Happy Massoud Day

It is the 13th anniversary of anti-Soviet anti-Taliban Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud's assassination by Al Qaeda (not coincidentally 2 days before 9/11/01) and the streets are full of police checkpoints and men driving around in packed cars with huge Massoud portraits covering their windows and the black-white-green tricolor of the pre-Taliban Afghanistan state and Northern Alliance flying. Apparently they are firing off guns in celebration in some places, but I never know what is distant gunfire and what are construction sounds. Apparently this happens every year and isn't to do with the still stalemated presidential election (although according to the twitterverse some Massoud supporters have been chanting pro-Abdullah anti-Ghani slogans).

Destroyed Soviet armored personnel carrier

UPDATE: According to the Ministry of Interior, one person has been killed and 5 wounded so far by celebratory gunfire. I'm surprised there aren't more casualties from falling bullets.

man spa

I went to a fancy pool/sauna with one of the karaoke guys and two of his friends last night. All three are rich young businessmen in shiny suits and it occurred to me as we changed that I look like a fucking peasant next to them in my cheap shalwar kameez and kafiyeh.
For about $10 per person we got a huge pool, two water slides, jacuzzi, steam room, sauna (which they call dry room--they refer to the whole place as sauna), kiddy pool (which one of our number, who couldn't swim and didn't trust the strap then kept coming loose on the orange life vest he borrowed, prefer but was kicked out of), and a clever rubberized bracelet with a metal iButton that opened a personal locker.
They seemed to know half the people there (FYI the average weight of Afghans as in most of the world--with the US as an exception--is positively correlated to their wealth) but at the echoing poolside my Persian comprehension fell to about 3% and I returned to the sauna several times because that was the only place I could understand the conversation (the pace of conversation also seemed to slow in there). I've found that once you start trying to socialize in foreign countries the some of the first slang you learn is the expression to be bored (here "degh avardan"--I have no idea was "degh" means by itself -- google translate says "percussion") because everybody is worried that you aren't having fun. Upstairs after swimming we ate mediocre overpriced shwarmas (my impression is that there is absolutely no correlation between the price and either tastiness or healthiness of food in this country) in a room with less echo where I could participate more and join in joke telling. A new one I heard:
An Afghan goes to the US for the first time and when he comes back his friends ask him was he thought of the place. It's such a developed country, he replies, Even little children can speak English.
My story went over well about how when I first went to Tehran I quickly learned the shared taxi system: you shouted your destination as the taxi passed and if going your way it stopped for you. But I was puzzled that whenever a prospective taxi rider called out "mostaqim" he/she was picked up. So I took out my city map and looked all over for Mostaqim Square, wondering why all the taxis went there. Mostaqim means straight ahead.
As most who become friendly do they made fun of me for my Iranian accept. You sound like the BBC, one said, "Good evening, this is London," he mimicked sing-song girly Farsi. ouch.
We got back to the locker room and one of the new friends showed me that he had 15 missed calls from family on his phone and a text from his sister saying that they were all very worried. He called back and was dressed down for not telling them of his plans beforehand--here when you don't pick up your phone people assume the worst, he told me.


This climate doesn't make sense. It's so dry and dusty yet fruits and mosquitos thrive like few places I've been. I've been slapping 10-20 mosquitos daily and sprayed my room and the bathroom with some very toxic stuff that didn't seem to put a dent in their population. I do however  recommend the 3M ultrathon repellent lotion I've discovered on this trip.

new friend (cont)

Wahid, the little housekeeper from my former guesthouse, stopped by yesterday not for a social visit but to inform me that he'd quit his job at the other house and hand me a copy of his CV. Apparently he worked as a welder for a Turkish construction company from the ages of 14-16. Also he worked for Blackwater (since renamed Academi) for a couple years; he biked over to their base to drop off a CV before visiting me. I posted an ad on the "Kabul Survival Guide" online bulletin board advertising his services as a chowkidar (literally: one who has a chair) and handyman but doubt anything will come of it. Postings per day on the site are far lower than 2 years ago.
Wahid said he'd bring me the momlayi he'd promised to get delivered from Badakhshan in the next week (which I thought was the purpose of his visit). He swears by it as the best remedy for back pain. I wonder if it would be a mistake to try to bring some back to the US through customs.

election

The electoral commission here announced that they would complete the audit of ballots tonight, so we may have an announcement of results and even a new president here tomorrow morning, after an election that has dragged on since April. There are a lot of jokes out there along the lines of Ghani being inaugurated in 2050 at this rate.
Yesterday on a visit to a think tank I pored over some copies of ballots that the Abdullah team had presented claiming them to be written by the same hands. I don't know what they were getting at--the handwriting looked distinctive on each of them--different ways of writings s's and n's, different angle of writing,etc--and those were the one's the team had cherry picked as examples. I was surprised actually--I'd taken it for granted that both sides in the election have been right about the other side cheating.

Kabul Karaoke

Can you believe this is Kabul? My new friend asked. You must think you've gone to America.
Some of the songs sung by my and the only other group present sounded completely Bollywood but with Persian or Pashtu lyrics. The other group got up and left during my Desperado, though I'd like to think that was coincidental and they nodded and smiled sympathetically to me on their way out.

Today

I think I'm going to stay indoors today. Today is the deadline that Dr Abdullah's faction set in their ultimatum that their demands for the audit of the presidential election be met; otherwise they have promised to pull out of the electoral process. And the rumor is that Karzai intends to vacate the presidential palace today because it is the day he set for the inauguration of the new president. I had dinner with a journalist last night who had just visited Karzai and asked him about the rumors. He replied that everyone was advising Karzai not to leave the palace because it would create a power vacuum and invite a coup. But he didn't say Karzai agreed with everyone.
If Karzai does leave the palace it will be perfect timing for the Taliban to launch as many attacks as possible on both Ghani and Abdullah's factions and generally to paralyze the capital in order to foment political chaos. Chaos in the central government can only help the Taliban comeback.
So I'm going to stay home and read and check Twitter often and hope that I'm being alarmist and that nothing happens.

UPDATE: I was being alarmist. I'm going to Karaoke.

New neighborhood

I've moved out of Taimani/Qala-e Fatullah, where a mix of middle class Afghans and mostly small NGOs and news offices are hidden behind high walls, to Wazir Akbar Khan, where embassies and larger NGOs and news offices are hidden behind even higher walls.

Here are some sheep eating garbage. General/VP Hopeful Rashid Dostum's heavily-guarded mansion with its pink-tinted windows is just behind me around the corner. This sums it up pretty well.
It's a bizarre mix of extreme poverty--trash pickers and mud brick hovels--and McMansions owned by the nouveau riche (read: warlords) or rented by foreign organizations. The AP was paying $18,000/month for theirs last I heard but they recoup some of it by charging other TV stations to use their balcony for broadcasts because it has a good view of the area including the US embassy that is most often hit with large-scale attacks.
Despite the wealth the roads are still some of the worst unpaved and jagged rocky in the central city. Maybe this is by design for security because it forces everyone to drive very slowly.

Here's one from one of the fancy new malls that's opened up in the past 2 years since I was here for fair and balanced reporting: