A holiday from my regular life: August 2012

Friday, 31 August 2012

Getting some work done, and some driving!

31st August 2012

Having a lot of fun here now that work has started! Unfortunately I can't write anything about the project but I'm getting a lot of good experience! The temperatures do get very hot though when you are out standing in the sun for four hours minimum! At least for me the breeze is quite cool, so it is just like Wellington on a very hot but windy day.

Last night we invited an Australian guy and a New Zealander and American living with him over for some drinks, we had lots of fun. Some of the New Zealanders who are living with us were in the NZ army and SAS and they had some great stories to tell, as you can probably imagine.
The Australian, Angus, said they were going to leave soon to go to some another gathering of ex-pats to continue drinking, but we convinced him to invite them over to our house instead. So eventually three girls turned up, Abby, Amy and Fleur. Fleur was a New Zealander, Amy was Irish and Abby was English. Together we made up well more than half of the ex-pat population!

We also met an Afghani guy Rouf's family, they are extremely influential in Bamyan and they were very hospitable to us. Rouf's father used to be the Mayor of Bamyan, and was a Governor before that in both Bamyan and another province, so he is very well respected around the area. They served us fresh grapes and watermelon while we were there, it was the first time we had had fruit in over a week!

I also had a go at driving around the town! It was really weird driving a left hand drive and staying on the right side of the road, but the most annoying thing I found with the car (a Toyota Landcruiser) was just the amount of pressure I had to put on the accelerator for it to start revving. I had to press very hard just to stop rolling backwards if I was stopped on an uphill slope. Then there were the brakes. If I pressed too hard on them they would lock up and the car would just skid forwards or sideways on the gravel roads. Luckily they only locked up once for me and for a very short time in the first minute I was driving so I knew how hard I could press the brakes!
Driving on the roads here is weird though, there aren't really any rules! I overtook a police car because he was going too slow!

The city of screams

A toilet

A wealthy Bamyan restaurant. I went to have lunch there with some of the Afghani staff.

Looking out over Bamyan from one of the solar sites.

Plastic bags used to cover bare wires in the mains box

The fruit we got from Rouf's family, the grapes were very sweet!

Tuesday, 28 August 2012

Finally in Bamyan!

27^th August 2012

Arrived in Bamyan on the 26^th! Went straight to the hotel we were staying at while the house we are now staying in got finished, not that it has even been finished now that we are staying in it. I shared a room with a New Zealander guy called Tem, who joined us at Dubai on the way to Kabul and is a nice guy, knows his stuff in his field and has really got into the work here with enthusiasm.

We went to another hotel for dinner, where they had a buffet style service. I had this rice dish which is very popular here I think. I’ve had it 3 times in two days! The rice is quite different to anything I’ve had before, it must be a sort of rice that we either don’t have in New Zealand, or one my Mum just doesn’t cook with. It was cooked with lemon/orange rind, raisins and goat! The goat was quite tough, but not bad tasting really. The naan bread is amazing too, especially if you get it off a street vendor and it has just been made, which it usually is because they are churning them out all the time.

In the morning Tem and I both woke up at around 5.30 (though the staff did not speak very much English at all), so we went to the restaurant to get something to eat but there was no one there! We had been told they open at 5 so the timing shouldn’t have been an issue. We went back to our room though and I checked again at 6, there were other people having breakfast there so we came back and sat down. Naan bread and some of my favourite ever carrot jam and happy cow cheese were brought out for us. We saw that the other customers had some omelettes though so we tried ordering those, and eventually got our meaning across. It was a really nice omelette! Quite oily though. That cost 50 Afs, which is about US$1, so about NZ$1.25 I guess (not too sure about the exchange rates at the moment), but when you realise that the average wage in Afghanistan is about US$5 per day the locals must really be amazed how much us foreigners spend.

We had a tour around Bamyan at about 10, which was a lot of fun and very interesting. We went up to the top of one of the hills were we could see a panoramic view of the valley that Bamyan is in. The unsealed airport on the far left, through to the poorest part of the town, which is in one of the poorest regions of Afghanistan, which is one of the poorest places on Earth! They still had satellite dishes on their roofs though! Some even had little solar panels! This place used to be on the Silk Road, which was the biggest trade route in the world for quite some time, so it used to be really rich (comparatively). There are these two amazing outlines cut into the cliff faces in the area, called the Buddhas.

According to legend though, and many, many people believe it is true, there is a third Buddha (named “The Lying Buddha” - not sure if it is meant like lying down or telling untruths) that had been hidden to protect it from plunderers because there was more gold than in Tutankhamen’s tomb hidden in the Buddhas and surrounding area. This is so widely believed to be true because there are many accounts of its existence from lots of places around the world. Many people have tried to find it – you need special permission to do try – but no one has ever found it.

