Of Herat: Tuktuks

Herat may be famous for its ancient architecture or its grand tradition of poetry, but when it comes to more modern forms of expression, the great spirits of this generation clearly turn to to tuktuk painting as the form that defines the era. I think the guy below may be demonstrating our next frontier for cultural diplomacy as he clearly painted that tuktuk based on a tutorial from Bob Ross.

Of Herat: Truck and Tuktuk

While the snazzy photos the last few days are courtesy of The Lovely Katherine, I have also been to Herat long ago, and all over Afghanistan by air. Looking at this picture and then thinking of the Afghan landscape, one can only wonder: Where on earth did they find a tree that big, and why did they cut it down?! There are some urban sort of decorative trees in Herat. There are some honest-to-goodness forests a few hundred miles away in Kunar. But neither of those is the likely source here. I'm guessing they felled it as a trophy - the biggest tree ever seen in Western Afghanistan. Don't let it distract you from the sweet paint job on the tuktuk.

Of Herat: Kuchi Huts

These are dwellings of the Kuchi, nomadic people who still roam Afghanistan. I always thought they lived in tents, but The Lovely Katherine informs me that they also sometimes live in these these mud huts. Or, our folks at Consulate Herat were just pulling her leg.

Of Herat: The Friday Mosque

Perhaps the most famous sight in Herat is the Friday Mosque. It's got a lot in common with the famous old mosques in Uzbekistan, which is reasonably close, but more importantly was tied by the Silk Road to Herat, helping architectural styles spread. More important than any of that is that Herat is safe enough that you can get out of a car and go look at the mosque and take pictures.

Of Herat

Your correspondent made a quick visit to Herat, the major city of Western Afghanistan, shortly after his arrival, and tragically failed to come back with any pictures. The Lovely Katherine had a couple days in Herat recently, and avoided any such problems. Several fantastic photos from her visit, as exemplified above, over the next few days.

Of Delhi

So on the way back home we spent a night in Delhi. We didn't really see too much of the city other than the road from the airport to our too-expensive hotel. We had some nice Indian food. And a colorful ride back to the airport. I think the guy on the chicken bike is telling the bus to go around him. But you never know.

Tomorrow: You may not believe it -- it's been so long! -- but we'll publish some stuff from Afghanistan, which is, actually, where we live.

Of Japan: Tokyo Cliche #4

Sushi. Or, from a more photogenic perspective, the fish market.


But don't worry, we also ate plenty of sushi, as illustrated below.

Of Japan: Tokyo Cliche #3

Crowded Trains. (OK, neither of these trains is really all that crowded. Above, just a picture we like. Below, crowded but no cattle prods needed to get everyone aboard.)

Of Japan: Tokyo Cliche #2

Sumo Wrestling. (P.s.: Go Baluto, the Estonian Sumo! I wish there were a Latvian Sumo, but we'll take pan-Baltic pride where we can.) (Oh, and also: If you're ever in Tokyo for a Sumo tournament, the very, very top row of the Sumo arena still isn't all that bad a seat.)

Of Japan: Tokyo Cliche #1

Vending Machines.

Of Japan: Diorama-Rama

After a fine time being outdoorsy in Hawaii, we spent a few days getting back in touch with what it's like to walk around a real city before returning to The Compound. So, Tokyo. What can you really say about Japan at this point, though? We mostly endeavor to make keep this blog lively by pointing out odd details we notice in our travels. But the things in Japan that strike Americans as odd have been so well-documented as to be a little trite at this point. So several of the next few posts will not be path-breaking in their analysis.

But we did find this fun feature that we had not previously heard of: In a swanky Japanese department store (of the old-fashioned variety with 15 stories and you take the elevator to the sixth floor for housewares and the seventh for children's clothes) we found this: There was a whole section of the store dedicated to these not-all-that-small dioramas, always of a man and a woman in traditional Japanese costume, seated in a room with lanterns. I'm sure they must mean something - if I had to guess, this is something you might give as a wedding gift to ensure a prosperous union/home. But who knows? I'm sure one of our many worldly readers who has spent time in Japan will comment shortly to explain.

