Well, there's no we can go back to Afghanistan if we never leave it. So we left on Saturday morning, or Friday night US time. No major problems with either flight; slight delay in leaving Kabul, but amazingly, and contrary to the expectations and cynicism of everyone we know, the plan to check the bags through Dubai all the way to Dulles worked. We got to our day hotel in Dubai around noon, had a nice lunch and walked around the mall and saw an extraordinarily high percentage of women in the full black chador, the one with just the slit for the eyes, which is I suppose a step up from the burka. But here's the difference between Dubai and Afghanistan: in Dubai, there are women in public places like malls. In Afghanistan, the public is pretty much the man's domain.
Anyway, we went back to the airport at 8 pm, checked in, had dinner, then caught our midnight flight. For a 14 hour flight, it was quite pleasant. Dulles is usually my nightmare airport, taking forever to clear immigration and customs, waiting forever for luggage, waiting for an overpriced cab. We flew through it in about 5 minutes for passport; our bags were the first ones off the carousel, customs didn't even look at our form, and we walked right to the front of the cab line, which zipped to Alexandria in record time. That's the great advantage of 6:30 am weekend arrivals. Anyway, we are at our temporary apartment, home for the next four weeks, and we are relatively cleaned up and ready to go find coffee and food. I have to go to work tomorrow, but that's not until 7:30 a.m. We actually are getting a Sunday off from work. I don't believe that's happened in quite a while.
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