Sylvia's Journal

I took Katie along to my physical therapy session, for yet another taste of Kabul, part of her Afghanistan primer.

It took us more than an hour to get across town. Some roads were blocked with heavy construction equipment and angry policemen waving us into a direction we didn’t want to go in; no one quite knows what’s goin on behind the blocades but we all assume it has something to do with the upcoming peace Jirga and the mobilization of thousands of men in uniform. Is anyone seeing the contradiction?

As there are fewer and fewer back roads these days to get to your destination, the traffic jams become more frequent and massive, especially since there are always people in the traffic jam who manage to turn their car around and then try to drive against the traffic to wherever they came from.

Police presence is visibly increading by the day. It is as if the grimmest looking police officers have been mobilized – sometimes it felt like even smiling at them was an infraction. We were pulled over but we were prepared with all our papers, most of which they can’t read anyways.

It is hard to understand why they’d pull us over but may be they have been given quotas: stop x number of people who look like Arabs with bad intention, x number who look like potential suicide bombers, and, for good measure, x number of blond or grey-haired female foreigners.

Eventually we made it, albeit quite late, to the orthopaedic center where we found the female treatment room fuller than I have ever seen it before. The three PTs were all treating several women at once, putting this one in a neck stretching machine, that one on a bench with a hotpack on her back and a third one with the e-stem, the electrical stimulation to activate muscles or reduce pain.

I did not complete my treatment because we had another appointment, with the Thai massage ladies, that I didn’t want to miss for the world. After yesterday’s khakbad (dust storm) my skin was so dried out that I was craving an oil massage. Katie chose for the, much more intense, Thai massage. We agreed that both had been sublime.

Back home we had lunch and I had a little nap before language lessons – I am now about one third through a literacy primer that teaches adult Dari speaking Afghans how to read and write. This meant I was ready for a 12-page Dick, Jane and Spot kind of reading booklet. I am learning about Asad and Nasim, two brothers, who are working on their plot of land. I am halfway through the story and I have no idea how it is going to end; I can’t bear the suspense!

Tomorrow Katie and I are going to Bamyan. I have flown from Kabul to Bamiyan and back on the way to Herat. It is no more than a 45 minute ride; but tomorrow we are scheduled to leave Kabul at 9 AM, touching down on Bamiyan’s small gravel airfield a little before 4 PM. I think Katie is going to get the aerial tour of Afghanistan, Kandahar, Herat, and who knows what else, before getting to our destination.

We filled yesterday (Friday) with all sort of excursions because we hadn’t done any lately and we wanted to show Katie that life here is not all that bad.
First we had breakfast at the Pelican restaurant, a French (real French, you can tell from the croissants) breakfast and lunch place with a lovely garden, not far from our house. It’s the place where Axel goes when he has gone too long without bacon and eggs.

A little further down the road, across from the bombed out shell of Darulaman palace is the Kabul museum. It is probably among the more traumatized musea in the world but it is getting slowly back on its feet. Some of its prize collections aren’t yet in residence though, such as the Bactrian Gold exhibit which has been touring the world for some years now. Much of what was left of its treasures are restored in the basement and then retrieved to put on exhibit.

The wooden Nuristani (Kaffiristani) statues, some of men embracing men, are finally on display in a light and airy room. Those are the statues that survived the wrath and misplaced prudishness of the Taliban. They are reminiscent of African or Polynesian statues, heathen of course in the eyes of those who hacked good chunks of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage into pieces.

Outside the museum is a small rusted locomotive that was bought in 1920 by King Amanullah, one of Afghanistan’s rulers who wanted to modernize Afghanistan (at the same time that Ataturk was, more successfully doing the same in nearby Turkey). The locomotive was used on a 7 km roadside tramway linking Kabul and Darulaman.

Upstairs was a more contemporary exhibit, a photo project that brought Afghan and American youth together through art. Two cultures, all representing minorities, were let loose with a camera to capture the concept of ‘Being We the People’ in their respective countries. They were then blown up and paired up to express similarities or contrasts. One of Axel’s students has one of his pictures on display.

For our next stop we had ourselves driven to the bird (and pet) market in the enormous Kabul bazaar off the main drag, Jade Maiwand in the old part of town. This part of town was entirely destroyed by the Mujahedeen fighting each other but is filled with life again.

Before throwing ourselves in the maze of narrow bazaar streets we ate some Afghan street food, Bolani, a deep fried dough triangle filled with leek or potato, greasy but very tasty. We then followed the narrow alley way, lined with large and small cages, empty or full with all kinds of birds: pigeons first, then the canaries, small birds with sharp beaks that are made to fight, love birds, small parakeets and parrots, finches and finally the magnificent pheasants and partridges, the latter also used for fighting. We bought a small cage, without bird, because it looked so nice and I have some idea that I can turn it upside down to serve as a lampshade and hide our ugly fluorescent terrace light.

Ignoring our guard and driver’s protests that the street food was not as good as what their women cook at home and this was no lunch at all, we asked them to drive us to our next destination, an upscale clothing and handicraft boutique frequented by foreigners to show Katie what she can bring back as gifts to herself and others.

A very special treat here is to go with Steve to Chicken Street. It’s a unique experience, and one that is about to end as there are only 4 weeks left of Steve’s assignment in Kabul. Katie got her outing with Steve just in time yesterday.

Axel declined the Chicken Street experience. Not having eaten the Bolani, he ordered a real lunch for about 100 time the prize of one Bolani, at the upscale French Bistro restaurant around the corner from Chicken Street. He can do that now because he is earning his own money. We found him content, with only a cold beer or glass of white wine missing.

While Axel is dining, we sniffed up years of Central Asian dust in Ibrahim’s shop where we had bought Daniel’s wedding gift only 3 weeks ago. Katie succumbed to her first purchase of a large embroidered bedspread. I succumbed briefly thereafter – not having enough money in your pocket is never a problem as all can be had on credit or a loan taken out from the Dr. Solter Bank.

On our way home we stopped to stock up on self-medication: the faux beer, that is the closest to beer we can have, and some sleep medicine and a blister pack of diazepam (valium) which can come in handy when you have a 16 hour flight in a cramped economy seat, or when you get too stressed out from living here. All this can be had over the counter at less the price of our co-pay back home.

Back home Axel cooked us a Cesar chicken salad (romaine spontaneously growing in our yard) and served it with lit candles and one bottle of Katie’s fermented grape juice, the yellow kind… ‘as if we are on vacation,’ said Katie.