I can’t believe it, I am on the SDMB from Kabul. I got in four days ago. I have some pretty good pictures, but I don’t know how to show them now. When I get home I can post them on the net.
Kabul is different in a lot of ways than I expected. I was in Kosovo after the war, and there NATO troops were everywhere, but I haven’t seen a single foreign troop.
I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone, but who knows when I’ll have an internet connection again.
Below is an excerpt from an email home. I know I’m babbling, but I’m operating on ‘mission buzz’ right now.
Hello everyone, I thought I’d share my first impressions of Kabul. The first thing that struck me about Kabul was its airport. It was an exact replica of a Russian regional airport. I had been in this version of dingy modernism before. The Soviets must have built it for them at some point. Everything was exactly the same right down to the chaotic mess at passport control. No one was shoving, it was a giant tumble of people, but everyone got their turn. When I saw the mob, I kind of got into my Moscow metro mind set, but it wasn’t necessary.
After clearing passport control, I was waiting for my luggage when I noticed the guy standing next to me was Geraldo Rivera. It was one of those odd, unclassifiable moments that I seem to get more often than most. He was actually being pretty cool for someone who is in fact a huge cheesewad. I was standing next to Victoria, a local Afghan woman who works for my office and we were making polite small talk when I noticed Geraldo and he was making polite small talk with the Afghan who met him at the airport.
I wanted to take picture of him, but I didn’t want to ask him if I could take a picture, but finally I did ask. At first I pretended to be messing with my digital camera and, oops, it went off, but none of those shots came out. I realized the only thing lamer than asking Geraldo for a picture was trying to take one surreptitiously.
So I asked for the photo and he said sure. Then Victoria (her real name is something else that begins with a V but she introduces herself to westerners as Victoria) asked me who he was and I said he was a famous journalist (I refrained from making air quotes with my fingers). So then she wanted a picture with Geraldo, I was afraid to ask for another but he ate it up.
As we were driving in I was kind of hoping for this big welcome to Afghanistan moment, but it was pretty much like every other car ride in a project country I’ve ever had. Some very nice young local who is very sincere and speaks very good English picks you up at the airport, you get in a car, the driver tells you that you don’t need your seatbelt, strange music is playing on the radio (sometimes you can substitute Brittany Spears or euro techno crap for this part), and you watch the near misses out the car window.
We had to drop some papers off at the US embassy on the way in, so we dropped Victoria off at the gate. You can’t stop in front of the embassy for obvious reasons so we were driving slowly along waiting for her to catch up. She couldn’t, so we started backing up. A marine in a bunker yelled at us, the driver saw him, but we pretended we didn’t. He yelled a couple more times, then he pointed his gun at us. That’s when we noticed him, by then Victoria had caught up to us. No blood, no foul.
