So for those that don't check Facebook (is there anyone these days?!), I'm back safe and sound from my weekend in Afghanistan, and it was amazing. To be honest, I was pretty freaked out about going, but (as with so, so, so many things in life) I just shut my brain up and forced myself to do it - and lo and behold, everything I was scared about seemed very remote once the adventure actually started.
My favorite thing about travel is that it makes a place real. After all the years of media coverage and war reports and best-selling novels and Central Asia classes and Afghan Grill in DC, Afghanistan is a real place to me now, full of real questions and real stories and real lives. Sure, we were on the ground for just over 48 hours, but you'd be surprised how much you can experience in that time when you're as crazy as E/me. You don't need to stay long for a place and its people to become concrete in your head, rather than abstract, and for me that's the whole point.
We met an amazing array of people, ranging from enterprising well-educated Afghan-American expats who've moved back to Kabul to capitalize on reconstruction efforts and make a sweet buck or two (or million) in the process, to hardcore Panjshiri villagers who spoke no English but taught us the Dari words for "good" and "bad" (khoobes and harab) and then let us interrogate them on their opinions regarding a limited number of mutually understood nouns ("Hamid Karzai? Harab. Ahmed Shah Massoud? Khoobes. Pakistan? Harab!" & so on).
I'm still debating whether I think it was "safe" to go. On one hand, I've definitely been to places (Tirana, Addis Ababa, Phnom Penh) where I've felt a lot less secure on the ground than I did in Kabul - by and large, people were too shocked to see us to harass us, since most expats have insurance riders in their contracts forbidding them from walking around the city and there's been no tourists since security re-deteriorated in 2005. Both days we were there it was sunny, the city was bustling, and even when we journeyed north out of Kabul it was hard to imagine anything sinister happening. On the other hand, that feeling of security may have been one of blissful unawareness, as we later found out that kidnappings are routinely conducted in some of the areas we had gallivanted around in, and Farhad assured us that driving 20 miles in the wrong direction out of Kabul would put us squarely in Talib territory where his driver, a Hazara, would have been summarily shot and we would have been sold to a mafia who would have sold us to another mafia who would have sold us to Al Qaeda.
But... whatever. Like I said, I had a great time, and I have so much to think about after the trip, and we'll never know if I just got lucky or if the situation is not as bad as the media/US State Department would have you believe. The pictures that I plan to post once Facebook stops sucking the life out of me (2 failed album uploads in a row!) will tell most of the story, but basically we arrived Friday morning, spent all day in Kabul with Farhad, headed north to the Panjshir Valley and a village in the foothills of the Hindu Kush with Farhad's driver early Saturday morning, and then spent Saturday afternoon exploring Kabul on our own before flying home today. There's so much to say and so many stories to tell but I haven't slept more than 4 hours in a night since Wednesday, so they'll have to wait.
So with that, khoda hafez (goodbye)!
