Sylvia's Journal

Saturday is physical therapy day, if I can help it. I showed my PT the diagnostic report from the American University Hospital MRI doc and ask for a translation in plain English. I wanted to know first of all if the report contained good news or bad news.

The good news was that the smaller of the two tears, the infraspinatus, had healed well, which meant that a few exercises were no longer needed. But the larger tear had not healed all that well and inflammation explained my recent problems. This meant new execises.

While the PT was attending to me all the other ladies in the room were watching our every movement with great interest. You could see them wonder, who is this blue-eyed foreign lady and why is she here. They asked questions about me, which, unbeknown to them I could follow. I told my PT that she should warn the Afghan patients that I could actually understand their questions.

After PT I scheduled my weekly Thai oil massage which was as good as ever, worth every penny of the 40 dollars and the 5 dollar tip.

I asked the driver and guard whether we could get me some traditional roper furniture. This led to a wild goose hunt from east to west and north to south; we covered most of Kabul in search of the outdoor rope-chair set. It’s the concept, Axel explained later; they simply cannot understand why a foreigner would want traditional rope furniture (‘farnichar’ in Dari) when shiny Pakistani or Chinese furniture can be had.

Strange enough Chinese (read imported) stands for high quality even though, by our standards, it is far from high quality. I was taken to a showroom of fancy (read: cheap) imported ‘farnichar’ even though I thought I had explained I wanted none of it. They kept showing me beds yet I had indicated, I thought, that I didn’t want a bed. My limited Dari was clearly an impediment to expeditious shopping.

After two hours we gave up. I went home, prepared for my Dari class, had two hours of Dari during which I learned more prepositions, and then we went back home for a brief interlude before heading out again for dinner at the Washington Post house where our friend Robin is staying. Around the dinner table we had many nationalities: Japanese, Afghan, American, Canadian, German, Dutch, Spanish, French and Italian, even though there were only 8 people present. Except for Axel, Sabina and Robin, everyone else had at least 2 nationalities.