back in dxb

The last couple of days in Kabul were weekend days (well, until this morning). My first of the trip, in fact, so I took advantage by going on a little shopping excursion and just generally hanging out. The shopping was cool. We went to two stores. One was a furniture and wood carving place. I had fallen in love with a couple of pieces that Andrew had hanging on the wall of his house, smallish unvarnished wooden frames with metal honeycomb where a picture would normally go. They were really beautiful. Alas, none to be found. But the experience of shopping in a place like that was really cool, the owner had tea brought for us and chatted with us while we looked around.

The next shop was Andrew's rug shop, owned by one Wahid, who took the first shop owner's hospitality and amplified it about 90 million times. The guy just loves rugs and he's obviously doing very well. We sat and chatted for a while in the main room of the shop (the guy asked after Andrew's uncle, apparently they know each other rather well), completely surrounded on all sides by rugs hanging on the walls, stacked four feet high, layered on the ground. Some of the stuff in there was just gorgeous. Andrew told me to just tell him generally what I had in mind, so I did. Then we were off into another room and he was just tearing through a stack of rugs, throwing things on the ground and explaining what they were as he went, taking my responses and tailoring what he was looking for. The ultimate salesman, in particular because he genuinely didn't seem to care whether I bought anything or not. Naturally, I could not resist and bought two prayer rugs (small and cheaper than the really massive ones, of which Andrew bought two). Both are Baluch and about 25-30 years old.

The rest of the weekend was relaxing and pretty uninteresting. I exercised some, read some, watched a bit of TV. Spent last night in the Serena and watched the Champions League final on my king sized bed. The Serena is super nice but I'm really glad I spent the vast majority of the time in the guest house. If you're by yourself in a big fancy hotel like that, it's lonely. I guess I would have ended up making acquaintances if I'd been there for a while but, meh, not my kind of people. Plus it's freaking expensive, even with my handy-dandy AKDN-staff discount, which came to something like 35%.

Spent today in the office, chatting with Noor and Maiwand and generally getting ready to go. Oh, and I made another quick shopping trip with Aziz, one of the admin guys, to pick up a couple of extra things. Driving through Kabul at rush hour and then again in the middle of the day is quite different from doing it at night or just sticking to the little neighborhoods I did for most of the time. LOTS of traffic and not really much in the way of rules. Then it was back to the airport, where my ass was saved by a stranger named Naghida (sp?).

In short, I wasn't able to print my KBL-DXB ticket. So after going through the frisking and bag-searching between the main road and the last gate before the airport, the lone cop there wouldn't let me through. So this young woman, quite conveniently bilingual (tri, actually, as it turned out later), argued with the guy on my behalf. That didn't work, so she went inside, got the ticket agent to print my ticket and had a little kid run it back out to me so I could go through. Saved. The. Day. We chatted a bit once I got inside, after I had finished thanking her profusely. Turns out she's American but her parents are Afghan. She now works in Iraq for USIP and was just finishing up her first-ever trip to Afghanistan, which she took as R&R. Oh, and she speaks Arabic, too.

The trip to Dubai was smooth after that and now here I am, waiting to check in for the last leg. Not much looking forward to it. Next time I post it'll be from home!