girl in truck, baharaya oasis, egypt.so i made it to kabul, afghanistan, after a hectic month of planning and getting ready while trying to have as much fun as possible travelling egypt, israel and berlin! i'm going to be volunteering here with an NGO. Since getting here sunday morning (after an overnight flight from frankfurt) i started teaching classes, which run 5 days a week, and am starting to find out more about the media/writing role i'll have while i'm here.
kabul is insane. it's dusty, filled with traffic, and built around foreign money (contractors, big NGOs). it's rained a lot since i got here which i guess is unusual, causing the streets to flood because the drainage is sketchy (as is much of the infrastructure here unfortunately). i saw an SUV that had been parked on the side of a dirt road and when the road flooded it sunk on it's side halfway covered in muddy water. all the women including foreigners wear headscarves, and many still wear those iconic blue burkas. i went into this clothing store the other day to get some long shirts and it's a kind of upscale one so they have gifts you can home as presents. one of the pieces were "bottle burkas" which are mini burkas that you can put on your bottle of wine to hide it! if i bring back any souvenir it will be that one, no doubt about it.
oh yeah, and yesterday i went on an independent afghan television network's cooking show as a guest judge... the other female international volunteer here, sophie, was too busy to make it so i agreed to it despite my aversion to being the one in front of the camera. the other judges were a female member of parliament (mariam something.... ) and local restaurant owner and pal, abbas, who drove me there and showed me the oldest streets in kabul, with cement structures still standing after a couple hundred years.
i don't have any photos yet from kabul on my computer so here are some more from the baharaya oasis in egypt (including the one of us in "explorer stance" below that i stole from erika). more to come soon....
kabul is insane. it's dusty, filled with traffic, and built around foreign money (contractors, big NGOs). it's rained a lot since i got here which i guess is unusual, causing the streets to flood because the drainage is sketchy (as is much of the infrastructure here unfortunately). i saw an SUV that had been parked on the side of a dirt road and when the road flooded it sunk on it's side halfway covered in muddy water. all the women including foreigners wear headscarves, and many still wear those iconic blue burkas. i went into this clothing store the other day to get some long shirts and it's a kind of upscale one so they have gifts you can home as presents. one of the pieces were "bottle burkas" which are mini burkas that you can put on your bottle of wine to hide it! if i bring back any souvenir it will be that one, no doubt about it.
oh yeah, and yesterday i went on an independent afghan television network's cooking show as a guest judge... the other female international volunteer here, sophie, was too busy to make it so i agreed to it despite my aversion to being the one in front of the camera. the other judges were a female member of parliament (mariam something.... ) and local restaurant owner and pal, abbas, who drove me there and showed me the oldest streets in kabul, with cement structures still standing after a couple hundred years.
i don't have any photos yet from kabul on my computer so here are some more from the baharaya oasis in egypt (including the one of us in "explorer stance" below that i stole from erika). more to come soon....
hard to believe we were there not that long ago. feels like forever.
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