Herat

Yesterday I spent the morning being a tourist and then the afternoon talking with journalists. A sociology professor here has been serving as my unpaid fixer and the previous night we had driven past the first radio station where journalists agreed to talk with me and seen lots of police about. The professor thought they must have a high-ranking guest but it turned out that somebody had tossed a stun grenade over their wall. When I visited they were talking about how the police chief had accused them of doing it themselves in order to build a case for political asylum for themselves. They said this was a way for him to play down the security threat but acknowledged that other journalists had done such things.

Everyone except the hotel manager who insisted that lots of tourists foreign and domestic are still coming to Herat (I saw only two other guests--Afghans--during my two days staying here) told me that security has gone downhill in the city in the past year. People stay home much more and order delivery; once-crowded restaurants are now empty.

Today I gave a talk about a paper I wrote (looking up that link just now I realized I gave the class the wrong URL) in Persian and it went fairly well in the end. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to print out the script I'd written for myself because when we arrived at the department it turned out the internet wasn't working so I couldn't download the document I'd emailed myself. We waited around for about 25 minutes with no change and then I asked what time the class started and the professor said Oh, 20 minutes ago. He sent an assistant to teach what was left of the class (advanced theory) and we went to the main administrative building where internet was working.
The sociology department is only a few years old and the faculty all have masters degrees and teach 3-4 classes each semester in addition to doing all the admin work. One thing they have is job security--the professor was surprised when I told him that increasingly US universities rely on adjuncts and lecturers without job security. Once you get a teaching job at a public university here, he told me, you can pretty much keep it as long as you want. It's almost unheard of for anyone to get fired. I wonder if it's different at the private universities that have been springing up in all the big cities of Afghanistan.

The class was about half male and half female, the women all in enveloping patterned chadors and the men mostly in a mix of suits and buttoned-down shirts. Men sat on the (stage) left and women on the right. Again I was the only one in a shalwar kameez, which always amuses.
Walking to the department I was one male student in a teeshirt that read,
F CK
all i need is u

The bike and motorcycle parking lot of the university:

The castle Arg (that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail must have an extra inside joke for Afghans):