Yesterday was a fun day, and marked yet another item we could check off our list of things to do before we leave.
We got up early and headed down to Darulaman, which is a city in the southern part of Kabul. We have another US Camp down there with our counterpart Navy team. Right outside of their base sits the Queen's palace, and up the road a little is the King's. Granted, these are no longer used, and once you see the pictures you will understand why. They were both built in the late 20's early 30's and were used appropriately to their names for quite a few years. Once the Russians came in, followed by the Taliban, they became headquarters for the oppressive leaders and thusly were bombed mercilessly.
When you are a kid and you see a construction site, or maybe even a building that is dilapidated to the point that it needs to be torn down, you always crave to crawl around inside it. Essentially that is what we got to do with these two palaces. The history was there, as were the remnants of some obviously at one time beautiful buildings, but all in all they are destroyed. The entire time we walked around, we were commenting that the entire place was a lawsuit waiting to happen with holes in the ceilings, no rails on the stairs and just some iffy situations in general. It was quite a contrast to the states where you would never be allowed in there for safety concerns. Gotta love the lack of safety laws!
After our tours, we headed to the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, which runs either 1st or 2nd as the nicest hotel in the country. Let me say that the standards here are low, so don't be all too impressed. Imagine a hotel built in the late 60's(it was) with some semi recent renovations. It's almost like a nice holiday inn, but certainly not 5 stars. We wanted to go there though, so we could have a nice lunch with our other Navy counterparts, and we also invited our terps so we could buy them lunch and thank them for their efforts. We have eaten all our meals (aside from the odd time out at a village) here at Blackhorse, we wanted one that was actually in the city.
The other bonus to this trip was that we got to drive through DOWNTOWN. We didn't skirt it, or go around at all. I was able to drive right through the middle of the city, which is something that I had been wanting to do. I also personally drove...I hadn't yet driven here other than just around PeC, so it was good to expand my drive circle a little! Very typical third world big city actually.....lots of small markets, donkey's pulling carts, people pulling carts and then we saw a guy pushing a wheel barrow full of goat heads. I have no idea if they were for sale or he was going to feed them to other goats. Interesting.
Pictures from all three are here.
Anyway....take another one off the list, couple more to go!
Gary
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