We moved in to our permanent house in the afternoon. We hadn’t done that yesterday because the workers had poured too much concrete into the walls of the septic tank and so it hadn’t set properly when they tried to take the plywood containing walls out, letting the unset concrete spill out over the whole thing. Luckily, today that was fixed and, while the house is habitable, we are probably going to be finding faults with it for a while. For instance, tonight we could hear a tap running – one of the upstairs showers had started going by itself! That wasn’t the biggest problem though, while we didn’t get flooding because we caught it in time, we did find out that some of the drains around the house were clogged. The Afghan workers had let so much glue spill into the pipes that it had hardened and completely blocked them off! Luckily for us we don’t have a house made of mud, because those things start to dissolve very fast in water. You need to make serious repairs on them every 3 years, and completely replace the house in 15. This is a place where it hardly ever rains too! If you get a leak in one of those houses though, you can wake up and just have your wall completely gone!

At the moment we are running a generator for power, and that’s getting shut off very soon so I’ll have to stop writing now, and it’ll be my job to rig up solar to our house!

I’m going to upload all my pictures to Facebook, just a few of them here, because I took a lot! I’m also going to be getting a new camera to use soon, 14 megapixels instead of the 5 megapixel one on my phone, has optical zoom too so should get some much better pictures soon!

The city of screams!

Saturday, 25 August 2012

The real work is about to start!

25th August 2012

Well, it's been a while since I last updated my blog! The week in Dubai was great, unfortunately though, I walked into the pool with my phone in my shorts still, so I was out of contact for a few days! Luckily it dried out and is now working perfectly again, so no harm done!

We didn't actually do too much in Dubai, our general schedule consisted of
9am - Buffet Breakfast
11am - Pool
1pm - I'd generally try to skype Chloe
7pm - We would go out for dinner!

One night we went to a place in the Dubai mall and had goat and hummus, which was actually really nice! We were sitting next to this amazing dancing fountain too, to shoot the most powerful jets of water it used pressurised air and so it made huge bangs.

At the moment I am back in Kabul, about to head to a power pole production facility before we go to Bamyan to actually get started! Apparently I have a structural engineering problem to do when I get there! Looking forward to actually doing some work, even if we are only going to be there for a few weeks.

Anyway, I have to go, I'll edit this post later with captions on the pictures

Skittles, about 1/4 of the NZ price here

A list of the shops in the Dubai mall

The breakfast buffet

Our $40 per person yum cha

Gigantic tv!

Relaxing in the pool

The dancing fountain

Sunday, 19 August 2012

Back to Dubai, and lots of pictures!

19th August 2012

Me and Tony have flown back to Dubai, to pick up his girlfriend Karen. I was a little bit nervous in the Kabul airport because we had heard that there was an attack on it planned for later that day, Tony said there was nothing to worry about though - lucky for me it didn't happen! So we got on the plane just fine. We were served our breakfast about a half hour in to the 2 hour flight, and that meal made me realise why everyone complains about airplane food. There was what I think was a rehydrated omelette with a rubbery white meat which I think was chicken inside it, some bread in the shape of a croissant and carrot jam to go with it!

We decided to stay at the Media One hotel this time, which is more central in the city, and 4 stars. To get back to Afghanistan, we have to renew our visas, but it is their equivalent of Christmas at the moment, 'Eid'. This will last for 3-5 days, but the Afghanistan government is more likely to have 5 days off rather than 3. That is unfortunate for Tony, because the weekend in Afghanistan is on Thursday and Friday! That means that we will have to wait until Saturday to get our visas, and fly back to Kabul on Sunday, and to Bamyan on Monday. I don't really mind though, because Dubai is really amazing!

If the government only has a 3 day Eid holiday then that means the Embassy will be open on Wednesday, so we can fly to Kabul on Thursday.

The media one hotel is really nice, I have in-room WiFi, a TV, a desk that swings in to give you more room and an en suite. I'm on the 13th floor and have a nice view of the city and sea! On the 8th floor there is a gym, restaurant and an outdoor pool! I've been in the pool a couple already, because it feels so good.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures!

Kabul from the air

This was probably the worst airplane food I've had

Carrot Jam

Lobby of the Media One Hotel

View from my bedroom

My Bedroom

Attached bathroom

Welcome message on my tv

The room comes with an iPod docking station

Millac Maid "Tastes like fresh milk"!

Patterned windows in the 8th floor restaurant frame the scenery

Tony in the restaurant

Restaurant

My buffet breakfast

The pool is a welcome relief from the heat!

The pool is also 8 floors up!

Friday, 17 August 2012

Embassies and Public Toilets

17th August 2012

Well it's been a while since I've last posted, had my share of interesting and uninteresting things happening...

