Morning. No one is around. I buy a bus ticket to Kabul and never learn what the teashop terrorists or night fright was all about. Just another earthprobe experience, I guess.
As the bus pulls out of Kandahar the sky becomes overcast and snow begins to fall. We pass through more jagged mountains and desolate, empty plains and arrive in Kabul.
Kabul, Afghanistan:
Damn! The bus station is six kilometers out of town again! I don’t know why they do this. Maybe to give the local taxi drivers employment?
A pleasant oriental face asks me if I need a hotel room in Kabul and if I do to try his so I go with him in his hotel taxi to the touristic quarter of Kabul: Chicken Street. The room he rents me is tiny but clean, neat and cheap. It has two cots, a wood stove and a color print of “Good King Winceslaus” looking out on a snowy landscape on the wall.
It is still early in the day and extremely cold outside the hotel and inside my room so I think I will try to find a warm coat I can afford. When I go out I discover there are lots of diminutive touristic shops on Chicken Street and most of them have inexpensive sheepskin coats and mittens for sale. The way you do business in these shops is to sit with the patron of the shop under a heavy blanket that covers both of your bodies and also covers a small charcoal stove which heats the under-blanket environment. The blanket is pulled up under your armpits, which leaves your hands free to drink the tea he offers you and your head free to talk business. A little boy tends the charcoal, brings the tea and hands the boss the coats he wants to sell.
It’s a pretty cozy way to get to know your customers and I feel so comfortable in the first shop I accidentally leave my camera. I don’t realize it is gone until I have sat with the patrons of a couple of other shops. When I do I race back to the first shop to retrieve it the boss hands it back to me and I gratefully buy his coat.
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