ending Istanbul, dubai's terminal 2, and on to Kabul

I started my day off well with some kebab, rice and really delicious soup.


That's Alan suckin and me blowin, plus eva from Poland, our turkish aiesec friend and Simon from New Zealand. the jenga is about to fall...
sunday night, a bunch of us went out to a low-key cafe that had nargile or whatever the turkish call sheesha. it was pretty fun as we sat around chatting, smoking, and playing jenga which ended up lasting a while. earlier in the day, me Stella and Simon ended up going out for lunch which ended up being a 2 hour deep discussion about life and random stuff, which was really cool cause i haven't done that in a while, made me think of an 'aiesec moment' when you realize how cool it is to be interacting with friends from such drastically different backgrounds.

So I get to Dubai at 1:30am on monday night and decided to sleep on some leather chairs near the baggage claim, so it required some extremely loud music to cover up the background noise. i got up around 9:30am, had breakfast and headed over to Terminal 2, which is really the much shittier terminal and had i realized it, i definitely would have stayed at terminal one. plus i was told that you had to take a taxi to terminal two (36 dirhams which is ridiculous for a 15 minute ride), so i just stayed there the rest of the day and night until i was allowed to check in for my flight at 4am. it's a long story, but terminal two basically sucks so i was extremely annoyed by the people yelling on their cellphones to people arriving and an extremely disgruntled service worker at the 'snack bar' sitting/eating area. This guy and his little cohort gave me huge attitude for putting my feet up on another chair, exclaiming "that's a bad habit, boss", and then later on in the night tried to kick me out after i had been there for a while. since i was so annoyed by their petty ridiculousness, i just left cause i honestly couldn't even muster up enough spite in my vains to stay sitting there and piss them off. i'm a big fan of spite, but i couldn't stand being around that area anymore and just left to sit outside and sleep on the breezy sidewalk. i woke up to a group of like 20 filipino emigrants surrounding me from both sides, which surprisingly didn't make me feel uncomfortable at all, they were waiting for their 6:30am flight to baghdad, at least they were in a good mood compared to everyone else in that damn terminal.This is the view above kabul from the Ariana Airlines plane i flew in on. There are some strikingly beautiful mountains covered in snow, and then, over kabul appeared a significant cloud of thick black/grey smoke which was much more apparent due to the contrast with the white snow. it almost looks as if it could be a large shadow from a cloud or a lake or something, but it definitely isn't. looks like kabul might have a slight smog problem, although the dust problem is much much better now that snow is on the ground to keep it from getting into the air.

Once i finally got to my office and sat down, it was a bit wierd to be at my old desk, but yet i didn't feel like i was dreading work or anything, it felt really good to be back, especially after my learning experience in terminal 2. I checked out the new guest house i'll be staying in, which is head and shoulders above my last living situation, can't wait to get settled in. It's good to be back cause i feel like i'm picking up right where i left off instead of having to go through a big adjustment period. hopefully i'll get to improve my Dari skills and other stuff on my to do list...