One of the good things about being an expat in a place like Kabul is that even the most banal of chores can seem exotic or take you down some unexpected paths.
Six months on and the 10-minute drive to work still enchants me with its seemingly endless display of life - bike repair shops; vegetable stalls; chickens in cages; dozens of young girls in school uniforms, Hello Kitty backpacks and loosely tied headscarves; the freshly skinned carcasses of i don't know what hanging up for sale; tailor shops with gaudy ball gowns in the smeared windows; mosques; cyclists; a Taliban in a black turban; taxis overflowing with passengers, or goats; young boys herding sheep with the most wobbly bottoms imaginable.
We shop for groceries and furniture, go to the gym, swim, play squash. We get our hair cut or go to the doctor. We make friends and date, we go out to bars and restaurants or have parties, yet none of these bares any resemblance to what they were back home, or anywhere else really.
No where else would I invite someone round to my house for dinner, who I have never met, purely on the grounds that a friend said, "you should meet so and so, they'd be a good contact". Nor would I have agreed to go on a blind date with a French bodyguard who spoke no English. I have been to parties where there are 200 people and a live band, and I have hustled my contacts to get on a guest list.
Today, I met a friend for lunch. This entails calling a cab half an hour ahead of time, even though the cafe is just a 10 minute walk away. In the garden of the Flower Street Cafe, over a spinach, walnut and blue cheese salad, I whine about the dull thud of a headache that has now spread to my cheekbones.
My friend says that the head of her NGO is a doctor. It seems that getting a medical degree and then going into the better paid development industry is par for the course here.
I am slightly sceptical, but figure it can't be any worse than the Lebanese doctor I went to see for a breast lump scare who refused to examine me but insisted I leave for Dubai immediately, claiming there were no treatment facilities in Kabul. Luckily I decided to get a second opinion at the German clinic, where I sit for half an hour surrounded by women in burqas and their multiple children before I am seen by the lovely Doctor Maria, who examines me, declares me fine but "knotty" and refers me to local hospital with a mammography machine (although most of the time it doesn't work).
So my friend gets her boss on the phone and he asks me the usual bunch of questions, where does it hurt, how long has it been like that, am I allergic to anything.
Cassie, I am writing you a prescription for some antibiotics and antihistamine, he says. Ann will bring it round.
When I get home that night, the guard at my front door hands me a large white envelope. Inside is my prescription.
For some reason, I had thought it would be written on a doctor's pad, with an authoritative sounding name imprinted across the top. Instead, it was a bit of scrappy paper torn from a small notepad with the names of two drugs scrawled across in thick black pen, and a line on how and when to take them.
Tomorrow, I might venture to the pharmacy.
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