Sylvia's Journal

We have a very busy social life in Kabul and on Fridays we are busiest. We had hoped to give Sara a tourist tour of Kabul but the rain and sleet made going up on a mountain for a panorama view of Kabul rather pointless. We were in the clouds.

We did take her down to the spooky Darulaman palace at the end of the road with the same name, going southwest right by our office. A shell of its former glory, what’s left of the palace stands there as a monument to war and destruction, destroyed beyond repair itself. It has been like that for more than a decade I believe and I wonder on whose to-do list this mammoth structure figures.

The newly dug and cemented jewies (open drains on each side of the roads) were no longer draining the snow/rain mixture that was consequently flowing into the street turning everything into mud. On days like this Kabul is very ugly.

We made a last stop on Chicken Street for Sara to buy a few more scarves to gift. We found the chief doctor herself shopping for scarves at the same place and so Sara got to meet her after all.

From there we drove in circles for about half an hour until we found the new Kabul Health Club – the same that we had not found last week. But this time we had a phone number. It took about 4 calls before we found the place, or rather the place found us as they had put a young man out on the street to flag us down.

Inside we discovered another part of Afghanistan – the educated, suave and polished Afghan diaspora that had returned and was determined to (a) help Afghanistan become more like the London, Dubai, Paris or New York they had reluctantly left when the relatives called them back to Kabul and (b) make it more palatable for them to live in.

The health club could have been in London or Dubai with brightly lit and elegantly designed dressing rooms for him and her, each with their steam rooms and saunas, a restaurant, a juice bar and a place to have nails, face and hair done (ladies only for now). The young couple whose venture this was, supported by several generations of family, greeted everyone warmly and flitted from one place to another trying to attract pre-paid one year memberships. The prices being American and the place as far from our house as it is, we decided to wait a while to see whether we can live without it.

Next stop on the agenda was for Sara and me a visit, once again, to the Thai beauty spa, me for a massage and Sara for a pedicure. An hour and a half later, all oily and shiny, while were waiting for our car, several (western) men entered the place, we assumed for a ‘gents beard trim.’ But thenl we noticed that only one of them actually sat down in a barber chair. The others, including two bulky men with military vests that had all their many pockets filled with various lethal objects – walked into the one place where, as far as we know, neither massage nor barber work is done. This parade of testosterone was so out of place in this beauty salon with its diminutive Thai ladies and pictures of smooth skin and Thai hair styles that it made us very curious.

We tried to casually walk by the room in which the men had entered but all we could see was four guys (two armed) sitting in a living room with several Thai ladies. Were we witnessing some historical secret talks? We will never know.

We drove home through more snow and sleet to find our house with doors and windows wide open because the leg of lamb that Axel was cooking had smoked up the house. He was doing this without knowing the oven temperature and had improvised a little bit too much on the hot side.

Nancy and Bill came over for dinner. Nancy lived here in the 50s and speaks fluently Dari – her husband Bill got here in 2002. Between the two of them there were a thousand stories to tell requiring many more than this one dinner.

It’s good to hear stories from people who have lived in a place for a long time as it puts all the current crises in perspective. I found this rather calming.