First night in Kabul

I've arrived without a hitch, after that long wait in the Dubai airport. I feel much better, having slept on the flight to Kabul. The guest house and compound where I'm staying is extremely nice, and seems well "fortified." There are armed guards who have worked for the company for years, and inside it's a very comfortable home on one side, very modern with all the conveniences, and offices on the other side. There's a gym and a snooker table (Dad? A little help there? How do I play snooker?) I brought my ping pong kit too.

They gave me a tour of the home and I'll just be here tonight, no going out or anything. Three meals, daily room cleaning and daily laundry are included in the room for $11 a day. NICE!!!! It's super comfortable. There was one room with a picture window that let in more light, but I took the more "inside" room out of an abundance of caution. Paranoia, probably, but whatever. There's a Salvadoran man working here and we had a nice chat about Latin America. How nice to speak Spanish so far from that side of the world! The big burly security guard named Paul picked me up at the airport with a driver, Jamal. Then there are staff members all over the house - because Saturday is a work day. It's a six day work week (not like that's anything new...) and Friday is the day off. Who knew?

When I was in line for the immigration counter, the other Western women put on scarves - lucky I had thought to bring one. I didn't have a mirror, and had never practiced, but I made it through immigration and out to the waiting car without a hitch. Probably I look like a rookie. But I've never been in a country like this. The closest thing, geographically, was the south of Russia, which is nominally Muslim and the call to prayer rings out each night over the city. But there, it was pretty secular - people didn't stop what they were doing to pray.
___

All is well here. We bought a ping pong table for the compound today, after we got done working. Hey, we need to wind down, right? And beer is $112 a case!!!!! Might as well get a ping pong table for not quite double that amount, at least it'll last longer than the beer.

I of course beat everyone in the house except the Crazy Croat, who could probably hit the ping pong ball through the wall if he wanted to. But I did pretty good. Dad would be proud.

___

The client asked for a "working dinner." Who ever heard of such crap? Working lunch, sure. Sit around and eat dry chicken and talk about deliverables, we've all done it. But a "working dinner"? C'mon. The security guys heard our conversation about this, looked at each other and smiled: they'll be in Kandahar when the working dinner happens, and will miss it completely.

Note to client: you can be sure you've proposed something stupid when people would rather be in Kandahar than participate.

Being here is weird and close, with working and living together. But it's appealing. I could see living like this, focusing on a project I enjoyed and putting my heart into it. Why not - there's not much else to do with one's time besides ping pong.  I did meet a nice guy:
 

 
Wali's very friendly! And he likes Jack Daniels. I'm sure he and Kyle would get along famously. 

Today it's your birthday!

The canoe

I woke up on my birthday in Harare, Zimbabwe. A quick run, breakfast, and the taxi was ready to take me out to a safari day camp about 40km from the city. We got stopped twice by cops - I think a face like mine looks like "MONEY" as they see us pass, and they want to see what I'm willing to pay for free passage.

The first thing I did when we got to the camp was to take a canoe out to the center of a choppy little lake, with marsh on one side and a very green farm on the other. Returning from the middle of the lake, we were pushing into a headwind - row, row, row, row, and barely go. We made it, but I know of three pairs of arms that seemed to be made of boiled pasta afterward.

Let's see, what's next on the Birthday Bucket List? Riding on an elephant, of course! This big fella is called Patsy. His hide was so thick and the hair so coarse, there would have been no way to do this without that blue blanket. I never knew elephants were like that.

 

He's corkscrewed his whole trunk to get the carrots from her.

This woman's elephant was very frisky

Time to dismount. Or blow us with water.

There were zebras following us. Maybe they thought we would give them the carrots. The guides told us that zebra kicks are among the most menacing dangers in Africa - even lions fear them. Here they just look kind of striped and small. But it's all in the angle - I'm actually quite far from them.






This shot's for Dominique, wherever she is.

The safari camp cares for orphaned or injured animals, like this lion, Bryon. Oddly enough, that's also this guy's name. He's a BBC correspondent in Zimbabwe. They look like they're having a nice little confab about life on safari, and you'd swear that lion was smiling.

One of his fellow lions, in a separate enclosure, was not nearly so sanguine about our visit. This one is not tame, but rather a rescued lion who will live out his days with a lovely female (not quite visible in the photo) which he is protecting at the moment this photo was taken. The guide put his hand and my camera through the enclosure fence, then called Brutus' attention. Brutus obliged, scaring the living crap out of everyone on the tour. He was behind a fence, but he is so big and forceful, no fence really looks strong enough.

Even when we'd left the immediate area of Brutus' enclosure, he continued to warn us of what would happen if we messed with his lady. Makes for interesting audio, though the video's not that exciting...

Dad's DC tour

Dad came to DC in September for a reunion of sailors from the U.S.S. Hornet. Dad's in the upper right corner, the classy looking one. I heard stories... these guys have lived a lot. I never knew Dad was an electrician working on the gyroscope of the ship. There were so many guys on the ship that even if they were on at the same time, they often didn't know one another. Hard to imagine a floating city, but that's what it sounds like.














It looks like they're coming to agreement on something, doesn't it? Dad and Raya got along just fine, because Dad was not opposed to feeding her.













We went from elegant to tourist from one day to the next. We toured the city, saw the Washington Monument and Arlington National Cemetery, visited the tribute to those who died at the Pentagon on 9-11, and closed the week with a lovely dinner in honor of the attendees.

Part of Dad's tour took him to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he met this goat.

Another evening's fun took us to the Kennedy Center for a rousing showing of Shear Madness, a play about a murder in a hair salon that changes each night based on audience suggestions. There was a hamburger hat in the lobby that Dad refused to buy for me, but he did take this lovely photo.

