Learning lessons

I am jinxing myself by saying this, but I have an incredible track record of not getting sick while traveling, and I really don't limit myself much in the way of street food. As you can see from my previous post, I am helping myself to plenty of kabobs served wrapped in newspaper from neighborhood kabob shops, and I also eat plenty of salad because they make a dressing that tastes just like Dad's and is worth the risking the raw vegetables. And yet I still haven't gotten sick, from food at least.

I am writing this post from my bed because I have spent most of Christmas Eve feeling absolutely terrible after having a few glasses of the worst wine I have ever tasted. It came out of a milk-carton that you snipped the corner of the cardboard off to make a spout. Now, being a muslim country, wine is pretty hard to come by, and so my two friends and I finished the carton though we all agreed we had never had worse, and then we went to bed. I woke up half dead the next morning, though they were relatively undamaged. Which I am taking as a lesson that while my stomach can tolerate quite a lot of abuse from developing country food, it demands a higher quality when it comes to beverages.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Getting into a routine

The first few weeks I was here, I used to hate rolling up to the office every morning because the drive had been so much fun; there were so many different things to see that the idea of going inside and getting work done was painful. Well, now that work has picked up, I am still dreading going into the office, as there are a million things that need to be done each day and it gets overwhelming occasionally, but the noticeable difference is that the drive has become less novel. I am feeling much more at home here, I know all of the drivers and cooks and cleaners names and can have 5 word conversations with them. I know which grocery store sells brownie mix and which sells microwave popcorn, I know that on clear days I should ride in the front seat of the SUV so that I can get the best vantage point for photos. Work is also getting more routine, things are speeding up and hiring is coming along quickly.

They asked me to stay another few weeks, but I have commitments on my other project so I can't stay quite that long and am only extending my trip by 10 days or so, but I am finding it really hard to think about leaving in a month. I have gotten very attached to Kabul, leaving is going to be difficult.

Woah

So work has picked up, like I knew it would. Tons of interviews, tons of reference checks, lots of little balls all being juggled at the same time. For now, I will just leave you with some photos.

First off, Zack was cranky I didn't have my camera for the kebab-fest, so here is a photo of a mini-kebab-fest. Plastic bag, lined with newspaper, lined with bread, filled with kebabs. That is Kabuli takeout. Pretty tasty.

Also, the shopping here is amazing, beautiful scarves and jewelry and carved wooden things. Here is my friend Martha in a particularly packed shop.

Salsa dancing?

So, I knew I would come home with fun stories, but this one so far takes the cake. I just spent my evening salsa dancing in Kabul with an award-winning figure skating/ballroom dancing/South African Security Manager who speaks pretty good Dari. Zimbabwean Guy was also a spectacular dancer.

My Toyota is Awesome

So our vehicle of choice is a monstrous Toyota Landcruiser. Armored, with a radio, it is pretty intimidating. About 80% of the other cars on the road are also Toyota, and I was amused to see the following sticker on the back of one yesterday: "My Toyota Is Awesome." So the photo of the day is dedicated to Sue Hughes, who kept her dear little Toyota for 20-odd years.

These photo are also to give you a general sense of the mud going on in my life right now. This is some serious mud. Zipping through them in our little 4-wheel drives reminds me quite a lot of jeeping in Moab, and makes me giggle, until I see someone trying to get to work on a bike in the mud, or navigating the curb in a burkha. Not a fun season to be a bike rider or a burkha wearer.

The Real World: Kabul

For those of us who did not grow up watching MTV, The Real World is a tv show where they would throw a variety of 20-somethings in a huge house for a few months and follow them around with video cameras to capture the insanity. That is my life right now...

I have moved into a house inhabited by about 8 expats, a cook, some drivers, a jolly South African head of security, and a few Nepalese guards who look very tough when they aren't grinning. At any given time, a few of these people are playing pool, watching random TV, or now that I have moved in, playing Settlers of Catan :). (addictive board game, let me know if you want more details)

So just to give you a picture of the absurdity, this morning's breakfast table had a jolly Bolivian, a chipper man with a trim white beard from Berthoud Colorado, a Zimbabwean wearing a full traditional Afghan outfit, and a schlumpy, half-asleep 20-something, (That would be me.) We had pancakes made from Betty Crocker mix. So weird. I am the only female expat, so we have decided I am Wendy and they are the lost boys.

Speaking of weird, they have KFC here. That would be Kabul Fried Chicken.

Kebab-Fest

Imagine a table, covered with newspapers like you were about to eat crabs, with large circles of naan overlapping on top, making a fluffy bread tablecloth. On top of that? Big chunks of lamb. Some on the bone, some off, with delicious juice soaking into the bread. On the side of the table are bowls of yogurt sauce and a tomato/chili sauce, and extra bread for those who are squeamish about eating the bread that has been touching the newspaper.

This was my lunch, at work!

Speaking of work, it is going really well. I am a bit overwhelmed with resumes right now, there are so many qualified people in Kabul! I haven't started the interview process in full swing yet, but I am looking forward to getting these positions staffed up.

