Sylvia's Journal

Weekends aren’t that much fun without Axel. We talked last night and he asked whether I would have a G&T, and a chilly omelet, part of our past weekend routines – but these things don’t taste the same alone.

I worked a bit on my Dari homework and took care of a bunch of private email chores that I had collected over the week. My new computer is defective. As soon as a power cord is attached the power turns off. And so I spent a lot of time between three computers and three batteries, using one up while recharging another; a royal pain in the neck.

At the end of the morning I went to see Katie in her new old Afghan house across town. The house came with several turtles and a bunch of very messy pidgeons who live in a fancy multi-room, gabled but poop-filled bird house that stands high on a pole in their yard. The small house looks like a cube, tiled on the outside with the kind of tiles we would put in a bathroom or kitchen. But inside it is cozy. The walls are thick and the breeze through the open windows cools the house off nicely.

This breeze is going to be important because painters were busy with the same high gloss/high fume paint that gave us headaches and nausea in our house – the thing that may finally have short circuited Axel’s lungs.

The house is tucked away behind an enormous poppy house, owned by Turks who have used every inch of the land to build as large a mansion as could possibly fit between the neighbors’ walls. Once again it is the juxtaposition of the very beautiful and the very ugly that is so typical for this country.

I left just about the time that four suicide bombers approached a police station a few miles away and then blew themselves up. I found this out only later when I got to the language school where everyone was busy texting to friends and loved ones.

And so this was another day in Kabul, another weekend passed mostly alone. I hope I will get the hang of it soon.