Catching a ride with the Hoff

Jump in his car with this video!

"The Hoff is back to rock your world! Recorded and produced in Sydney, David's hoff the wall take on the 1975 Aussie classic 'Jump In My Car' by the Ted Mulry Gang is going to majorly impress his hofficial army of fans. Watch the full video, which was also filmed in Sydney, right here..."

Welcome to Afghanistan

My sister sent me some pictures she took during our trip to Afghanistan. Although I did not take the pictures I stood right next to her when she did take them.

Kabul Airport
Remnants of the wars downtown Kabul
Barbur Garden, Kabul
Near the Kabul Museum. This was the primary location used in 'At Five in the Afternoon'.
Homes Kabul
Mosque at Barbur Garden
Kabul Sky

River near Jalalabad
The nomadic people of Afghanistan live in tents outside town. There are clusters of tents within the city of Kandahar now.

That's us dressed and posing just before our Afghan wedding experience. Moments after this picture was taken we were covered from head to toe and found ourselves on a bus with hundreds of sweaty, freshly permed ladies driving aimlessly around Kandahar.

Dala Lake, outside Kandahar. Probably the most beautiful lake I have ever seen.
River in Kandahar
Burqa at Sai Baba Memorial, Kandahar
Mosque, Kandahar
Mosque door, Kandahar

Cinema in the market, Peshawar, Pakistan. Only men attend the picture shows and it seemed that only men were allowed in the market as well. Ignorance is bliss.

Czech Mate

Daniele brought her digital camera and we were therefore able to make digital memories which I will share with you here:

Here is who went to the Czech Republic. Not surprisingly, this picture was taken at a bar by Scott's freakishly long arm.
It seemed only logical to be wearing shades while drinking absinth.

The walk down from the castle.
This was taken from the top of the cathedral in the castle complex.
The Frank Gehry building: Fred & Ginger
More architecture
Me stretching with Charles Bridge in the background
Ooohhh, ahhh.


I would love to share more pictures but the site is refusing to upload at this moment in time. Don't worry the Germans will figure it out. After all, this sort of malfunctino does not happen here.

Oh poor Bonzai

Here is the picture Shanna Rose refered to in her post.

Here is my favorite picture sequence from that particular day at the Chinese Tavern (my favourite bar that no longer exists):

Heather explains the concept.

Deaner totally gets it!

Culture Fest in Mnichově

Culture Fest was awesome! Dancing until 7am in a church courtyard in the Czech countryside is pretty nice. Having a bunch of Czech people buy you drinks is even better. Sleeping in a tent for four hours a night and having to get up because it is boiling hot is not so cool but workable considering the music is great and the atmosphere Bohemian.

The Quick Version

After the many wonderous events that occured in Afghanistan I high tailed it out of there and flew back to Delhi. Once firmly on the ground in the Indian capital I went to a market and keeled over. Blacked right out during a lunch hour rush. Luckily, a very nice Indian lady helped me get back on my feet fifteen or so minutes later. Passing out was not a new thing for me. I had plenty of practice in Kabul where I took to spontaneously making friends with the various pavement options four days in a row.

I got homesick. I know, isn't it weird? Who would have thought that after five months of travelling and sleeping in a different bed virtually every night one could get homesick? I was as shocked as anyone when this happened. So, logically I headed to Turkey to sleep for three days straight. I decided to get up when a guy in my hostel room pointed at me and said: 'you sleep more than me!' He, Sheik, slept more than any human being I have ever met. I suppose he was tired as well. We decided on a dodgy Bosphorous cruise. It was beautiful. He was cute. He was weird. He proclaimed that all teenage girls were horny when they giggled their way past us. He is a teacher. I subsequently found the energy to drag my sleepy butt to the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sophia. The latter is an architectural marvel that left me completely underwhelmed. There is lots of scaffolding inside and they didn't really do a good job of preserving the building. Istanbul was and is a beautiful city. I highly recommend it as a travel spot when in Europe. Next stop...

my people, aka the Germans. I arrived with mixed emotions. I had not really prepared myself for this encounter with the Heimat. However, any apprehension I had instantly disappeared when I saw my sister. It has been lovely being here (in Berlin) with the drunk German public during the World Cup. Shopping is good in this cool city and lucky me, I can not participate at all. The money was intended for traveling and not buying new clothes. I look like a lost person in this sea of beautiful, well dressed people.


Next stop: Prague and a music festival outside of town. I know none of the bands but have been promised Czech reggae.

