Kabul Cowgirl

In a country where women do not ride bicycles, drive cars, or play sports, I managed to get on a horse yesterday. An friend of a friend, a nouveau riche Afghan, has six horses on the outskirts of Kabul. He is from Badakshan, Afghanistan's northernmost province, the birthplace of the national sport, Buzkashi (horse polo, without clubs, and a drowned goat instead of a ball).

The horses were beatuiful, all stallions and quite temperamental. The saddles were enormous armchair-like structures with a cover of hand-woven carpet and a big handle in the front apparently "for hooking your leg on when you hang down the side of the horse." I didn't do too much of that.

We left the mud-walled compound and rode down the main road to Darulaman Palace, a big castle which once housed the royal family and which at some point in the future will hopefully become the seat of parliament. At the moment the palace and its surroundings look a lot like Dresden or Warszawa circa 1945. Through the gaping holes of rockets and grenades one can see the insides of what used to be richly decorated dining rooms and sitting salons. We rode through what once must have been the palace gardens, now a wasteland of dirt and garbage.

It was quick to leave the city and enter the villages. Though my black headscarf revealed only half of my face, I was no doubt the evening's greatest attraction. The men whistled, pointed, and laughed, and the children yelled "Haraszi!"--the Dari word for foreigner. One teenage boy tried to persuade one of his cows to attack my horse.

Through alleys too narrow for cars and too dirty for feet; up hills that had not been de-mined and down marginally green valleys where nomads herded their sheep -- for two hours I was in an Afghanistan that I had never thought I would get to see, let alone on a Sunday evening after work. I saw long queues at the water pump, a fist fight too real for comfort, and raw sewage running down the middle of a road where children played. I saw Taliban-looking men in stylish turbans and not one woman without a burqa.

We got back after nightfall. My hands were blistered and my backside was sore, but I couldn't feel it.

Afghan Wedding

A few days ago, we were fortunate enough to be invited to the wedding of O's colleague's sister. Her fiance had just come back to Afghanistan, having been denied asylum after six years in England. This, as the vast majority of Afghan marriages, was arranged by the bride and groom's parents--the happy couple had in fact never met before the night of their wedding. Engagements are often arranged when the bride is very young; and the payment of "bride prices" for daughters can be an important source of income for poor families. (For more about this common, slavery-like practice, read this article in the NY Times). This wedding, however, involved two very wealthy families by Afghan standards. Thus its elaborate nature.

Weddings are a very big deal here, perhaps because it's as much a business transaction as it is a family celebration. Loans are taken out, hundreds of people are invited, and women spend days caking on makeup at beauty parlors. Who would have thought that Kabul has as many wedding shops as bakeries? In the capital, most weddings seem to take place in one of the space-age-like wedding halls that have popped up around town in the past five years. They are all concrete blocks covered in green or blue mirror glass, and they come decked out with eagle-shaped fountains (without water) and blinking neon lights, sometimes in the shape of palm trees. As these Las Vegas wannabes sit in the dust amid century-old mud houses and garbage dumps, however, they fail miserably in their attempts to be glamorous. On our way to the wedding, I snapped this picture of a newly built wedding hall. Though it has yet to be blessed with neon lights, please note the shops selling hubcaps on the ground level.
We stopped on the way to buy flowers for the couple. Flower shops here cater almost exclusively to weddings and wedding parties, and almost all of the colorful creations are fake! Why buy real roses that fade when you can buy plastic ones from China that will stay red forever? I wouldn't have any of it, though, and made sure to find a bunch of real, albeit somewhat wilted and sad-looking, flowers. And then the bride showed up holding a bouqet of fake lilies. Bride and groom walks in, the woman in green is the bridesmaid holding the Holy Koran over the bride's head. In the background is a television set showing what is going on in the men's section--men and women celebrate separately, on different floors of the wedding halls. Related men may visit the women's party, but no woman--not even the bride--ever goes into the men's section. According to my spy on the other side, the man's party was a bit of a drag, and it ended hours before the women's party did. The bride is supposed to look sad the entire night, and she has to cry as she leaves the party with her new husband. Why? Because she is leaving her family, with which she has lived her entire life. She now has to go live with her husband's family, even if the husband is living or working abroad or in another city. O's colleague said yesterday that since the wedding, he had been home crying with his parents because his sister was gone. "Does her husband's family live far away?" O asked symathetically. "No, just across the street."
The wedding cake, of which the 500 men saw nothing as it was housed and consumed in the women's section, was a study in tackiness. It had at least three tiers, five miniature bride-and -grooms, plastic flowers galore, and an inexplicable flourescent orange figurine in the center. It was almost too cheesey to be true. I cannot speak for its relative culinary value, however. Who knows, maybe it was delicious.

At first, everybody was afraid of me: I was the only foreigner, the only blonde, the only woman not wearing glitter. Within an hour or so, children were pulling my hair, teenagers were telling me to get up and dance, guys with video cameras were filming me as I was doing nothing but sitting on a chair. One of the highlights was getting to know Sharifa, the only other woman not wearing a vail, who is Afghan but lives in Sweden with her husband and two insanely cute little daughters. See picture: It was an amazing evening. Boring, for sure, and the food, service, and music were terrible. But it was such a bizarre setting that I enjoyed every single moment. I still feel like I have very little in common with Afghan women, and I still don't really know what to talk to them about, but at least now I have some insight into their world.

Picture It

Yesterday, at 7:15 in the morning, I looked out the window of the old Toyota minivan that takes me to work and saw the following: Amid beat-up old yellow-and-white taxis, starved horses pulling carts loaded with carrots, and buses spewing black smoke, an entire Afghan family floated down the street on one very shiny motorcycle. The man was driving, his henna-dyed red hair flowing in the wind, his Paris Hilton-like sunglasses reflecting the bike's chrome. Sitting in front of him on the fuel tank was a boy of 3 or 4, desperately clutching his father's elbows, but looking like he was enjoying the ride. Behind the man was his wife. The wind caught her shiny blue burqa to reveal the brightly colored, vividly patterned outfit and high-heeled shoes she was wearing underneath. Finally, squeezed in between the parents was the newest addition to this picture-perfect biker family: a tiny baby girl dressed in pink from head to toe. I am not sure how to explain it, but for some reason that image stuck on my retina and made me happy for the rest of the day.

Never a dull moment.

The Kabul Catwalk

This past week, bombs went off in Kabul, the Taliban killed some British soldiers in the southeast, and unthinkable amounts of opium were harvested in Helmand province. But I've had more important things to worry about. Fashion. After many long evenings of dressing and undressing, pinning needles to skin, and practicing something as basic as how to walk, the big day finally arrived on Saturday. Two designers, seven models, and lots of beautiful Afghan-inspired clothes made for an awesome opening of the Kabul catwalk.

The event got picked up by the BBC--check it out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5163282.stm.
(and yes, that little picture is me on Afghan television!)

The clothes are all made here in Kabul, from Afghan materials including old turbans and raw silk. Some of the pieces have the most beautiful traditional embroidery. Zolaykha and Gabi, the designers, are incredibly talented and deserving of fame and fortune. Pictures of their older collections are available at www.zarif-royah.com, and I'm sure they will post pictures of the new collection soon.