Santa's stuck in the chimney

I take this opportunity between a gorgeous post-Xmas breakfast involving lots of croissants, pains au chocolat and cougnoux - some sweet bread with lumps of sugar and raisins in the shape of baby Jesus. The ultimate Belgian blasphemy... - as well as liters of coffee and a long walk or maybe a movie or both to wish ya all a

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

(Huh apologies for the remotely childish colour mix hey. Anyhow, hope you're all having some kind of holidays and enjoying them to bits)

Some pre-Xmas wish

Quite unfairly, I failed so far to mention a few people that I find make my life in Afghanistan a tad more special. In each and every office and guest house we have, there is indeed at least one staff, a guard, a cook, a gardener or a cleaner, whose kindness makes every minute of the day nicer. In my case, I fondly think of Bangui, who used to work in our Charikar office, to a couple of our guards in the Kabul guest house, the cook in the office and the old gardener, as well as the entire crew in the Mazar guest house.

Sadly enough, quite often those who are the sweetest, most often smiling and all, are also the lowest on the social scale. As a result, they will be the ones other staff dump annoying tasks on. As a friend mentioned, I suspect there is some link between the latter fact and their kindness. I also believe that the gratefulness showed by some expats in front of such pleasant personalities is a kind of gratification of itself, which makes some tasks less of a burden. Nonetheless, there is something quite free in the way their generosity of mind is provided to all willing to accept it that is remarkable.

Somehow, there seems to be something unfair in how humbling the blows of life has made some of these people and in the way they are treated by their peers, as a kind of cheap labour. It's probably more typical of a society where the notion of hierarchy is much more central to social contacts, and where clanic, social and professional ties decide of where you are on the social scale and consequently of how you can behave towards other beings. I would venture that, while continental European cultures also know a certain hierarchy, it is by no means as obvious, possibly inter alia because to start with, the educational and knowledge gap is by no means as large as here.

Anyway, whatever one can do to make up for nature's (society's ?) unfairness, it is only of very symbolic value against a lifetime of injustices due to one's lower social position. So my pre-Xmas wish is that all the people I've met here who have been looking after us with so much gentleness, if they cannot find in this existence the moral reward they deserve, be, in their next life, reincarnated as wise among the wise, respected by all. Now that would seem fair.

Just a perfect day

With the Christmas season approaching, not only am I more in a family celebration mood than ever, but I also keep on having fantasies about semi skimmed cafe lattes like never before. Understandably, in about ten days I'll be flying home for the first time in 13 months and that on its own would be sufficient to make this Xmas special.

Anyway, if you were me, Xmas mood would mean longing for pancakes and French toasts, as well as hot chocolate and gluhweinn. Yeah, if you were me, you would think food is the main reason we were brought on the planet in the first place. So yesterday, a friend and I decided to have French toasts (or in the circumstances, Afghan ones).

To keep in line with the tradition started by ExMi on his own blog, I will try and give you an idea of the recipes followed to prepare the delicacies we stuffed our face with.

First, it seemed like a great idea to prepare apples in Calvados. For lack of Calva, we decided they would be apples in Captain Morgan. So we cut four apples in small pieces and started cooking them in a lot of butter (and I mean a LOT of butter. I never said it was a balanced and healthy recipe, did I?), adding cinnamon and cloves as well as sugar to taste. Then, as I was planning to have the apples flambees, I took the preparation away from the fire and poured rhum rather generously over them. I lit the match, approached it and nothing happened. Ah well, I always forget how to have stuff flambe, but there was my confirmation: you keep the dish heating or at any rate extremely hot. So the apples went back on the fire and I poured some more rhum, lit the match and holly molly, the apple were on fire for a whole minute. A great show it was.

In the meantime, we mixed three eggs with half a liter of milk and cut two nan (the type you find in Mazar, not too flat, with a real crust on the outside) in quarters and then sliced each quarter in two, so they would be thin enough. We dipped the quarter in the milk cum eggs for as long as it took for them to absorb a lot of the preparation. In the meantime, we heated a pan and filled it with quite a bit of butter again. We then put the toasts in there and made them fry both sides until they were a honey brown and started calling 'Eat me, eat me!'.

By the time we were finished, there was Afghan toasts for a whole army, so it is fortunate Bruce joined us for that great lunch. Even more fortunate was his idea that we should have gluhweinn with this meal. So he heated one bottle of wine with four scoops of honey, a lot of cloves and cinnamon as well as some bits of mandarine peel. (What a fantastic thought). The wine was soon ready and we had this feast watching the movie Goodbye Lenin, which turned out to be the perfect accompaniment.

The rest of the afternoon was a mix of doing as little as possible by the fire and enjoying it as much as possible. That certainly was a perfect pre-Xmas day.