I am moving into one of our office guest houses tomorrow, which will be a nice change of pace. The hotel is definitely comfortable, but pretty impersonal, and I am REALLY getting sick of the same breakfast over and over again. Depending on what is for breakfast at the guest house (they have live-in cooks,) I might buy a box of US cereal to mix it up. There are grocery stores that sell everything you could imagine, with better selection than I found even in Chile. They have Barilla pasta, Cocoa Crispies, Frappuccinos. It is very weird.

I am in love with Alakazoy tea, it is just about the only tea that anyone drinks and they drink a lot of it. I already bought a box to bring home with me. I am already getting sick of the two or three Afghan-appropriate dresses I brought, so I am going shopping this Friday for a few new outfits.

Well that is about all for now, I am writing on my lunch break still trying to digest the Kebab-fest. Good times.

Love you all,
Anna

Is that Spanish?

As it turns out, the majority of the staff on my company's other project in country are all from Spanish speaking countries. Tonight we had a mini-Christmas dinner at the project's compound and I got to speak with an Honduran, a Bolivian, a Peruvian, and a Spaniard. I had flan for dinner in the middle of Kabul. Haha. As a fun side-note, the word for "yes" in Dari sounds like "Vale," so people answer the phones here the same as they do in Mexico.

Work is going well. We are hitting a few roadblocks, but mostly I am finding really amazing candidates for our project.

It is supposed to snow on Wednesday, and I really can't imagine the streets being any more of a mess. I have never seen potholes this big. Our drivers are all amazing, navigating through epic mud puddles and driving through 6 lanes-thick of traffic where there are no lanes and absolutely no rules about who can go where and when, and whether they should use turn signals. Before you get worried, I am quite safe. We use large armored SUVs that are indestructable and I, of course, always wear a seatbelt. The people I really worry about are the women in burkas who have to cross from one side of the meyham to the other, they have no peripheral vision and it really is incredibly dangerous.

Anyway, it is my bedtime, Love yall.

To tired to write much

Well I wrote a whole long post last night, but evidently it didn't post? Anyway, we got into Kabul Saturday at 7am. The plane was a little late taking off because "they don't let civilian planes land before sunrise in Kabul" Well, during the descent practically SKIMMING huge beautiful, craggy, snowy mountains, I am pretty glad the pilot had the most visibility possible. It was beautiful, but a little harrowing.

So far so good, my hotel used some pretty tricky photography on its website to make it not look itsy bitsy. It is pretty itsy bitsy, but is very safe, has plenty of hot water, and good breakfast (naan, grilled tomatoes and scrambled eggs? I love this country.)

My security-department-issued cell phone has thus far received 5 spam text messages. Awesome.

I have been the most popular person in the office today, I bought a two pound bag of chocolates in the Duty Free shop in Dubai. The darling cleaning lady stuck her head back in my office about five minutes after I first offered her one and I eventually figured out she was asking if she could take a couple more for her kids. It is amazing how much English everyone speaks, I am able to get by in conversations with almost everyone who works for the company or hotel. I had lunch with a bunch of women in the office today, who taught me some Dari. The office has a cook that makes lunch for $1.80 every day, today was some sort of meat (Lamb? Beef?) and potatoes in a sauce over rice. Delicious. I am looking forward to my daily cheap, gourmet meal, with free language lessons.

28 hours into the longest trip of my life...

Hi guys, so I made it to Dubai! Our flight was cut into two parts, a 14 hour beast from DC to Dubai, after which we were supposed to check into a hotel, check our email, find the itinerary for our next flight the following day for Kabul. Well when my boss and I got into the hotel at 10pm, his email couldnt open the itinerary and we decided to get some dinner and check it in the morning, since the flights usually leave around noon. Well, dinner turned into smoky kareoke bar till 3 am, after which we were able to open the itinerary and realize that our flight was scheduled to leave at 3:30. oops.

No one is quite sure why we couldn't have received our itinerary before we left DC, or why 3:30 is considered a decent hour to fly folks to Kabul, but we are now rebooked on tomorrow's 3:30 flight and that means I have an additional day to play around in Dubai.

Last night was pretty absurd. I have never seen a city without a single car older than a 2007 model, let alone the sheer number of Hummers, Land Rovers, BMWs, Jaguars, and Porches. Gag. I found it poetically ironic that a citystate with such upscale tastes in cars did not also extend that snobery to their food. Let me list you the restaurants I passed last night: McDonalds, KFC, TGI Fridays, Chiles, Popeyes and Haagen Daz. Gag 2.0

That said, my breakfast buffet today was ridiculously delicious, if not particularly breakfast-y. There was cauliflower and leek gratin with pine nuts, little egg pizzas (circles of omlette with onions and peppers and melted cheese on top,) little fried things similar to a sopapilla served with a curried potato dish on top, and then a strange sort of ground meat with tomatoes and chili sauce, delish. Coffee was nestcafe-ish, but oh well. I am still looking forward to going back tomorrow. Oh wait, my flight leaves at 3:30 am. Have I mentioned that?

I am going to take a nap now, get some work done, maybe go to the beach for a minute just to say I did (and get in some last few drops of sun and warm before six weeks of Kabul-in-December weather)

Love yall,

Anna