Street Fashion of Berlin

This look was never very good for the not-so-thin contingent of the population (in North America that contingent is growing fast) but somewhere someone thought it would be good to bring it back, cellulide and all. Yes, I am talking of the leggings\skirt combination of the 80s.

They're back! On the streets of Berlin the black leggings and short jean skirt look is very hot. Imagine black leggings instead of white. No one wears white. Only black is acceptable.

These babies (lace) were made popular by Madonna during her Lucky Star days.

She's doing it again! Bringing back her own fashion.

Then there was the balloon skirt. Was that ever hot in North America? I predict sightings in the summer of 2007 on Toronto streets.

The New Ragin' Cajun

Because he's my little brother and I'm oh so proud of him I had to post this:

Deep down in Cajun country Ron Hudson came across a video, in amongst a mountain of submissions from across the continent, of a wide receiver from New Westminster.

The receiving scholarship spots, however, at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette were already full. But Hudson was an offensive line coach and he'd been at Bowling Green and Kent State universities where they'd had success with Canadian kids on the O-line. So he popped in the tape, sent to the school by Hyacks' head coach Farhan Lalji, and had a look. While he was impressed with Marc Moore, what caught his eye was a big guy on the line.

"I was kind of curious, so I called [Lalji] up," recalled Hudson in his thick Louisiana drawl from Lafayette. "I said, 'Have you got any more tape on [Nasser Jamal]. We were intrigued with him.

"He's a very tall, athletic kid. He moves well and we thought he was going to be a good, young prospect."

That's how the 6-foot-5, 265-pound Jamal became a Ragin' Cajun. He was all set to go to UBC, which was offering him a $2,500 scholarship. He changed his mind after visiting Lafayette and receiving a $120,000 scholarship offer.

"It was actually overwhelming," said Jamal. "There was [University of Texas-El Paso], Texas, Oklahoma, Tulsa, there were a whole bunch of schools that were interested.

"[ULL] just seemed more comfortable for me. The university was nice, the people were great and they ran an offence similar to ours so I could make an immediate impact on the team."

Although Jamal prefers to play defensive end he admits he's a better offensive lineman. It's likely he'll redshirt the first year and work toward taking over the coveted left tackle on the offensive line once the starter graduates next year.

"That's a smart thing for him to do," said Hudson. "I don't have a lot of long, athletic bodies here and my tackle is going to be gone and I think Nasser has a chance to compete for that spot."

Jamal said his parents wanted him to go to either SFU or UBC because all of his older siblings, three sisters and a brother, went to those schools on academic scholarships. Now he dares to dream NFL.

"That is my goal, but I'd be just as happy just to play NCAA," said Jamal. "Eventually I do want to go the CFL/NFL route, but that's a long way
away."

--------------

My pride has no boundaries so here are a few other links:

NFL & CFL Futures.com
Highschool Football News
The Record

Bombs over Kandahar & The Riots in Kabul

These are the sort of choppers you see in Afghanistan. Sometimes they hover low over buildings and sometimes they hover in the middle of an open plain for no reason whatsoever. What was most disturbing was seeing them fly low over our courtyard and having the kids say: "If they were to bomb they'd go lower." They must have gone lower nearby because having dinner on the roof we started hearing bombs going off. It's not the sort of dinner time entertainment you expect sitting cross-legged on a roof on a nice summer evening. It's strange to have no one react. The bombs sounded like they were going off quite close-by but we were assured that it was happening in the mountains. Not very comforting, the mountains are not so far away from Kandahar. They are essentially all around the city. This experience was warm up for a much bigger experience in Kabul though.

We took a bus out of Kandahar. They don't seem to know how to work the air-con on the nice German buses where the windows didn't open and everyone felt compelled to chain smoke. According to the sign over the driver's seat our driver for this trip was "Herr Frank" but he looked more like and Abdul to me. Our escort for this journey was our 20-something year old male cousin. A very nice young man. The trip was almost uneventful until the bus was going to get searched near Kabul. A routine operation. The female member of the search-party stepped on board to notify everyone of the imminent nosing through of private items when a man got up from the back of the bus. He walked right up to her and told her he had a bullet in the back of his head and was heading to Kabul for a medical appointment he would miss if they searched the bus. He took off his cap and turned around and there it was: a bullet in the base of his head. The guy was on a five hour bus ride to get a bullet removed! Traveling for medical treatment is nothing new in this country. People routinely leave to go to Pakistan and India for more serious operations and illnesses. However, seeing that man blew me away.

