I woke this morning to what I was told was a beautiful Kabul spring day – but all I could think about was the lack of water – hot or cold – in my small guestroom. After an hour of running up and downstairs to talk to the management, a trickle of water creaked and groaned its way out of the ancient pipes. Brrrr! Now I’m beginning to see the beauty of a headscarf (will i wear a burqa when I run out of clean clothes?).

Down to breakfast then where I have now become addicted to Nescafe with powdered milk (that is all there is) and slabs of Afghan bread with carrot jam (I kid you not!!). It’s a mixed guesthouse – mostly Afghans with a few foreigners. I am always stared at, but I can’t remember a country I have lived in where I was not, so it’s par for the course these days. I guess they could be staring at me not because I am a foreigner, but because I am wearing a bright green tunic, a pink sweatshirt and a reddish pink headscarf. Is this what they mean by being low key?

This is a phrase that almost every foreigner I speak to seems to claim describes their life here. The American who shouts out the car window at poor Afghan drivers and joins a bunch of hash house harriers for a roof-top party says he is being low key. The European woman who refuses to have anything to do with foreigners, and walks around town disregarding security concerns says she is being low key. The British guy who stays in a guesthouse full of Afghans says he is acting low key. I would love to know, what then is high profile.

I have found a place to stay. A lovely house with a garden and fig trees that has all the right ingredients for my stay – friendly, respectful, hardworking people who are into steamed vegetables and dinner parties! What more could I ask for, expect maybe a couple of cats?

*******MUM, STOP READING HERE ************************************

The house also has a safe room – an underground bunker that we are expecting to spend a couple of days in this summer. With the military surge, the Kandahar assault approaching and elections in September, another targeted attack in Kabul is all but written in the papers. When I told one of the Afghan editors where I will be living, he said “that’s good, it’s safe there”. So we are hoping that it won’t come to that and I won’t need to be in a bunker with steel-reinforced doors and four flat mates, three security guards and housekeeper.

*********OK YOU CAN START READING AGAIN NOW *************************

It was my second day at work today, and while I think I may be winning the staff on side - we agreed on the term store house instead of go-down and they are respecting my ban on the words perished and eliminated for “killed” - I am tearing my hair out with the patchy internet connection (headscarf to the rescue again). For hours on Monday, my first day, I could neither access the web nor the English language server, where most of the Dari and Pashto stories drop for the translators here in the English language section. On Tuesday I left at 6 as the internet and the local server were down again and there was nothing I could do. I wanted to walk the 10 minute journey home, but no one would let me. It is not safe round here, apparently. So I took the car back to my guesthouse – nose pressed up against the windows inhaling the sights like a prisoner – and then sat in my guesthouse garden reading about the CIA’s folly in Afghanistan in the 80s.

I chatted with one of the cooks, Amim. He is leaving Kabul in just over two weeks to go to Mazar-i-Sharif to look for work. Kabul, he says, is just becoming too expensive. His landlord recently increased the rent on the house where he lives with his wife and two children, parents and younger brother, to US$150 a month from US$100. Amim makes just $200 a month at his job at the Kabul Inn, cooking, cleaning and generally running the place. For that he works every day from 6am until 10pm with a half day on Friday. His wife, a former English language and computer science teacher, works with USAID as an office manager and makes $400 a month (yay sister!) but that job will only last another few weeks.

So he is heading to Mazar where he will build a house and look for work, and where, Amim says, it’s safer, the air and streets are cleaner and the quality of life is better.

One of my colleagues here, a young, very enthusiastic and clipped British English speaking Afghan, has come down to Kabul from Mazar, much to the dismay of his parents who are desperate for him to settle down and get married. So worried are they by his decision to live alone and work as a journalist, that they are moving down next year when his sister finishes school to live with him in Kabul. I told him that parents the world over worry about their children’s life choices, no matter what country they are in.

Every morning at 9am I attend the morning meeting where the editors discuss the stories for the day. I am not allowed to make any comments or to say anything to anyone at all for the next two weeks. In this stage I am building trust among my Afghan colleagues, although I’m not sure how I do that without talking to them. As no one told me about this no talking rule for the first day – I was able to piss pretty much everyone off, suggesting changes to headlines, copy, battling with the head English language guy over archaic use of language. So for now I am demure Cassie in the corner waiting and plotting for the right moment to speak. God I need that glass of wine.