Playing Chicken

A low-key day -- Friday, Juma, the sabbath; little traffic, comparatively. Emily's knee throbbing so a short walk up to Chicken Street, the traditional tourist-junk shopping row, for a couple of shops' worth of haggling, and a quick gypsy (can I still say that?) cab ride to Zardozi, qv

http://www.afghanartisans.com

for some non-exploitive, hand-crafted, small-batch, etc., tourist goods.

A stop at a bakery for a kilogram of fried pastries doused in, I think, sugar-water or honey or perfume - dunno, Karen and Emily pointed and I paid. The Afghan headwaiter at our hotel identified one variety as julabi, flat coils of dough and eau-de-sickly, and the little round ones … after a hesitant conversation with one of the busboys, he said, "We call this one 'sweetie.'" (I'm guessing it was gulab jamun, but you can look at all the varieties yourself and drool, or cringe, as befits your insulin level:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_sweets_and_desserts)

OK. We managed about a quarter-kilogram's worth, as lunch, and offered the rest to the hotel staff. An afternoon nap, or at least a resting of weary limbs, and a celebration of getting everyone this far alive, and then maybe some dinner and packing. Islamabad by lunchtime tomorrow, Lahore by dinner, inshallah.

Shot nothing worth a damn, because I was playing porter and negotiator all day, but here's a smoggy view of TV hill from our hotel courtyard. In central Kabul, it's a hill bearing much of the telecom apparatus for commercial and military (at least psy-ops) outfits around these parts. In a nasty blizzard in 2006 I crept to the top with a Belgian military contingent to refuel generators, then slid off one side, the sleeve of my winter coat catching a bit of barbed wire before I took a long dive, sans bungee cord.