Previously, in Hawaii...

The Lovely Katherine has forbidden the Holla staff from publishing the pictures of her swimming in one of the two awesome waterfall pools we hiked to because they have her in them. Here's a picture of the waterfall by someone else, though. So anyway, your television-addled (Netflix-addled?) correspondents found a lot of the goofy sights along the way reminded us of Lost. Sometimes just scenic coastlines, like the one above, but then also random towers of loudspeakers (tsunami warning systems, I think) against backdrops of lush green valleys. Driving around Maui, we saw some isolated little towns that seemed very Lost-y.


But then we got to Molokai. It's a whole other world of Lost-iness. First, when hiking deep valleys and crossing rivers you come across wrecks like the jeep immediately above. If only it were a blue VW bus... But to top it all off, we got to our accommodations, which were literally half an hour driving from anything else resembling civilization, and discover them to be this odd arrangement of bungalows, mostly empty, facing the sea and half-overgrown with greenery, studded with random bits of sidewalk leading to nowhere. There can be little doubt that this place on way Western tip of Molokai was the inspiration for the Dharma initiative town where The Others lived. (Pictured by night below.) So we decided to hit the road for Japan to make sure our story didn't end as badly as Lost did.

Of Hawaii: Moss 'n' Lichen

Not a lot of deep meaning on this one: Just two pictures we like of small things we found growing. Above, moss found on a fallen tree as we were hiking to an awesome waterfall-fed swimming hole. Below, lichen growing on the rocks of what was an ancient Hawaiian ceremonial site that we biked to on Molokai. As always you can click on them to embiggen them.

Of Molokai: An Apology

I would like to here publicly apologize to everyone I know in the real world, but above all my brother, for failing to notice this sign at the airport in time. Because the airport is tiny, there's a stop-sign t-intersection where you leave it, and you can't help but read the big sign that says "Slow Down - This is Molokai." But maybe you don't even notice the next sign, which advises that if you go to the post office in Hoolehua you can mail a coconut to someone. My brother obviously needs a Molokai coconut, and I failed him. I could say it's because we were there on a Sunday and a Federal holiday, but really, that wasn't the only issue. Sorry, man.

Oh, also: I promise to get over to ISAF and get your Xmas presents in the mail before our next vacation.

Of Molokai: Incoming

So we did the part about being on Molokai before the parts about getting there. But here are two pictures from the short flight from Maui to Molokai. We could see whales from the plane, which was fun. But also the views were generally kick-ass the whole way, however brief the flight. Picture below isn't totally what it looked like, but what the computer "auto smart fix" thinks it looked like, and it turned out ok.

Of Molokai

After a delightful week on Maui -- spent in equal parts driving scenic roads, being outdoorsy, drinking rum on the beach, and wandering around Safeway (and/or Foodland) -- we parted ways with family and set off for a more secluded island with less resorts and industrial tourism: Moloka'i. And we succeeded, because we got there and had no idea what to do with ourselves for a few days and weren't totally sure we'd be able to figure it out. Fear not: eventually, we did.

More pictures to come, but we're starting off with this favorite, from the green area just a couple hundred yards from a beach that was at least a mile long, completely isolated, and had the hugest, most dangerous-looking surf you can imagine. And of course, that is right where you would need a sink.

Of Hawaii: Pictures from the Top of a Volcano

As nice as our little slice of beach was, your correspondents, intrepid as ever, felt obliged to get out exploring. Diving and kayaking, though we did see amazing wildlife at close range during both activities, were not conducive to photography, what with their proximity to seawater. (And also, divers with underwater cameras are almost always annoying.) We did some hiking around on lava rocks and found an isolated snorkeling beach of our own, but it was cloudy and the pictures are just grey skies and black rocks. Luckily, the top of Maui, and Haleakala National Park is a bit more photogenic. See above, where some Park Ranger arranged this attractive tableau of plants and manhole covers for our enjoyment. Or, if you must, the more traditional shot of the Crater from the hiking trail, below.

