Pictures

Here are some pictures I took during my recent trip.  The first two are looking out through the fence at the base I was visiting as we were driving around just to give a idea of what the surrounding area looks like from the ground there.

The next three are from the air (obviously), this is what rural Afghanistan looks like, well at least the area near me. This is a semi arid climate at ~5000-6000 ft.  I don’t know for sure but I imagine the farms are for fruit or nut trees with the pastures for goats.  All the compounds are mud/adobe with tall perimeter walls like I was talking about before.  The haze you seen in the second picture is probably just dust, the air gets pretty dusty here since it is so windy, in the cities it is less dusty but more polluted. 

This picture is a traffic circle (which they have tons of here, British influence I guess?) but it’s out in the middle of nowhere.  Super nice, landscaped etc no where near anything, it probably has some significance but I thought it was pretty funny.  Heck even two(the “north” and “east” roads) of the roads don’t go anywhere, they just dead end a few hundred yards down.  It’s an interesting country.

The final two pictures are the outskirts (?suburbs?) and then a shot of more of the “downtown” area of Kabul.  Some of the buildings have survived the past 30-40 years of war pretty decently and some haven’t it results in a strange mix.

I’ll probably write about the rest of this trip some other time, right now I just wanted to post some pictures.  These pictures are from about the first half hour of a trip ended up taking about seven more hours than it should have, but I got back on the day I was supposed to and we didn’t have any trouble just a lot more waiting than expected. No biggie.  Plus while I ended up missing dinner I was able to eat at a Turkish restaurant for lunch which had real (ie not stale) bread so I may have actually come out ahead in the deal.