bottleneck: a road crew was hard at work, patching up this bridge that once carried so many to their deaths.