Now in Kabul

We arrived yesterday afternoon. The landscape you fly over is endless barren folds of earth in every conceivable variant shade of gray: standard gray, brownish gray, blackish gray, tan gray, etc, with sharp upthrusting mountain ridges like what you'd get if you crumpled aluminum foil too many times, then took a close-up of it and posted it on Google Earth. You could see where the rivers would be running if it weren't the hottest point of summer, but now, they're dusty trickling lines weaving among the higher ground. You can see what have to be villages and farms, but since houses are built of the same baked dirt of the land, what you really see are lines, a bit lighter brown in hue, demarcating the buildings' and compounds' walls. Only close to Kabul did I start to see bluish-black lines that were rivers with water, and dark blackish clumps that were thickening vegetation.
Upon entering the airport, the first sign I saw was for "108 FM Kabul Rock," keeping Kabul rocking when the insurgency isn't enough. Most of the billboards in the airport were ads for mobile telephone companies, each one claiming the best coverage throughout the country. The signs that weren't for mobile phones were for advertising agencies, each proclaiming the most effective advertising campaigns available. And then comes the ride in from the airport. But this post is already too long.