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 [View Full Entry]

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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, [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Well there's another one, you can't escape them here, a man with a Kalashnikov just walked into the internet cafe. That's Afghanistan, but honestly it's not bad at all. It's a little more rough and tumble than the places I've been so far, but the people are so wonderful and helpful, I don't feel the least bit in danger. Okay, the generator failed once and I lost my blog, but here goes again. I left Khorog last week after very long goodbyes with my friends, and got on to a Russian army jeep headed for the Wakhan valley. On there [View Full Entry]

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Alright, here I am in word again… when did I last write? I don’t know, but I think it was before the birthday party, so I’ll start there. I was invited to go to Nargiz’s cousins birthday, and I went. At first it was very quiet, and I talked with a woman who works in Dushanbe with Aga Khan foundation. I should talk about Aga Khan a little bit, he is supposedly a swiss born business man, and the Imam of Ismailism, a branch of Shia Islam that’s extremely peaceful, and has no mosques, no holy day, and no praying [View Full Entry]

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Well, since I last wrote... ehm, many things have happened. I guess it's been ten days, but it seems about a month. When I went to the airport to fly the next day, the weather didn't favor me, and the flight was cancelled, so I decided to wait it out till the weather was better. I sat thinking what to do, because I didn't want to stay at the overpriced Great Game Tour Company again, so I decided to try and get a bed in a private flat, Malohats BB which is 5 bucks a night. On the mashrut there, [View Full Entry]

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Right. Well, I was travelling with my father for a while but now I'm on my own, and with my spare time I will come to internet cafes, when they are available, and write here. It really seems to make sense. I've been thinking about it though, and as far as writing goes, it's an interesting audience one writes to in a 'blog.' But I don't think I'll censor it, too much. In Bishkek, there was a photo shop where you can transfer digital photos to CD, but Dushanbe is a little bit more backward, so I don't know if [View Full Entry]

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Damnit, I just wrote a huge thing about Uzbekistan and the goddamn generator lurched. The horrible part is it was enough to shut my computer down, but the guy next to me didn't have any problems. So I am mainly going to post some photos here. I refuse to write it all over again, I'm sorry. We went to the cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, Nukus, and Moynaq. Moynaq is the epicenter of the Aral Sea disaster, where almost overnight the sea receded due to Soviet irrigation projects in the desert, and shrunk to something like 40% of it's original [View Full Entry]

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