Embassies, Flooding Bazaars, and Leaving Kabul
Today I'm leaving Kabul and heading up to Mazar-e Sharif. I'll be travelling with two guys from the Mustafa -- Barukh, a Jewish freelancer (successful! making money from the pieces he writes!) from New York, and Chris, a wanna-be freelancer trying to make it here who's originally from Seattle. I hope Chris doesn't come down here this morning wearing shorts as he has been for the last few days. Bare legs are quite offensive in Muslim cultures, with young men pointing and laughing, old men scowling, and maybe the more fiery men in the middle wanting to throw you in the river. The locals don't understand Western clothing well and can't tell the difference between shorts and underwear. Thus, Chris in shorts is, in essence, Chris walking around "in his underwear" in front of women, etc... Bah. It would be a slight security threat to Barukh and I if Chris decides to wear shorts for this trip. I'll probably talk to him about it again.
Me, I'm wearing a shalwar kameez and a Pakistani-style hat all the time. The shalwar kameez is made of very light, thin cotton and is cut generously to help alleviate the heat. The shirt, which goes down to just above your knees, is probably hotter, in my opinion, than a Western-style t-shirt. The pants, however, are much cooler than jeans. They also look like they're cut for MC Hammer or a wide-hipped elephant. I'll take a picture of the pants laying out flat, without the belt in them to cinch the waist. They're about four feet across (literally), all of that cloth eventually being bunched up at your waist. When I first removed the pants from the bag, after spending 20 minutes having tea with the cloth merchants (customary after a "big" purchase), I thought I'd been had and that the tailor had so obviously cut the pants wrong.
I've been entertaining the idea of going to Kandahar. It'd always been a give-in that I'd avoid it since it was the Taliban stronghold, the focal point of ongoing attacks in the country, not especially interesting to me anyway, etc. But... I think I could do it safely. This is despite the news this morning that there was an attack on a car in the neighboring province of Helmand where gunmen opened fire on a car of civilians, killing five or six, including a woman. "Personal enmity" suspected, not Taliban-esque insurgents. I don't want to avoid doing something I want to do because of unfounded fear. Kandahar being a dangerous place is somewhat founded, but... it's probably overblown, like most other security threats in this country. (See below)
The question now is just if I want to go or not. The only thing of strong interest to me in Kandahar is a mosque that houses the Cloak of the Prophet. It's a cloak that Mohammad (PBUH :) wore and it has the entire Qu'ran written on it in very tiny script. It's shown only rarely. The most recent time was in the mid/late 90s when Mullah Omar brought it out it "prove" that he was the leader of the true believers or something. Prior to the that, the last time it had been shown was in 1934. All other times, it's kept burried under a small mountain of
blessed rugs, etc.
There's also an "Al Qaeda graveyard" full of foreign fighters who probably had no ties to Al Qaeda. That's probably actually more interesting to me than the mosque. Locals believe the men who are buried there are heroes and that the dirt from their graves will cure all manner of sicknesses. People visit the graveyard to take tablespoons of dirt off the graves, replacing what they take with a tablespoon of salt.
That's interesting, but I'm not sure it's "a few days of travel through the Southwest"-interesting. If it's 100F degrees here, how hot is it in the desert between Kandahar and Herat? Probably 110-120F there. I'd survive, of course, but the hassle, the time, coupled with the increased danger, etc -- I'm not sure it's worth it. Still, it's an idea I'm considering, as going through Kandahar would make a travel loop into more of a real loop than zig-zagging and backtracking.
Yesterday, I completed what was definitely the most dangerous part of my trip so far. I went to the US Embassy. The Embassy is in a secured area across town, near the road to the airport. The whole area is blocked off with barricades so cars can't approach. There're multiple gates and sets of guards in posts all along the road. The Embassy itself has sand-bagged look-out/sniper points on its roof, razor wire everywhere, search lights, etc. High walls, bomb-sniffing dogs, more sand-filled barrels to block explosions, etc. I say it was the "most dangerous" mostly because it's a very high-profile target for insurgents but also because the guards there are so high-strung.
My taxi driver pulled too far forward, slightly past the first
barricade, and a tall, muscular black man wearing a bullet proof vest and waving an M16 flipped out, waving his rifle at us and shouting in English, "What the fuck is your fucking problem today? You can't come in here, motherfucker! Your bitch-ass is gonna get shot. Are you all fucking stupid today?!" I can't really put myself in his shoes, to know the stresses of being a proximity guard for the Embassy compound, but he certainly projects a poor image to the locals. You'd think the outer-most guard would be someone who could, uh, speak Dari and/or Pashtu and actually communicate with people? At the very least, it ought to be some amiable and with good manners.