Of Hawaii: Wedding Wonderland

We were, admittedly, lodging beside a pretty awesome beach in Hawaii: Nice sunset views, soft sand between pretty rocky points on either side, good for swimming and body-surfing. But that said, it was kind of silly how many sunset weddings there were on the beach. I only managed to ever photograph two brides in at a time, but for a while there were three marriages and/or wedding photo shoots with psychotic photographers on the beach simultaneously, along with us sitting there in beach chairs drinking rum punch from plastic cups.

Of Hawaii

Sadly, we had to leave Shanghai without having sucked the eyeballs out of a fried pigeon head, or having seen a live cricket fight. We showed up at the airport, having carefully packed carry-on only in hopes that our precarious Kabul-Delhi-Guangzhou-Tokyo-Honolulu-Maui routing would go smoothly if we didn't tempt fate by checking luggage. No such luck - our Shanghai-Tokyo flight was cancelled. As we waited in the line snaking around the terminal to see what fate awaited us, The Lovely Katherine had fruitless phone conversations with Carlson Wagonlit, official travel agent and bureaucracy multiplier of your federal government. I stood by and tried not to think about the mountain of sichuan peppercorns I had eaten the night before. Lucky for us, despite Carlson Wagonlit being generally worthless, Delta Airlines (yes, that Delta Airlines) rebooked us on a China Air flight an hour later. Dear Carlson Wagonlit: You got outperformed by the Chinese airport employees of Delta Airlines.

Anyway, we made it to Tokyo, and after some time in the surprisingly boring Narita airport, made it to Honolulu, and then to Maui. Above, the view from our condo balcony, which made the airplane time easy to forget.

Of Shanghai: Fighting Crickets

For some, a highlight of the trip, and for others, a kind of creepy diversion: Here are some pictures from the birds and fish and crickets etc market in Shanghai. There were any number of small animals for sale - a variety of fish, a few frogs and salamanders, turtles, tons of kind-of-boring little birds. But the apparent raison d'etre of this market is the fighting crickets. We saw thousands of crickets, though, from tiny little guys to crickets of sizes larger than your correspondent was aware crickets were biologically capable of. We saw any number of people haggling over crickets, and one-by-one taking an endless series of seemingly identical crickets out of their carrying cases (boxes, special cricket canisters, toilet paper tubes, etc.) for up-close inspections. I wish there had been a chance to see an actual cricket fight, because: WTF, cricket fighting?! But we did not. Always good to save something for next time.

Editor's note: This is probably our last post on Shanghai, before we move on to other exotic vacation photos. Sorry, but we haven't been off the compound since we got back from vacation, so until further notice, the travel photos will continue. We hope that we'll get out and take some Afghanistan pictures sometime in February.

Of Shanghai: Killing Time

Ok, we have one kick-ass set of photos from Shanghai, but it's late and we're sleepy, perhaps because we spent all day napping while the power was out in the entire Embassy. So for today, we're just randomly throwing out a couple decent pictures from Shanghai. As we may have mentioned already, this trip in general was not filled with photographic glory, so most photos are a bit more illustrative than intrinsically good pictures. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

Anyway, above, one of the more interesting pieces of art in the Shanghai Art Museum, which features centuries of historic Chinese Art, demonstrating any number of stylistic shifts in the painting of ridiculous mountain landscapes with little pagodas in the valleys. In the ancient sculpture section was this stele, covered in little carved Buddhas.

Below, the thriving commerce of the streets in Shanghai. The saleswoman, it turns out, was not enthusiastic about being photographed along with her wares, for some unknown reason. You would think it's because the books she was selling were a blatant infringement of copyright, but then again, the guy selling street corn-on-the-cob didn't want his picture taken either.

