how green was my valley.

Friday is the weekend in Afghanistan. One day, that's it, so you have to make the most of it. Get up early, pack up a motorcycle, take off with local friend on bikes at 6 a.m... Stopped at first checkpoint and almost got bikes confiscated for having no registration papers. Out of the city before the crazy traffic hits. Stop at one of the little side stands for some yoghurt that tastes like its turned but is apparently a delicacy here. There's this greasy fry-bread here that's the bomb though, with potatoes and leek in it.

Rode up into Panjshir valley, one of the most amazing places for so many reasons. Probably one of the very few regions of the world that can say it has never successfully been invaded by foreign occupiers. They know who's coming or going into their green green valley. And they're leaving those dilapitated, destroyed Russian tanks around so everyone knows they ain't messing around. This dude Massoud is from Panjshir and he's one of Afghanistan's biggest heroes. He led the resistance against the Soviets and the Taliban both. His image is everywhere, and is a striking resemblance to Bob Marley (they probably consumed equal daily amounts of hashish). We stopped by his tomb on the ride.

Life here is insane. It goes by so fast you barely have the time for anything except living itself. Reflecting, appreciating, bitching, writing, no time for any of these things. I'm very glad to have a camera, because it saves me typing out all those extra words. So take a look. The beauty, the sheppards, pieces of history strewn alongside the road, a picnic along a river, and kind people. There's riding motorcycles, and then there's riding motorcycles in Afghanistan.

like a kaleidoscope...

"Kabul is like a kaleidoscope, always changing. People coming, people going..." - Marc (who just left for Haiti after two years here)

obligatory arrival in kabul plane photo

i live near the kabul wedding hall strip.

the frontyard at our guesthouse.

bottle burka?

extraordinary balance and skill!

I can't believe I've almost been here for a full month already. Like the various military and UN helicopters in the skies day and night, my time here in Kabul has been flying by. You'd think that working somewhere six days a week, nine hours a day would get repetitive, boring. That is certainly not the case. Every day is same same but different from the last. The NGO is work for is small and there are only so many people to take care of many, many tasks - which I actually quite like because we have so much freedom to make the school into anything that we (and the kids) want it to be.

Looking at the photos in this post, maybe you think Kabul looks like what you imagined: dusty, mountainous, traffic filled, full of goats and signs of war. But it's also much more than that - from the Las Vegas style strip of wedding halls with bright lights of all colours (as long as there's no temporary power outage!), to the modern shopping malls with any clothes, shoes or makeup you'd find in other major Asian cities. I've seen a young girl (one of our students, in fact) ride a little bicycle (a BMX!), though I'd heard so often that girls here never, ever do such a thing. Yesterday, on our day off, there was a big (wedding?) party at the house behind ours, and this constant drumbeat was accompanied by women singing, laughing, children yelling joyfully... This is not what you hear about Afghanistan. But this is it. Life, family, food, music, glittery high heels and silly mobile phone videos.

There was a bombing in Kabul this afternoon. A suicide bomber, but apparently there were no serious casualties or death except for the bomber himself. And then there was that one a couple weeks ago that killed about 60 people. But I was talking to a co-worker, an Afghan who lived in Kabul as a teenager under the Taliban, and he says that compared to those times, when you couldn't leave the house, even to get food, let alone work, when you hid in the basement and kept glued to the radio in case there was a day of ceasefire to go get some supplies... he said that "now it is like peace... compared to the Taliban times everybody lives like a king."

I wrote this earlier when I heard of the most recent bombing but was unaware on the casualty situation:

"To be here though is to still feel a significant removal from the news that hits the international papers and television sets. There have been a couple bombings since I've been here yet you become, very quickly, somewhat blase - hearing about it and moving on with daily tasks. There was a suicide bombing 15 minutes ago on Jalalabad Road, near Supreme market, which we were just talking about checking out yesterday. Simon told us the news then he came back into the room two minutes later and said he had to go, he couldn't do the classes he usually teaches on Saturdays because one of his housemates was shopping at Supreme and now they can't reach him. It's sobering to think how close to home these incidents now are for me. two degrees of separation to a potential victim. I hope that's not the case, but the fact is it so easily could be."

Simon's friend got hit by some debris and went to the hospital but is thankfully okay.

I really don't want to paint a negative picture, and I hope in the future through this blog to emphasize the positive, day-to-day existence here in Kabul. On the whole I have never had a moment where I felt scared or in danger. It would be easy to feel that, I'm sure, if you so desired, and I know people probably want to freak out and tell me I'm being naive. But I haven't felt I had any good reason to be scared yet, and for many many people, including my new friends, this country is their only home and they don't have the luxury to leave.

the next post will be about a beautiful motorcycle trip from a couple weeks ago to the panjshir valley.

from one dusty corner to the other.

