Kabul Blues

Babur, the great warrior of timurids, destroyed all while heading to India. But he saved Kabul because of it’s beauty. He even ordered that after his death his heart must be buried in the soil of Kabul. Nowadays, five hundred years later, the Babur gardens are the one of the few places in Kabule where you can really sit down to relax.
To be honest, Kabul is an awful place to live. There is very high pollution and almost no infrastructure. Everyone is responsible for their own water well or electricity because there is only some hours city power per day. Huge piles of garbage are on the every corner and sewage water runs in deep concrete ditches beside the streets. There is no city transport, only minibuses dash around like bees. Only wide avenues give hints that there had been some good ideas when this city was planned.
Old residents of Kabul have told me that before the last war it was a beautiful city: huge trees lined the streets, there were many beautiful worship places (even for jews and sikhks), trolleybuses rattled around. Russians who were afraid of snipers cut all big trees, worship places were destroyed and Taliban took down all the wires necessary for trolleys. Only huge "graveyards" of trolleys or roots of cut trees remind those times.
But the worst thing is that there is an atmosphere of fear. You can feel it. You can see it. You can smell it. It just surrounds you wherever you go.
I met one young lovely afghan lady from Canada at the airport. She just visited her relatives in Kabul. She was born in Afghanistan, she knew very well both dari and pushtu languages. But she was afraid. She never went out alone and felt all the time oppressed. "It was not the same country I remember," she told me sadly.