Musings of a Gora

So I lived in India for the first five and a half months of this year, in Goa, which is a major tourist destination. Yet somehow I couldn’t seem to find a proper supermarket, with all the fixins of home.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but on my first visit to the “Finest Supermarket” which is on the edge of Taimani neighborhood/district of Kabul City, I was overwhelmed by the abundant options that abounded.

On our way to the Supermarket we encountered one of Kabul’s campaigning politicians:

After we made it past the overzealous “Pear candidate’s” staff, we set to work looking for the various western staples we needed to stock our guesthouse refrigerators. It’s amazing, but Kabul’s “Finest Supermarket” has a perfect selection of any American’s basic suburban needs:

As well as Ragu, the grocer stocks Campbell’s Soup, among a plethora of other canned and condensed necessities. Not only is the store well-stocked, they have futuristic shopping inventions such as the “shopping basket-rolling cart” hybrid, perhaps a Chinese  or Japanese invention:

If all that wasn’t enough to assure you that this is truly the “finest supermarket in Southwest Asia,” you need only check out the second floor, glassware, chotchkies, DVDs, and Barbie!

Kabul’s been quiet for me thus far (knock on wood) so today I’ll leave you with a funny story I heard the other night from a friend.

In Kabul the ice cream man has a push cart and a mini-megaphone, rather than a truck as happens in so many western countries. It just so happens that one particular ice cream man in Kabul, has slightly more sinister plans than many others. If you hear the ice cream man at a certain hour of the evening, it never bodes well. In some parts of the world that’s because the ice cream man is secretly dealing/transporting heroin. In others it has to do with children and such.

Now kidnappings of foreigners have allegedly gone out of fancy in Kabul,  however Afghan kidnapping is still in vogue. So when some certain foreigners noticed their dog was missing after hearing the ice cream man at an odd hour, they didn’t initially think anything of it.

A few days later the Ice Cream Man showed up at their door in the evening and suggested that for $300 dollars it might be possible for him to locate the dog.

You might be thinking what you would do in this instance, $300 is a lot of money for a dog that might have just as well run away or been killed.

But what else is an expat stuck in Kabul to do? They paid the man.

The next day he returned with the dog and said “Let’s never speak of this again,” and with a jolly tune on his wagon he rode away…

Day two in Kabul was, fortunately, a day off. I have been running on steam since living India on a 4am flight to Doha last Monday. So the day began slowly, rising late, dealing with various outlying work, writing yesterday’s blog, etc. etc.

In the afternoon John Smock and I lunched in the courtyard of the Kabul Inn, the quiet beneath hovering storm clouds was quite relaxing. During our lunch of chicken burgers, and shockingly enough, a vegetarian burger for this writer, we were reminded we were in fact in Kabul and not some cheap hotel in a middle-of-nowhere hostel just once, as two large helicopters passed overhead.

The daylight hours were relatively uninteresting as I’ve said, interesting conversations with John Smock about his work and Small World News’ background, but nothing of note for the readers really. The day didn’t actually kick off until about 6:45pm when we left the Kabul Inn to walk to our friend Una’s guesthouse, to meet her and some friends for, that’s right, an Afghan rockshow.

As two bumbling foreigners on our second and third days in Kabul, we walked right past the alley to Una’s house and 2 more blocks before we realized our mistake. You see, Una’s place is “right behind the bread stand” but in Kabul there can be a bread stand on many a block, thus the error. Heading back to the Kabul Inn to regroup, we found the correct bread stand, and Una’s house just behind.

After brief intros to Hadi, Zaman, and Lea, we packed up and headed off to the Kabul Health Club. The Club is exactly that, a health club, which includes a bar and restaurant, and a few guest rooms for rent. However I have to admit that I didn’t see anything resembling workout equipment or anything to suggest it was more than a nice restaurant/bar for well-to-do Afghans and expats.

We were running late and after navigating a bit of confusion with security we found Kabul Dreams already well into the first few songs of their set. Like some combination of Jacob Dylan, Bob Dylan, and Nirvana, they were quite the sight. There were mixed messages about whether cameras were permissible, so John left his big fancy camera at home, and we each brought a mobile phone for assessment testing just in case.

It was clear soon after we arrived that cameras of any kind would be fine. During several songs the cameras  just in front of the stage nearly outnumbered the crowd. There were probably 50 attendees milling on the grass in front of the state, or a few more than that. Like many an indie show, they left a wide semi-circle of empty space in front of the band, which was soon filled by over-zealous journalists with all manner of visual recording devices.

I have mixed feelings about the impact of the show, it was loud and in an open-air courtyard in a populated residential area, meaning all the neighbors were subjected to loud indie rock well after dark. There were shishas to be smoked in the garden space after the show, and a highly overpriced (though well worth it) barbecue dinner. Oh and did I mention that it was held at Kabul Health Club, a pricey gym for Kabul’s other half? None of these things can be particularly good for encouraging local goodwill.

That said, a fun time was had by all, the band was an interesting mix of Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction meets something far less edgy, however they take themselves too seriously to be anything like pop-punk. Kind of like  if Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo met Kurt Cobain in Kabul and were listening to too much Death Cab for Cutie. Or something. I’m no music critic.

[h/t Tom Willard for the Death Cab for Cutie insight. Video coming once my slow Kabul connection gets it online. Check out http://brianconley.blip.tv]