Daily Life in Kabul - 1
Friday, December 1st 2006 - 12:18 AM
My life in Kabul is generally fairly unexciting. Mostly, i just work, waste time on the internet, and sleep. There are highlights every now and then - like a trip out of Kabul, or doing a bit of socialising in the evening, or something - but mostly life is fairly boring. Boring's good in a war zone though!
But, even though life's "boring", i never really feel bored. Work's different every day, and i have enough social contact with friends to keep me sane. I don't normally go to any of the many parties that happen in Kabul though. The "expat" scene here is pretty dismal, i reckon. I've got some good friends - not all of them are foreigners - and i've met quite a few ok people since i've been here, but the party and "pub" scene is not much fun. unless, of course, you're blind drunk - and then anything's "fun", i suppose!
There aren't really any pubs in Kabul, but there are several restaurants which perform the same function. The ones i've been to are l'Atmosphere, La Cantina, and Samarkand.
L'Atmosphere is ok - specially in warm weather, because there's lots of garden space for sitting around and dining, and they've got a swimming pool. But i'm not that keen on the place, personally. They've got free wireless internet there, so quite a few people go there to work at weekends etc. But it sometimes has a real depressing "expat" sort of air to it - mildly deranged people huddling together and getting drunk to try and forget where they are. That aspect of it is hideous!
La Cantina is a nice place. It's a Mexican restaurant - run by Aussies! In the warmer weather, most of the space was outside, and it was a good place to have some reasonably good "Mexican" food and a beer or a margarita. Now, though, there's a lot of inside space - which is really outside space closed in, with wood stoves dotted around. It's got a good feel to it - like the outdoors inside. I haven't been there much, but it doesn't seem to suffer from the desperate ex-pat feel that the "Atmos" does.
Then there's Samarkand... Well, i've only been there once, and i don't think i'd go there again. It's big, it was crowded, and it didn't have a good feel to it. There was an atmosphere like a "British" pub in some ugly Mediterranean coastal resort - guys standing around looking like they want sex or a fight and don't much care which. It was scary!
I'm sure there are a number of other similar places - but i haven't been to them, and possibly never will.
As for the parties, i went to a few when i was first here, but i haven't been to any since. I just can't find any enthusiasm for them really.
Here's a bit i wrote in my diary about one of them. It was an "Aussie" party and it was kinda scary!
Walking into the gate and down the path at the side of the house, we came to a table with a sheet of paper on it with instructions about what to do in an emergency, including the location of a bunker. The first instruction said "Don't panic"!
A bit further on, in the back yard, there was a big marquee-like awning, made of material with a local design on it. Under that there were white plastic tables and chairs and lots of people sitting down, eating, drinking and talking. This awning covered about half the yard and in the uncovered part, there was barbecue and a table of cooked meat, white burger-type buns, salad, sauces etc, in one corner.
On the opposite side, there was a table covered in bottles containing a wide array of different types of alcohol. There were three large eskys next to the table and i helped myself to a can of Heineken from one. I'd hardly drunk any alcohol at all in the last year or so, but somehow, the Australian barbie-like atmosphere made me feel like having a beer for a change!
The two people i came with wandered off to talk to people they knew and, not knowing anyone, i stayed standing towards the back of the yard, sipping my beer. After a while of standing watching the bizarrely displaced Aussie barbie scene, i thought i'd make the most of the fact that i was eating meat while i was here, for the first time in many years, and have a burger!
I was standing back at my spot in the corner, eating the burger, when a very Australian-looking guy, with a bush hat and an enormous beer gut, wearing a yellow "Emirates airline" tee shirt, came over and started talking to me. He seemed to be well pissed and had probably been drinking all afternoon, i supposed. He asked me where i came from and what i was doing in Kabul.
I never managed to work out what he was doing in Afghanistan, but after a while he started telling me how he was looking after his staff and had thrown this party for them, because they needed it to deal with all the stress of their work and stuff. Then he got kind of threatening and told me they didn't need me reporting on them and not to "fuck it up". I really had no idea what he was on about or what he thought i was doing there or what sort of pissed paranoid fantasies were playing themselves out in his head, but i tried to appease him by telling him i wasn't going to report anything to anyone and so on.
Strewth! It really was an authentic Aussie barbie, ey? Complete with its very own passive-aggressive paranoid drunk. Bewdy cobber! It made me feel right at home!
Later on i was talking to some other people and the yellow beer gut came up and asked them if they'd established my credentials yet!
Maybe it was the name of the organisation i was working for that got him going. I think he thought i was a reporter or something, even though i tried to explain to him what it was we did. But at the time i couldn't really work out what was going on in his beer soaked brain, so maybe i didn't make it quite as clear as i could have done that i was in no way connected to the English language media - i just built radio stations for Afghans.
You can see some of my photos of Afganistan at
WillKemp-Photos.com/afghanistan