Anyway, the jaunt over there wasn't what I expected. After much confusion, being sent three times to the area where locals get badges for embassy access, I finally learned that I didn't need to do that at all and just had to wave my blue passport around and walk right past the gate guards to the embassy itself. When I finally made it there, I told them I wanted to register as an "American-in-country" and instead of inviting me in for tea, cookies, and a chat (or something -- I don't know what I should've expected), I was brought into the first security foyer, taken through the metal detector, and then just given a single piece
of paper and a pen. When I finished filling it out, I set it in a paper basket and walked out. That's it. The sheet asks for your name, address/phone locally, who to contact if you're dead, etc, and has a small section saying that due to the such-and-such Privacy Act, information about your whereabouts and health will only be released to: "[ ] no one. [ ] anyone. [ ] family. [ ] individual members of congress. [ ] the below specified individual(s)." After mulling over picking "individual members of congress" and having fantasies of a rebel congressman spearheading an investigation into a covered-up disappearance here, I just picked "family" and left it at that.
While leaving the US Embassy I ran into some Canadian ISAF soldiers. They politely and appropriately returned my "salaam alaiykum" and shook hands with me and we talked for a few minutes. I asked them about the Canadian convoy accident I'd seen the night I arrived. It turns out nobody was injured. That's good news. After talking with them, it also seems that the road I was on coming to Kabul from the border, the ostensible "shortcut" that got us stuck behind the German ISAF convoy for so long, was one that looped around and came back down into Kabul from the road that Bagram, the main US base in Afghanistan, is on. Weird.
I did chat for a bit with an Afghan security guard at the Embassy and, speaking of "overblown security threats," he related a funny story. He
told me that he once took an American soldier who'd been in-country for six months to the bazaar to do some shopping. The soldier had never left the secured "behind the wire" area of the blockades and guardposts of the Embassy area and when he went to the bazaar, his hands shook the entire time. He was afraid someone would just walk up and behead him in the middle of the marketplace. The Afghan relating the story had a good laugh about this with me, but it's not really an isolated case. Fear seems to permeate all expat communities here. There's a young Western guy from Kansas or Colorado working the bar here at the Mustafa and it came out last night that he's been here for two years and hasn't been to Mazar-e Sharif, Bamiyan and Band-i-Amir, or the Panjshir. The last two are short day-trips and frequent tourist destinations of intense beauty, etc. Strange. All that time, sitting here in a hotel and venturing out only to buy beer or to go to the other expat bars.
All of that said, I do take my own security seriously. Avoid obvious expat areas (ie, Chicken Street), be extra-careful after dark, maintain vigilance for people following you/suspicious vehicles, dress and move/act like a local, tell most people I'm Canadian or Australian if they ask, being sure in follow-up questions to refer to temperature in celcius, etc. Haha... details! Lock doors, don't sit near front windows. Observe cultural cues: you eat with your right hand only, the only acceptable use of the left being to hold nan while you tear it with your right hand, stand when an Afghan of higher social status enters the room, seating arrangements put honored guests furthest from the door with lower social status being closer to the door, returning the "touch right hand to heart" gesture if given, shaking hands lightly, holding wrists, interacting with children, not pointing the soles of your shoes at someone, holding your shoes together sole-to-sole, not side-to-side, if carrying them in a mosque, etc. There's a whole variety of stuff but it's all pretty easy to remember and to smoothly nail each time.
Yesterday, I met a guy here at the Mustafa named Joel. He's from San Francisco and, 13 months ago, in an unrelated double-whammy of tragedy, lost both his job and his girlfriend at the same time. By way of response he checked his savings account balance, sold his Porsche, and left the country. He flew to Japan and has been travelling mostly overland since. It's the sort of "exit strategy" that I also have. "If everything goes pear-shaped, I could sell everything in my apartment in X-days, making a little extra money from that, on top of Y-money in savings, and then travel for Z-years in third world countries. Anyway, he's on month 13 now. The
initial plan was six months, then when that ended, six more. He's on the third "just six months more" now but feels like he'll probably definitely go home at the two year mark. He just left this morning, after two weeks in Afghanistan, for Turkmenistan.
Joel's a good guy and I enjoyed his company. Yesterday, he and I walked down to the market near the river here. The bazaar is called "Titanic Bazaar" because it floods when the river floods. Right now, the river is almost completely dry, filled instead with trash, merchants, and beggars. I took a few pictures of it and a few of parts of the meat market there. One, a top-down shot of a platter of goat heads, teeth grinning, should be especially good. He and I casually but very carefully snapped photos while moving through the bazaar area for about fifteen minutes and then left the area. Again, security.
I think I'm going to try to go to the OMAR landmine museum this morning, before we leave for Mazar. I have to pick up my laundry also. I'm wearing my one greyish/purpley shalwar kameez now. My other, sort of a biege/peachy color, and my Western pants/shirts are currently being laundered. I hope the guy cleaning them doesn't drop the ball; he should be here in half an hour. I'm not sure if I'd delay leaving the city until I had my clothes or if I'd try to have someone at the hotel hold them and then return for them later. Decisions, decisions. I hope I can find a buzkashi game to watch in Mazar. And, damn, I can't wait go to Band-i-Amir and go for a swim. I think the lakes are at about 9,000 feet and are brutally cold. They sound about perfect right now.
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