Of Shanghai: Pigeon Head, Hot Pot

We ate quite well in Shanghai. It's a thoroughly modern kind of place, and in the tony diplomatic neighborhood where our hosts live, we found both Thai food and Mexican food. Which was sort of a waste because Mexican Fiesta Night at the Kabul cafeteria is really one of the least objectionable menus they serve. The Shanghai Mexican Food was good, but still only sort of split the difference between cafeteria Mexican Fiesta Night and Real Mexican Food and/or Mission-Style Burritos.

Anyway, we also took advantage of our hosts' insider knowledge and Mandarin language skills to have such delicacies as fried pigeon head, as seen above. We are duty bound to tell you that while we did have pigeon, we did not eat the heads. Our hosts I think sort of nibbled around the necks. Nobody sucked the eyeballs out, which I thought was how it is properly done.


We forgot to record for posterity what this dish looked like before we ate the chicken out of it, but perceptive readers might note that even if there was previously a whole lot of other stuff in this basket, that is still a substantial pile of those crazy hot little red Chinese-cooking peppers. And you can't even see all the Sichuan peppercorns, which your correspondent ate all of because it's fun how they make your tongue go numb.


Despite all that, the highlight of the trip was probably "hot pot," which term we have seen elsewhere to describe a clay pot of boiling water and various ingredients. We had not seen it to mean a restaurant based on having a little fry-o-lator on every table top (seen above featuring "normal" and "extra spicy" broth), and they bring you all sorts of crazy ingredients like "cuttlefish paste" which you toss in the boiling oil and then fish out and dip in a sauce that you make yourself at the sauce bar from an array of spices, soy sauces, and pureed things. Really a great place for families. They not only provide customers aprons and a special plastic bag to put your cell phone in so it doesn't get boiling oil on it, but also: the mix-your-own-sauce bar features mountains of Sichuan peppercorns. Or maybe they were just pre-positioned in the boiling oil. Either way, despite being warned about eating a small mountain of Sichuan peppercorns the night before flying across the Pacific, your correspondent was powerless to resist.

Of Shanghai: Bikes and Cardboard

This is apparently how the recycling industry works in China: People ride around on bikes, and pick up recyclables wherever they might find it, and haul it to wherever it goes.




Also apparently recyclable - chickens:

Of Shanghai: No, it's not the Happy Fish Waterslide Pavilion

So we figured we should have some pictures of some real Chinese-looking stuff here. On our first day in town, we went to see the centuries-old Yuyuan Garden in the center of Shanghai. It is, I gather, quite old, and has very Chinese-looking scenes of pagodas and ponds like the above. But the highlight, really, was the fun names. Perhaps they could just be translated with more panache, or maybe it really is that they give things names that we find ridiculous.


In any case, it's good to know that the the Ming-dynasty Chinese were well-balanced enough to know that you don't always want a Tower of Happiness. Sometimes you're feeling chill and just want a Hall of Mildness.


And, sadly, the "Big Rockery" is not the place where Mötley Crue hangs out while in China. It's actually just a big pile of rocks. And if you're heading to the Happy Fish Water Side Pavilion, don't expect the fish to be doing big happy leaps out of the water. They just sort of sit there, and don't look all that happy at all. So, yes, China was great, but there were some disappointments.

Of Shanghai

We were in China! Three wonderful days in Shanghai! I guess Shanghai is "China Lite" or something and if we were serious we would have gone to Wuhan or Shenyang or somewhere without such a grand tradition of Westerners pillaging or setting up Prada outlets or whatever. But we had friends to visit in Shanghai and don't really know anyone in Chengdu. And we weren't really looking for "roughing it" on this trip anyway.

So, we have a few days of China pictures coming up. We had a great time in Shanghai, but I feel like we didn't accumulate many anecdotes to accompany the pictures. Unless you count stories about visitors peeing inside the American pavilion at the Shanghai World Fair this year... but we didn't witness that, we just heard about it, so we can't really claim it as our own story, let alone elaborate.

