Just another day in Kabul

Today Kabul was in the news, and not for the right reasons either.  I had a meeting this morning which went really, really well, and which involved going past armed soldiers, through an x-ray security machine, waiting in a reception area and then being escorted to the office of the person I was going to see.  It was great to meet the person I was meeting, and we had a fascinating and enlightening conversation, and he was very generous with his time.   When I am out and about I have to check in with my security guy letting him know when I have left the guest house and where I am headed, when I get there etc, etc.  As I was leaving my meeting and in the car on the way back I got a message saying there had been an assassination, and that i needed to be extra vigilant, if you look on the BBC website you can see more details, thankfully it wasn't near where I was, but it had a knock on effect with vehicles being pulled over and being checked by police, which slowed down the traffic, which is chaotic at the best of times.   I arrived back to my area of town, and went and visited with a neighbour expat where a couple of women were also hanging out, meeting, chatting, and drinking tea.  Then one of them just said in conversation, "I think that was just an explosion".  Curtains were casually drawn, but the conversations went on, and a quick phone call was made to our security guy to check everything was ok.  Turns out we had heard something different, that was to do with some construction happening nearby.   Sitting down for lunch just now I thought I heard what sounded like gunfire, but seeing as I've never heard gunfire except in the movies, it was most likely something else entirely.  Suffice to say, this is life here, everybody handles it, gets on with what they are doing, keeps going about their business, with restrictions, with consideration, but life carries on anyway.  As the man I spoke to today said "I have lost 16 co-workers since I have been here, but how many more Afghans have died".