Sylvia's Journal

No alarm this morning. I slept in until 7 AM. It was another one of those glorious Kabul mornings, the kind that make you want to sit outside and have breakfast in the sun. I have to wait a few more weeks for that but the rehabilitation of our house (khana si-o-seh or guesthouse 33) is progressing according to schedule.

The hiring of staff is in process. I have asked that each of the cooks who have applied for the job prepare a sample meal next week in our guesthouse for its five current occupants, one vegetarian, one carnivore and three omnivores, so I think it will be a good test. It would be nice if he can prepare sushi but Afghan food would be fine too.

In the meantime I have bought some local art to put on my bare office walls. I spotted some lovely pencil and watercolor drawings in a rack in the back of a small dusty bookstore on Flower street during our weekly outing into town where I also found Dupree’s famous book on Afghanistan, a well used and somewhat dirty copy that will do the trick as a reference.

While Greg and Steve went on their weekly carpet hunt on and off Chicken Street, I went with Naranjan, an Indian colleague who is staying with us, for a stroll beyond the carpet and knick-knack stores to a more ordinary street with small grocery stores and shops that sell ordinary household goods.

In between the shops we spotted a window filled with pakoras, small deep-fried beignets with potato and spinach filling. Naranjan is a vegetarian while the other housemates of us are carnivores and so this was his chance. Together with Abdul Ahab who is there to guard is, we filled our plates with all the pakoras and something like potato latkes. I generously offered to pay for everyone; combined with 3 cokes the bill came to 3 dollars and 60 cents.

My Dari teacher showed up late for our first lesson because he works with an organization that had one of their cars taken into custody by the policy somewhere in the north and his services were required to ‘solve the situation’ as it was referred to. Eventually he arrived and we had an hour and a half lesson working on verbs, pronunciation and numbers. I learned, among other things, that here people ‘eat’ tea rather than drink it. Maybe it is because of the chewy candies that are such an integral part of the tea consumption.

He gave me much homework that includes declinations of at least 15 verbs, the numbers I was tripping over and, if I get all that done before Tuesday, also a writing assignment. We are tackling talking, reading and writing all at the same time.