Pre-Fun Fun

There was a certain comfort to the screech as our taxi successfully faced down an oncoming car at slightly more than full speed. It was good to be heading back home from the airport.

My mind drifted back to a few hours before, in the Dubai airport, where Hamroz and I were separated for long hours. Because she was refused a visa on her Tajik passport, she had been forced to transfer to “terminal two” without so much as a chance to get at the luggage - unloaded on the other side of customs. I journeyed, after collecting our luggage at the real terminal, to the “Dubai” side of terminal two; she was sequestered on the “airport” side. After managing to pass half our luggage (Hamroz made a quick friend of a policewoman to pull that off) my third cultural construction gave me another idea.

The terminal two companies that venture planes into Kabul don’t place the typical western cultural value on tickets; they never make you feel like having one gives you a right to travel. So, I waited in line to fly, even though my ticket was for three days in the future. Though they pulled me aside, in the end the wrong-date ticket didn’t matter and I flew. The terminal two disorder worked in my favor, (making me a certifiable third-culture veteran). After seven hours of solitude, in line to board the plane, Hamroz was shocked to see me amble into the back of the same line.

Now, we were together again, routinely risking our lives in the taxi home (far more foreign aid workers have died in Kabul in traffic accidents than have died by intentional violence – it sounds like a pleasant fact until you are traveling). We were soon to be enjoying the smell of our garden, soon to be reassembling furniture taken apart for the move, soon to be receiving guests and coming up to date on the real news of what had been happening in Kabul during the time we were away.