Sylvia's Journal

For 16 hours I was high up in the sky, oblivious to the worries of the world, ensconced in my business class pod. Things turned out all right and it was my lucky day after all. I fell asleep, which is very easy to do in the pod because the seat flattens entirely, as soon as we were up in the air and woke up as we approached the North American coast. Sixteen hours in that business class pod is easy flying; I could have gone on for another 16 hours. But in coach it is an endless trip, I have done it too.

I entered the US with a simple swipe of my passport in a kiosk. I got my clearance for the Global Entry System just when my continuous travel stopped, last winter. It’s very satisfying to bypass the long lines. The swift entry and not having any checked luggage, made it possible to catch the plane to DC that left 25 minutes after I exited the plane that had taken me from Dubai.

I was taken to a very fancy hotel, Monaco, which is located straight across the National Portrait Gallery. I learned that the hotel used to be the Tariff Building and was the first significant federal building constructed after the US Capitol and the White House. The design is based on an Italian Renaissance Palazzo. I feel kind of royal, first the B-class and now this. I am travelling in style.

I threw myself Washington like a true tourist, starting with a walk down to the Mall. I chose my lunch spot carefully: in the National Gallery’s statue garden. I had it with a glass of white wine in a plastic cup, just like that, in the open, while watching a steady stream of obese tourists waddle by and trying to look at the exposed flesh with the eyes of an Afghan and I marvel about this place where everything is possible that is so frowned upon back home.

I visited the National Gallery and then made a brief pilgrimage to see Amelia’s shiny red Lockheed Vega in the overcrowded Air & Space Museum. I had watched the movie about her on the plane and felt compelled to pay my respect.

On my way back to the hotel I passed by the Canadian embassy, marvelling again at the absence of any visible form of protection, except for some low fences one could jump over in a second. It made me want to scream at all the warmongers in Afghanistan, ‘don’t you see what you could get, how lovely and peaceful Afghanistan could be if you could just stop worrying about your own wellbeing and interest and start looking after the good of the country?’

Back at the hotel I ‘rested my eyes’ as Axel calls it until the phone brought me back from a bottomless sleep. Kathy from the reception rang to tell me the provincial health director of Bamiyan Province had showed up. He has been all over the US on a trip paid for by the State Department and we were able to keep him here three more days to participate in our conference. I am paying his bill, hence the call.

I am happy about his presence at the conference on Monday. It will keep me honest. When people ask me about ‘country-owned’ and ‘government-led’ I can call on him.

It also meant that I had an Afghan dinner date and the food was going to be Afghan. Our Sikh taxi driver took us far outside the city; I was ready to turn back and then there it was, a place along a major road, strip mall style. I don’t think I would have ever gone in by myself as it didn’t look very attractive on the outside. It was Afghan all right, very Afghan. A wedding was going on inside. It is as if I was back in Kabul except the men and women mingled freely and most women were not covering themselves as they would in the home country.

The food and the service was excellent and stood in some contrast to the rather run down surrounding. I could tell that my Afghan friend was enjoying the food he has missed for 3 weeks. I watched him observe with curiosity his Americanized country men and women as he ate his warm Afghan naan, sipped his green tea and dug into his qabuli rice. It was royal treatment of a different kind.