Sylvia's Journal

Today was mostly a play day. Aside from a brief excursion to the supermarket, we were home-bound. Axel was at home the whole day. He has not been feeling so well, so we took it easy on this day of Independence (celebrating the Treaty of Rawalpindi in 1919, granting Afghanistan full independence from Britain).

Despite our low energy, we made giant bubbles with the Klutz bubble wand I had brought from the US. We are testing dishwasher detergent to see which kind makes the best bubbles. So far we have tried Gulrang red and Gulrang yellow. Yellow is better. According to Mr. Giant Bubbles the climate here is not so good for bubbles – too dry.

The climate at this time of the year is, on the other hand, excellent for kites. We are in the middle of kite season and they are all around us, some more than 1000 feet up. They are all of the thin paper kind – not the fancy nylon ones that sell for up to 80 dollars in the US. Kites get stuck in barbed wire or in trees all the time. Every day we find new kites on the roof of our guard’s house. No point in wasting 80 dollars each time.

While Axel made 5 feet long bubbles I practiced the hoola hoop. I am making some progress although I cannot quite copy Meghann’s acrobatics. After that we played a board game until it was dark and the lone mosquito came out.

We discovered that one of the local cheeses makes an excellent cheese fondue. We don’t have white wine so we added a little bit of Dr. Beam to help with the melting and then dipped locally made French bread into the pan. We could have fooled ourselves that it was the real thing. We could even taste the missing Kirsch and white wine!

For desert we watched James Bond in Quantum of Solace. I am not much of an action movie lover. Little did I know that there would be three chases in the first 5 minutes and then all imaginable kinds of chases spaced throughout movie: a car chase, and old building/cistern/running across tiled roofs chase, a church chase, a motorboat chase, a plane chase, a chase in a fancy opera house and finally a big fight in an exploding building.

The only reason I can handle it is because I can stick my fingers in my ears and I because I know that James will, in the end, not lose his life nor his job, even if it looked like that for most of the movie. I am still catching my breath.