My Uncle had to leave me in Kabul last Tuesday while he went to Bamyan because he couldn't get me on the flight there, So I had a couple of days by myself where I just watched movies because there isn't anything else to do. On Wednesday night I tried ordering a pizza from a place called Everest Pizza, which we had ordered from on one of our first nights here in Kabul, and they had decided since then that they didn't deliver to the area of Kabul that I was in. So instead I went out to a place called Bella Italia with an English guy called Dominic - he used to work at the British Embassy but they started pulling out of Kabul and so he found another job with a private company here.

The bill at the end was about $40 US each, and a quarter of that was one can of beer each!

Tony was back again on Friday morning, so he picked me up on the way from the airport to the bank, where he had some papers to hand in. After that we went to a restaurant called Boccaccio's for lunch and to use up time before going to the US embassy to discuss plans for a future solar power project. We were stopped at the gate because my name had only recently been added to the list of people the embassy was expecting and the guards' copy of the list had been printed out early that morning.

As we were waiting an Afghan was admitted through the gate and started talking to us from the other side. He introduced himself as "Akhmed the American", and he did have a very strong American influence in his accent and spoke English very fluently, though you could tell that he wasn't born an American. He had a several projects running which tied into each other. One was breeding goats and getting better prices for the Afghan farmers selling goats,because they earn about US$3 per goat they sell. The other is getting better rights for women. 48.8% of the Afghan population are women and 90% of them are unemployed! It is going to be really hard for the economy to improve when there is over 40% of the population without jobs!

We still hadn't been admitted through the gates, so Akhmed talked to the guards and managed to get us in, which was a very bad security breach really but we didn't mind. Then one of his friends picked us up in a little Jeep and drove us down to where we were meeting this guy called Jim. I thought that the restaurant that I talked about in my last blog was an island in the middle of Kabul, but the embassy was an even greater contrast! American accents everywhere, air-conditioning, free drinks, a pool, and later for dinner that night was steak and lobster! Unfortunately we couldn't stay for that though. I would have taken photos of it all but they confiscated our phones while we were inside.

After the American Embassy we went to the New Zealand embassy to meet our Ambassador. He was a big Maori guy and it was so cool to hear a New Zealand accent again! I didn't realise how much I had missed it! While we were waiting for a taxi to take us back home after seeing the New Zealand ambassador Tony had to go to the toilet, so he had a look at a public toilet that was close to us, then quickly decided he didn't really need to go, and besides, nothing else would fit in it! That toilet must be one of the scungiest places on earth, short of going into an actual sewer...

And that brings us to today, we were going to go to the palaces they have here in Kabul, and have a look at this swimming pool where they used to execute people. With all the water drained out they used to make people jump off the highest platform there, and at the bottom you can see all these bullet holes from where I guess people didn't die fast enough...

But we aren't going there, that might be for some other time. Instead we are going out for lunch at a place called "The Flower Street Cafe", hopefully it lives up to its name!

One of the funniest things I have seen here

A lizard in the shower

I don't even want to think about what the pink and yellow bits are...

Sunday, 12 August 2012

An island of peace and civility

12th August 2012

Last night we went out for dinner to this nice place that was within walking distance of where I'm staying. On the way there we went past a lot of kids playing with kites because of Ramadan, some of the littler ones knew some English, so they followed us for a while asking us for money until they realised we weren't going to give them any. These were kids from the richer part of Afghanistan too, they had bikes and their houses had concrete outside them, instead of just a dust road.

From the outside, the restaurant looked like just another small house, apart from the armed guard. Just inside the door we got patted down to check for weapons by another guard, then we were allowed through. The restaurant was called "le divan", it used to be owned by a Frenchman but he sold it about 6 months ago on the condition that the menu and name of the restaurant stay the same.

While we were there an Englishman walked past our table, and it turned out to be a guy called Richard that Greg and Tony were talking about just a bit earlier! He was guy in his 60s who seemed like a classic old rockstar, long hair that was turning grey, dressed all in black. He works in Afghanistan doing transportation, but he really loves music and is going to be doing some gigs in Afghanistan at "le divan". They are going to drain the pool, put some scaffolding in it and then put a stage on top of it all!

Richard was meeting another guy there, who was running late, so we invited him to sit with us. Eventually his friend got there, a 30 year old Australian called Eli, who works as a security consultant in Afghanistan. He shouted us a few rounds, so we allowed the Australian to sit with us too. The drinks were really expensive! A vodka and coke costs US$9.90, and a can of beer costs US$10!

We only had US$200 so that went pretty fast, Greg and Tony decided to forgo their dinner to have a couple more drinks, but me being me wanted some food, so I had spaghetti bolognaise. It was quite nice, apart from the cheese they put on top of it, which resembled flakes of coconut, though there was not much of it so that was fine.

All in all it was a nice night, and the setting was remarkably different from the rest of Kabul. The company wasn't bad either, even if there was an Australian.