Today was interesting.

Alex Henderson arrived in-country about a week after I did. A retired Army Warrant Officer, Alex is a confident, outgoing guy. He let it slip that his buddies call him "Hollywood". Easy to believe that--Hollywood has curly hair, baby doe eyes, and a girl in every port. Like many of the guys here, he worked for KBR previously, in Djibouti. His last assignment in the Army took him to Bagram Air Base, about 60 miles north of Kabul. He has a twelve-year old daughter living with his mom.

When new employees get here, we are all assigned a laptop computer, among other things. In our conex box/office at D-1, we have a wireless Internet connection. D-1 is where I work--it is the Afghan National Army (ANA) National Supply Depot. There are also two other National Supply Depots called D-0 and D-2. Those of you familiar with military logistics will probably point out that there can only be one National Supply Depot. I agree, but things are different here in Afghanistan. Don't even start on the problem of having a "D-0". Back to the story: Alex's computer was never able to establish an Internet connection. For reasons too involved to flesh out here, we were never able to get our sole tech support guy to fix it. So today our boss, Dana Cook, sent Alex & I out into the city to buy a new Internet card on the economy (reimbursable, of course).

Did I tell you about Dana Cook? He's a crusty, loud former Army maverick from South Dakota. In the few weeks that I've been here, working from a desk next to his, I know all I'll ever need to know about hunting buffalo, elk, coyotes, rabbits, deer, prairie dogs, and whatever else walks, runs, crawls, swims or flies in or around the Black Hills. His wife sounds like a sweet woman and she must be an absolute saint, I'm sure. Interesting also to get a local's perspective on Harley riders, the Sturgis Rally, and Indians. Don't get me wrong, I'm picking on him in case he ever reads this. Dana is actually a great guy and has invited me & my family to stay at his house next time we go to Sturgis to do some fishing, and perhaps consume some adult beverages.

Alex & I grabbed one of our Interpreter-Translators (IT), Gee, and headed out into town in an MPRI vehicle commandeered by one of our drivers, Abdul. Gee apparently knew where to buy a Internet card. The route started out fairly familiar--down Jalalabad Road toward Camp Eggers. Then we turned off next to the Ministry of Defense toward downtown Kabul. We started to see a lot of people walking alongside the road, and Alex asked the driver where they were headed. "Downtown" he replied.

There are pics in my photobucket album. I'm almost lost for words. Downtown Kabul looked like it was right out of a movie. The first movie that comes to mind is "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome", only the scenery in Thunderdome was cleaner and better organized. Throngs of traffic--everything from military vehicles to donkey wagons to people wagons to people. There seemed to be no order to the chaos. Everything from power cords to 'fresh' produce to fish was available to sale on the streets. Gee had the driver stop and let us out in the middle of it all. Then he led us into what I thought was a storefront shop, instead it was a doorway into a larger "mall" in the interior. Wow. It was an open courtyard, with about seven stories of shops overlooking a shabby-looking building in the middle, onto which trash and debris was deposited. The whole place smelled like urine, body odor, and marijuana. Could have been clover cigarettes, but it sure smelled like marijuana to me. We looked into several dirty shops cluttered with electronics, computer equipment, video supplies, etc., from every country and manufacturer imaginable. Gee asked for the part in about a dozen shops before we gave up and headed to another possible source.

That's when I realized that I made a mistake I will never do again. I had left the sanctuary of reasonable civilization needing to urinate. I asked Gee if they had bathrooms there. He hesitated, then led me to the rear of the mall and out into another adjacent enclosed area. There it really got ugly. Two boys, I guess about ten years old, were monitoring the "bathroom". As a stall became available, they handed me about four sheets of pink toilet paper and pointed to the door through which I was supposed to go. I walked into a 4' by 4' concrete stall with a 6" by 8" hole in the floor. The smell was almost unbearable. I skillfully aimed at the hole and completed my task. Through the hole I could plainly see the deposits of the visitors before me. I say "plainly see" because there was sunlight down there. I hesitate to envision what exactly was out there. On the way out, one of the boys had his hand out (imagine that!) and Gee gave him ten Afghanis (about twenty cents).

Our next stop was a smaller, dirtier mall, but we found the Internet card for $70.00 US dollars.

I learned some new words today. While getting back into the vehicle to leave, a police officer told our driver to "Bora, bora!" (Go, go!), and in traffic on the way back, Abdul called somebody a "kaka-e-khar" (uncle of donkey) and a "shadi" (monkey).

I added some pics of "jingle trucks". We get a lot of shipments through Pakistan. The Pakistanis like to decorate their trucks with bright paint and chains sort of like wind chimes. They jingle when they go down the road. Hence the name "jingle trucks"!