Let's Go Shopping!

ISAF apparently does a weekly bazaar, and so we went today.  By “bazaar,” we mean a lot of local vendors plying their wares of varying degrees of knockoff-ishness, so it wasn’t that spectacular. 

Best quote?  This guy behind me, after being told, "Sir, I have only the best name brand watches," says, "That's a shame, I was kind of just looking for knockoffs."  


Gotta love the honesty. 

Picked up some overpriced sunglasses (overpriced by the standards here, but still, guy’s gotta make a living), once again realizing that while I can haggle, I usually suck at it.  Something about feeling like the guy deserves to get the price he quoted me.  Still ended up around $40 to the good compared to the original price, but actual price vs. quality?  Who knows.

Met a guy over here who explained how these kinds of micro-economies actually do more harm than good, and folks like myself who overpay without getting the actual value tend to inflate the cost of doing business while we’re around. 

In a tourism-based society, this really isn’t such a bad thing, because, after all, it’s the way they do business, but in conflict zones and other zones where tourism isn’t exactly the focus, well, the “newcomers,” regardless of who they are tend to bring lots of cash, pay too much, and then the vendor has no way of continuing that same price point going forward.

Another interesting note:  we as men had to go through a full-body scanner.  Several women went right through said scanner ahead of us without getting scanned, which apparently is policy.  If you’re female, no scanning, because, as everyone knows, the women in these places never do anything dangerous.

Stupid sexism. 

Equal scanning for all, I say.

Then apparently there’s a policy, or maybe it’s just soldier douchebagginess, where everyone that could, sterilized their uniform.

Sterilizing is the process wherein one removes identifying markings, such as name, rank, etc. from the uniform.  This is usually done by special operations forces who don’t really want their names to be remembered.  Or by non spec-ops douchebags who like to think they’re special ops and really aren’t.  CA and PSYOP types who are nowhere near an SF team are notorious for doing this. 

So apparently we’re worried they could identify us by name and yell at us if we don’t come back to their stall.  I’m not all that sure what the security concern is there, but in their mind, I’m sure, it’s very, very real.

It really was a beautiful day out, somewhere in the 50’s with clear skies.  Well, not cloudy…given Kabul’s fairly polluted air, it’s never really clear here.