Blogs from Afghanistan, Asia - page 18
February 6th 2005
Well today is the day of packing and doing the laundry to see what fits and doesnt fit.. Gonna watch the Eagles and take a trophy down broad street.. 76 hrs and counting.. TC... read more
November 18th 2004
I don't really feel like writing, but I suppose I ought to before I forget too much. I am kind of upset by what an enormous pain the holiday of Ramazan has been to me. It was fun sharing food with people at sunset, but when I arrived in Kabul, the post Ramazan holiday had begun, and just about everything was closed. I've been trying to get my Pakistani visa now for 5 days. I was 3 days in Kabul, and then I came to Jalalabad consulate, where it's supposedly easier to get. It seems though, that Ramazan was not yet inconvenient enough for me, and Pakistan's holiday lasts a day longer. So I settled down in Jalalabad, played billiards and cricket with some of the local boy, enjoyed a nice picnic of kebab and ... read more
November 11th 2004
An update on what I've been doing the past few days. I've settled into Mazar-i-Sharif, now a regular at one juice stand and an Indian restaurant, which is nice. Mazar is a dirty, dusty city, filled with beggars, but it has one of the most amazing structures in the Islamic world, the shrine of Ali. It's really impressive in person, the photos I'd seen of it before didn't really do it justice, and neither do mine, as you can probably see. The highlight of my time in Mazar was a side trip I took to Balkh, probably Afghanistan's oldest city, and the birthplace of Zoroaster. It's filled with ruins, the city was huge before being completely levelled by Jenghiz Khan. It was fun walking around the site where the city used to be, it's littered ... read more
November 7th 2004
I thought I'd just write about some minor things, conversations I've had in the last couple of days, which I find very interesting and will certainly forget to write about if I don't now. Last time I wrote I was headed off to my first bastion of Western culture in Afghanistan. I love Afghanistan because it's certainly the country that's retained it's culture more than any other I've visited. I met a guy yesterday who mistook me for a German he met a couple of months ago. He showed me around the city, but most interestingly he told me about Afghan dating. It's amazing how un-free you are to do what you want here. As we would walk, he would point to a girl and say, 'ohh, she's very beautiful.' and all I could see ... read more