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....

nothing worse than a bubble to the eyeball.

the blind kitten. our hostel, cairo, egypt.

so in less than two weeks i am going to kabul, afghanistan, for six months. this is my to-do list at this point:

- buy medical insurance
- buy flight and train ticket
- learn some dari
- get cheap jeans?
- get afghan visa in berlin
- buy unlocked phone
- get toiletries in berlin
- buy skateshoes
- get many english books
- buy new lens in berlin? (Canon EF 24-70/2,8 L USM)

it is surreal to think about. i may be using that word (surreal) too often these days, but it just seems the most fitting. perhaps i need to expand my vocabulary but tonight, for instance, we were riding bicycles to the memorial day ceremony in downtown tel aviv and when the air siren signifying the minute of silence went off every single person stopped as though a pause button had been hit. the people in front of us, walking or on bikes just stopped, dropped their arms to their sides and looked down in one smooth motion as soon as the siren started up. scooters and cars turned off their engines. the only signs of movement or change were a golden retriever looking around from time to time and the traffic lights.

another surreal thing is that there is this corner near my friend mati's house here in tel aviv that has a couple toy shops, both with bubble machines or bubble people continually filling the crosswalks. we were walking one day, with the bubble machine behind us going full force, and old men crossing from the other way were squinting and dodging bubbles, completely accustomed to this particular daily obstacle at this particular intersection of the city. when i bring that image to mind it still makes me smile, so ridiculous!

anyways, here are a few photos from our favourite tel aviv neighbourhoods, florentin and jaffa.

brail graffiti in florentin.

view of the abandoned lot with scary dogs from our rooftop in jaffa.

amazing sublet, spring sunset, discount wine and a good bud.

i spent a night on the moon.

(sunrise in the white desert, egypt)

out of the hundreds of photos i've taken in the last couple months i decided to put these one up first because it was one of the most awe-inspiring places i've ever been in my life, an experience that can't quite be described in any manner that would do it justice. these photos are of the white desert, in egypt. after a five hour bus trip from cairo through mile after mile of dusty desert, we arrived in the baharaya oasis, which has been one of those places where human beings have lived and passed through on trade routes for thousands of years (in fact, a few weeks after we were there a roman-style mummy of a woman was excavated in the oasis, dating back as far as 31 b.c.). we spent the day touring around in a 4x4, seeing such landmarks as "the salty lake" and eventually ending up having bedouin tea with our driver's mom and sisters inside their home.

that tea with a mint sprig from their garden in it, and small talk complete with language barriers, was one of the very few moments i was actually glad to be travelling as a woman in egypt. in the cities we endured non-stop harassment for our strange appearance. yet in this small bedouin village where "three, maybe four" women out of several hundred can be seen working, and the rest drift through the streets in their burkas with hardly more presence than a shadow, we were able to go into a household and meet some of the women, from age two until sixty, and see their home. the mother looked like a kind, beautiful gypsy queen with wrinkles of wisdom. sitting on the carpet cross-legged, with concrete walls covered in old green paint, struggling to communicate with the teenage sister was also the moment i most regretted not speaking more than a few words of arabic.

travellers have often talked about the strange grey zone that foreign women occupy in muslim countries. foreign women do not have as many restrictions or expectations (for dress, how they act etc) imposed of them as local women do, but they also do not have all the freedoms of men, and certainly not the security. for example, as foreign women in egypt we were exempt from the social mores that would prevent women like those in the baharaya oasis from sitting around talking to male strangers. later that night, as we sat and talked with the young guys who work at the hotel and told them about going to the driver's house for tea they pointed out that it's lucky we were two girls traveling together (for once!) because as men living in the quite conservative baharaya oasis, you can be best friends with another man for your whole life and never see his wife without the burka.

(the chicken and the tree)

the next morning we set off on the trip to the white desert though, which was the main point of this post. we were in a four wheel drive truck with a sticker on the back saying "desert safary for ever of road" with an italian girl, an american princess and a cairo-born-and-raised guy. our bedouin guide, mohammed, was quiet and efficient, speeding through the desert path to make up for lost time and make it to the white desert before nightfall. occasionally he pointed to various strange rock formations and would say the shapes they are popularly known by, like "the camel", "the chicken and the tree" or "popeye".





the landscape when from dark sand (the black desert) caused by ancient volcanic eruptions, to light beige sand, to stark white rock covering the ground and jetting up into the horizon. just before sunset we got to the centre of what looked like another planet. i never knew such a place existed, nevermind that i would get to camp out under the stars there! mohammed unpacked everything quickly, set up a two-sided camp beside the truck with carpet for walls, a small table and a couple mats, making me think of some opium den of yore except in the open air. he built a fire and started cooking up delicious tajine potatoes and chicken over the fire. i wandered around, scrambling up the "horse head" rock to get a better view of the area, where a couple dozen other camp groups were spread spaciously. after dinner and tea, mohammed walked off into the dark and we sat around the fire until the wood was gone, then laid down in our sleeping bags and looked up at the stars that went on and on forever.

(big-eared desert fox spotting)