On an unrelated note, we didn't buy any Chairman Mao dishes, but we could have:

Home Again

Greetings, Hollamaniacs. We're back from our epic Kabul--Shanghai-Maui-Molokai-Tokyo-Delhi-Kabul R&R trip, and ready to regale you with boring stories about it. As with last time, we'll try to keep it limited to the stuff rather that an average reader might find amusing rather than just showing the world our holiday snapshots. But we, like anyone, love our own holiday snaps, so somebody say "uncle" if we cross the line.

A few notes gleaned from our extensive air travel on this trip. First of all, there is a dangerous Airline Food Gap opening between us and the rising powers of Asia. If left unchecked, the superiority of the food on Air India and China Southern could seriously hamper the competitiveness of American industry. Darn but Air India doesn't offer some tasty food in those little airline serving dishes. United, you've been warned.

Oh, also, Air India has these old planes and a lot of the interior is kind of falling apart. But they still manage to have the kind of movie system in Economy Class where you can start and stop any of the movies on offer whenever you want, as opposed to United, which on the not-insubstantial flight from Japan to Hawaii and back still has the old-fashioned system where the movies start on their own and you have to decide to watch a movie at the moment that the movies are starting or you're out of luck. (For their part, I don't think China Southern had any kind of movie system at all, but I'm still giving them some props just for being an actual airline -- when we bought the tickets we weren't entirely sure.)

And yet despite this, our several flights on Air India were never more than half full. I would guess the flight from Tokyo to Delhi was at most 20% occupied. Ten hours is a long way to fly a plane that's mostly empty. Which of course means there must be some ridiculous subsidy scheme going on because I don't see how Air India could stay in business serving tasty meals and buying snazzy movie systems for a bunch of empty seats. So maybe United deserves some slack, too. Not too much. But a little.

Gone Fishin'

Greetings Loyal Readers:

Once again we are away from Kabul on one of the fabulous R&R vacations they provide us suffering civilians. And once again, we failed to get anything ready for posting while we are away. We're currently posting from a friend's computer in Shanghai (and note that the Chinese government has blocked its people's access to the Holla, perhaps recognizing our steady progress toward world domination. The 21st century may belong to China but the early smart money is on the Holla in the 22nd.) We may have some down time during which we'll post from the road. But just as likely, you'll have to manage without regular Holla updates until the 24th. Don't cry, it will be here before you know it!

In Which We Welcome 2011

Embassy Kabul celebrated the New Year as we celebrate almost every week: hosting visiting dignitaries. They in turn brought press delegations and inspired subtle suggestions that we Embassy staff should not be too boisterous because, after all, it's still a war zone. Apparently our public affairs experts determined it would not be a PR "win" to show off drunken diplomats whooping it up in Afghanistan, even on New Year's Eve.

Nevertheless, there was a bonfire on the dirt patch behind the chancery (known as the "soccer field" because apparently people were allowed to play soccer there before it, like every other open space bigger than a postage stamp, was fenced off for mysterious construction-related purposes). And somehow, the Embassy owns a New Year's Eve dropping-ball contraption - our own little slice of Times Square, New York here at Dirt Square, Kabul. A small but hardy band of revelers enjoyed the fire, counted as the ball dropped, and sipped champagne with maximum possible restraint and decorum one can muster while wearing novelty 2011 eyeglasses.

The mainstream media, it turns out in the end, were not at all interested in what we were up to.

Massoud Circle

This is right next to the Embassy, as in, you walk out the security checkpoint, and there it is. Massoud Circle is a traffic-choked roundabout named after the Ahmad Shah Massoud, the hero of the Afghan resistance to the Soviets. He was assassinated in 2001. He's a towering, heroic figure. Of course, those not familiar with his likeness might mistake his portrait on the circle for Che Guevara, or Bob Marley, or anyone else with facial hair and a floppy hat rakishly draped off his head. Knowing tragically little of the history of the city, I don't really know if the monument here was re-purposed to be a Massoud monument recently or if it's recent construction. While we're busy getting into the minutiae of provincial budgets and insurgent reintegration plans, we don't learn about the geography or history of the city blocks right around us.

In a certain way that focus is surely appropriate. In another way, it's a shame.