Even better, in Dad's mind, than me in a hamburger hat is the following photo of me standing in front of the Air Force tribute to the DC victims of 9-11. I know he thinks this is very funny, otherwise I wouldn't include it here. I just wish I'd been having a better hair day.

Red wine in Buenos Aires, and other glories

I love Buenos Aires, with the food and the wine and the people and their outrageous accents, like characters in a Fellini film. Here I'm sitting at a beautifully laid table, awaiting the pouring of the vino.

And there it is! Wine has left the bottle. The fellow who organized this event gives the proceeds to charity, and we buy a bunch of wine and that goes to charity too. His charity of choice is a school in a disadvantaged corner of Argentina, not blessed like we were at this get-together.

The really weird bit of all this is it's part of a hobby I've gotten into, through a website called FlyerTalk. It's at http://www.flyertalk.com/. It's a forum for people who are trying to maximize frequent flyer miles. I know, I'm a nerd. This is not news to anyone reading this blog.

I'd gone to Argentina for a little break, right after having been in Cambodia for work. The timing was too close - I think the jet lag stuff that I used to mock is now beginning to catch up with me. I arrived with a head cold, an attitude, work to finish, and money worries. What I forgot to bring were a coat, boots, and sweaters. It was still cold this Labor Day weekend. Crap.

Fortunately, I was able to locate some Argentines willing to sell me locally made goods in exchange for my Cambodian rieles. Soon I was fitted out in fine style, the cold was going away, I remembered what a great economical option Buenos Aires is, and there were cute guys.

Why did I come home?

Every week the tourism board puts on a couple of free plays in the street. It was a bit cold for these poor performers, but they gaily acted out their tale of immigration to Argentina.

New friends in Argentina, at the historic Cafe Tortoni, where (among many other memorables) Jorge Luis Borges sat to write and drink bad coffee. The two guys are FlyerTalkers too - on the left a bloke from Ireland and the guy on the right is a New Yorker. I learned a lot from them about getting MORE miles, faster.

Enough for now. More sites and sounds and smells to come.

Eating Cambodian style

Fantastic fresh foods everywhere we went, for so little money - this was what I found all over Cambodia. Bright red peppers spicing up veggies, cooked so lightly it was eating vegetables the way God intended. Lemongrass and greens flash cooked in oil and added to chunks of garlic and more peppers.




Amuse bouche - pickled garlic cloves and spiced peanuts, selected daintily with chopsticks. More than a few of these ended up under my chair.

Fish soup with fresh vegetables, light noodles, cilantro and peppers. Served steaming hot. The fish had plenty of bones - it was wise to eat slowly. But as it was breakfast, this was very hard to do.

Another steaming soup, this one with goat chunks and spinach, into which we tossed mung bean sprouts and red pepper jelly for spice. Hard to beat, especially when it costs about $2.00.

This is a famous frieze from Angkor Wat, called Churning the Ocean of Milk. They had to do this, in order to work off all the food they'd eaten.

Waterlogged in Cambodia

I contacted a friend-of-a-friend who lives there as soon as I arrived, and she signed me up for a bike ride with a bunch of expats. We pedaled out of the downtown Phnom Penh area past traffic that is charitably described as terrifyingly chaotic. Motorbikes are the norm there, and they dictate traffic, and they follow no rules. No. Rules. At. All. Arriving riverside (the Tonle Sap first, then the Mekong as we island-hopped on the bikes) we took a ferry ride across and immediately were on rural, muddy paths on Silk Island. We heard silk operators clanking looms behind bamboo curtains as we rode past, and every child within view of the road would shout out “hello! Hello!”

The Ferry Boat (20 cents a ride):

After three hours, we stopped for an iced coffee (Asian style – with sweetened condensed milk at the bottom) near a Wat (temple). Heading out again our bike path dropped off into a deep stream. The first bicyclist tried to ride through, and ended up swimming his bicycle back to shore. On the far side we could see a dugout canoe, so he swam across and brought the canoe over to our side. It wasn’t exactly seaworthy – one end was almost completely rotted away. The weight of a human would've sunk it. But we were able to  stack some bikes on it and one guy swam the canoe across. Then a few of us would wade in and swim ourselves. We repeated the process till everyone made it through.  

Loading the canoe:

Swimming across:

Stinky water, choked with grasses, deeper than I am tall – when we got out we even theorized it’d be a good hiding place for snakes. It wasn’t all that pleasant, but we did feel like bad-asses when we were through. There are no more pictures of me after we crossed because I was wearing white cotton pants that were as muddy as they were transparent after this escapade. I had to buy a scarf to tie around myself, so as not to show off my underwear in the fancy hotel lobby when I got home. I looked like a wet muddy rat, with a very pretty scarf tied around its waist.

Phnom Penh life. Lively.

The sun beats down here – if you’re in the shade, it’s muggy but it’s fine. But the sun is so freakin’ hot.

Motorbikes rule this city. Cars drive slowly because they’re automatically at fault if a rider gets hurt. At stoplights the bikes and motorbikes and tuktuks and ciclos and remarques swarm in between the cars, stop right in front of them in the intersection, anything for a leg up on the chance to go. Seems like absolute mayhem but it’s pretty slow paced, so it doesn’t feel quite as dangerous as it might.

They are NOT up to code on what they carry.

That tuktuk is carrying two sofas.

For the evening I took off on a boat with the new expat friends for an anchored raft on the other side of the Mekong. We sat on the comfy raft (big soft chairs, coffee tables, a full bar) and drank gin, ate olives and cheese, to watch the sunset over Phnom Penh.