Kabul. A breath of fresh air. Women on the streets, faces uncovered, western clothing, no kidnapping stories. Phew. We did the usual tourist things: visited the bombed out zoo, an art gallery, the university, the Babur Garden, shopped on legendary Chicken Street, saw the fancy mall called Kabul Centre (where you have to check in your handgun before entering the mall) and walked a lot.

Then one morning we didn't leave the house right at 9am as we usually did. This was a Monday but the days of the week didn't really mean much to us at this point. Our cousin came home at 10am and asked if we were out. Then he got in his car and went to pick up his sister from her high school. Apparently the girls in the schools were panicking. Those that weren't being picked up by family members were not allowed to leave the school to go home. One of the teacher's husband was killed by a stray American bullet. By 11am the entire city was shut down and angry crowds were rioting their way through the streets. Rock through window seemed to be the theme of these riots. "Death to Karzai" was the slogan but that clip didn't play on the BBC or CNN.

Don't believe a word you hear on the news. The Kabul riots were the result of a fuck-up by the American military. Reports on the BBC claimed the trigger for the riots was a traffic accident invovling a military convoy that plowed down twelve cars during rush hour. That doesn't even sound like a plausible event. A traffic accident involving a military convoy that plows over twelve cars?! Don't those things come with breaks? Plus, how many cars do you have to crush before noticing that you have just driven over something? The images on Kabul TV were quite graphic. The cars were completely crushed. Also, there was the random firing into the crowd by the soldiers that seemed a little suspicious and unreported in the Western media. Most Afghans say that those in the convoy were drunk and/or high because the attack was completely unprovoked and came out of the blue. The numbers of crushed cars and injured/dead civilians is also higher than the reported figures according to locals.

There was a city-wide curfew that night. Something that had not happened in Kabul since the Soviets. Driving through the city on Tuesday the burnt out cars, broken windows and burnt down offices marked the route of the crowd that had maneuvered its way through Kabul. Broken window after broken window. It was like following arrows pointing down the road to show you the way the rioters had gone. Tanks were stationed everywhere and police presence on the streets was higher than usual. It was back to business for the residents of the city. People were going about their business as usual.

In my opinion, the riots are just the beginning of civil unrest in Afghanistan. People are fed up with the puppet government and a foreign military that claims to be there for them when it is doing nothing but furthering its own political agenda in the region. Six years and billions of international dollars later and proper medical care is still non-existent, the main international airport for the country is the size of a thumb without any proper devices to scan baggage, electricity is unreliable, most major roads are still unpaved, the poor are still very poor without any aid coming their way, there is no garbage disposal system in the city of Kandahar, bombed out buildings are everywhere downtown and at risk of collapsing any minute.

Land of the Mulberries

Southern Afghanistan may as well be run by the Taliban...I suppose in a way it still is. According to news reports the Taliban now hold four provinces in the south again and Kandahar is among them. Our drive to Kandahar was once again filled with amazing scenery. Mountains like I'd never seen before. The colours all seemed so odd because the mountain would be brown and all of a sudden there would be a black blotch right on the side of it, making it look like a huge shadow was falling on it. The mountains also looked like water had passed over them, the curves were all round and soft, like waves. In the middle of all this vastness a mini sandstorm tornado deal appeared. It was awesome to see and drive past it. It was also awesome to get caught behind a Canadian army convoy that crawled along the road, slowing down our progress toward the city. You can't pass a convoy because they'll shoot you for it. No questions asked. What was even more amazing was driving behind the convoy at a snales pace passing poppie fields. No one can tell me that the military folks didn't see any of these fields while driving 30km/hr on a daily basis down the same stretch of road.

Kandahar: Finally. We arrived in the city of our ancestors. A city filled with burqa clad women and turban wearing men. A city were all the buildings still look like they are falling from being bombed and the roads are mostly unpaved. The most surreal experience was driving over a million bumps toward our uncles house and then realizing that we were in the middle of a graveyard and the bumps had been graves. They built homes right on top. There isn't enough ground space for all the dead in Kandahar.

Fear reigns the lives of the city's inhabitants. No one was to know we were foreigners for fear of being kidnapped and held for ransom. Children were being abducted on their way to school, so of course everyone keeps their kids at home and out of school. Women, apparently, were being kidnapped by taxi drivers and taken to be sold as slaves. No one knew a woman this had happened to but it was enough that people were saying it was happening for men to forbid their wives from leaving their homes. Afghan women, in the south, lead their lives within the confines of their courtyards, often not leaving the walls of their homes for months. Going outside is also not the most comfortable experience in Kandahar. You have to wear a burqa. We were dressed in hijabs that covered everything except our eyes and we were still harrassed with comments like "the Taliban will be back again soon." To be more equal opportunity, every monument had a women's day which means that on that day only women are allowed in to walk around uncovered. Uncovered means your face is showing but your hair is still covered.

