Sylvia's Journal

We went on our usual walk in Bagh-e-bala below the Intercontinental hotel. As we walked back Janneke spotted a hole in the fence and a path up the hill where a bunch of young girls and boys were carrying a variety of jugs with water. The older girl would gather as many jugs as she could, carry about 50 yards up the hill and then return to get another bunch that the smallest kids were not able to manage.

We picked up the jugs and took them to another hole in another fence all the while enjoying our escape into the wide open of Kabul. Our guard walked along and we would look at him each time we moved further away from the path as if to ask whether our jail break was OK.

But then finally the call came from our security folks that we had strayed too far and we marched obediently back to the main road. We ended our walk seeking out a different tea tent and settled on a carpeted platform to enjoy green tea and a snack that was fried and served in vinegar. It led to conversations about GI afflictions but some of us were too curious not to try. Now, many hours later, I can say that all is well and the snack was quite nice.

We had lunch at the Wakhan Cafe which serves the best espresso and macchiato in Kabul, nearly as good as the macchiato in Addis. It was a balmy winter day, more like spring, and so had out lunch outside in the withered garden.

On our way to the newly opened Kabul health club we stopped at one of the supermarkets that cater to the foreign community. Sara ran into a colleague from CRS who took her job in Bolivia before moving to Herat, right in front of the frozen meats, imagine that!

Right in the middle of the candy aisle I dropped a bottle of fish sauce which stank the place up so badly that the staff thought it a good idea to cover up the smell with room fresheners. The end result of this is best described as rotting fish in a perfume store. These odors mingled with the very strong chemicals from the painting that was done on the second floor – a nasty cocktail of chemicals that gave me an instant headache.

We never found the Kabul health club. Because it expects to cater to the well-heeled foreign community it is trying to fly so far under the radar that we couldn’t find it.

After introducing Sara to Chicken Street we returned home with a bunch of daffodils, green peppers for our chili omelet tomorrow and a bag full of eggs. Back home it was time for Dari homework (write down your daily routines in Dari), learning the vocabulary words for lesson 9. The reward for all this studying was watching Seinfeld for the remainder of the evening. It was a good Friday! No bombs, no explosions, no kidnappings.