Well, it's Monday evening in Kabul and it is suddenly evident how ridiculously brief this trip is-- I leave Kabul tomorrow evening! It has really been an eyeblink and I honestly wish I could stay for much longer. The students have been fun and responsive but I know the mark I leave as a horn teacher will be fleeting at best. I have worked especially hard with Mashal and also with a young and enthusiastic trumpet player, Qudrat, and they were as dismayed as I felt when I told them I was leaving. There is a big gala concert here on Wednesday and they had assumed I was participating, but my obligations in the US required that I leave sooner.
Yesterday was a standard day of teaching, punctuated by a somewhat impromptu recital where we once more played the Brahms trio, this time for the students, as well as the Mozart quintet movement that we practiced a few days ago. Both very well received by the students, and once more the excitement of playing this music for an audience that hears so little of this style was very moving.
Today I taught in the morning, but much of the rest of the day was a "hurry up and wait" kind of schedule as we tried to move instruments and equipment across town to the French cultural center for the gala concert. Kabul traffic, already abominable, is made even worse by the recent snowfall and freezing conditions. There are old traffic lights around the city, but none work, and there are no highways whatsoever so crossing town can easily take a couple hours. An interesting thing to note is that despite the everyone-for-himself ethos of driving in the streets, there are remarkably few fender benders (ie I have seen none and most cars are unscratched) and everyone seems surprisingly patient and good natured. None of the steer fights that were common in Shanghai!
The only time that I was really nervous here was when we got stuck behind a military convoy. They consist of huge tan armored vehicles with automated swiveling guns on top. Without a single person visible, the guns will quickly swivel and fix on a particular car, then move on to the next. Highly disconcerting to have that kind of firepower suddenly trained on you!
The soldiers here have a difficult relationship with the city. While everyone understands the threats that could erupt without their presence, the military environment is highly disruptive to commerce, and ironically, the soldiers with all their firepower are most fearful of the (generally extremely friendly) Kabulis. The Canadian soldiers who were unaware of a western supermarket less than a block away from their compound were an example of this.
I wish I had had more time to get a sense of Kabul as a metropolis. There seem to be many interesting neighborhoods and the city, for all the pollution and dust, is very scenic. A mountain range squeezes the city in two (the geography is very similar to El Paso, Texas), and neighborhoods creep up the sides of the steep hills. At night, even the poorest people on the hillsides light up their homes, and the effect is very pretty. Kabul is sometimes called the City of Lights.
Hopefully tomorrow I will have time for a few last shopping adventures before heading to the airport and facing my return to the West!
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