The visit back to the hometown wasn't all a walk in the park. Yes, we saw some amazing sights like the Elephant rock that greets you as you enter Kandahar or the thousands of Pommegranate orchards just outside of the city or Dala Lake, one of the most beautiful lakes I've ever seen in my life. Dala was amazing to see because it was off-road. There were no signs leading to it and the road toward it is unpaved. It's a little oasis with a huge lake right behind a series of mountains. Walking around the area we discovered some bombed out buildings, piles of rocket shells and a graveyard. We didn't walk much further after that because it dawned on us that there may be mines in the hills near these relics of war.

Getting sick was also part of this trip. Most of it involved us having upset stomachs but my sister's toe got a nasty infection after visiting Dala. The remedies for her particular ailement involved a cooked onion being placed on the puss-filled-blue toe, then someone poked it with a needle without disinfecting the needle or the toe, this was followed by someone wanting to put leavened dough on it and of course, our favourite go to: vaseline. The infection kept getting worse and taking her to a doctor would have probably made things deadly. 'Doctors' in Afghanistan don't really have proper training. My cousin works at a pharmacy that prescribes the wrong medicine to people all the time. The sick hardly ever go to get their own medicine. Someone in their household does it for them and describes the ailements to the 'medical professional' (in some cases a 17 year old like my cousin with no schooling whatsoever).

Everyone in our family has an ailement of some sort. High blood pressure, angina, diabetes and asthma to name just a few. Everyone has also lost at least one child to sudden infant death syndrome. It's quite sad. My cousin still blames his family for his daughter's death at 2 months old. She was fine when he left for Herat and dead when he came back. He's sure that she was sick and no one went to the doctor to help her. Quite sad. He's one of the most outspoken people on the Taliban I've ever met. He HATES them with a passion and has no problems calling a Mullah that is a Taliban supporter a few choice words. Coincidentally, the mullah in their neighbourhood was a Taliban supporter and urged people to give them money to help their cause. My cousin is also convinced that it was this guy that posted all the bills in the neighbourhood warning people to take down their cable antennas or else they would face the wrath of the Taliban. A threat not to be taken lightly. Some of the stories we heard make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The kind of torturing and killing that happens here can give you nightmares for a lifetime.

Before I forget: if you want to see pictures of Afghanistan you should try this gallery site from some dude's trip there in 2004.

No Crop Tops Anywhere!

The Chinese are not wearing crop-tops on the streets of Kabul. Far from it.

Our ride back toward the Khyber Pass early in the morning was marked with a sign forbidding all foreigners from entering the region. Of course there was a Shell station just before you hit the winding roads leading through the mountains. The villages along the way were lively and boys in each of the towns wore different coloured uniforms to school. A sight that was amazing in itself because I had never seen so many kids on the side of a road waiting for their rides to get to school. Once we arrived at the last town on the Pakistani side of the pass we had to get out of the car and walk a few hundred meters to cross into Afghanistan. No passenger cars are allowed to cross here at all. Only large trucks smuggling arms or flat screen TV's can drive through the pass. Apparently it is a well known fact with the locals that the foreign military in Afghanistan is using this route to smuggle various products in and out of the country. I was surprised at the number of people, hundreds, that were walking across the border this early in the morning. This is one of those experiences that I won't quickly forget.

Once on the other side we arranged for a car to drive us to Kabul. Our driver made a quick stop off to buy himself some Hash and then proceeded to smoke it the entire way back in his cigarettes. The unpaved roads and the dust made the ride less than comfortable and I was comforted by the thought that at least our driver was not getting nauseous. Four hours of crazy driving later we arrived in Kabul and headed straight for the bus depot to hire a car to drive us to Kandahar. There was no end to the haggling. Thankfully, none of us had to participate in it and our cousin took care of it. In the end we had to pay more than was agreed upon before we transferred all our luggage into the car that was to drive us southward. It was two o'clock and the worry was that we were not going to reach Kandahar before dark. In Afghanistan being out after dark is not a good thing because getting lost is quite easy, plus the added banditry on the roads doesn't make for a safe ride. The last time my mother visited in 2001, it took 24 hours to drive to Kandahar from Kabul. The road has now been paved and the ride has been cut by at least 18 hours to a more manageable five to six hours.