Date Night

It's a funny thing, working with your significant other. Joel and I knew it was going to be a challenging year: not only coming out to Afghanistan together, but also working as colleagues running the Marketing Communications department at Roshan.

For those of you who don't know us, we met working together at JWT (thank you Bing Case Study.) But working together for an hour every couple of days to get a case study video done and spending eight hours every day looking at him from my desk are two totally different scenarios. So in effort to distinguish between work time, hanging out/watching TV time and romantical time, we instituted date night.

Last Sunday, as the kick off to Date Night series, we took the opportunity to celebrate our 10 month anniversary. (10 months on 10-10-10, how's that for good numerology?) We got a recommendation from some friends and headed out to eat Italian food at Bella Italia. It was the first time we had gone out just the two of us since leaving New York. The driver dropped us off in a relatively secured parking lot: we had to go through a check point to get into the place, and there were a bunch of other cars parked along the side of the street.

(Side note: There are no addresses or street signs in Kabul, but you can always tell the where the restaurants or bars are located by the number of cars/drivers parked on the street, since they sit and wait for people to finish. The cars carrying off duty American soldiers are generally white or black Toyota Four Runners, with thick antennas on the front. The US soldiers are always wearing bulletproof vests, even after they get past the various levels of security.) 

We took a quick look around and realized the driver had dropped us off in the wrong place. We finally found a guard who spoke English, and he pointed us in the direction of Bella Italia. We ended up walking for five minutes along barricaded and barbed wire sidewalks. Five minutes = 300 seconds. It's not a short amount of time. The entire length of the walk there were Afghan guards with guns - think full camouflage uniforms and rifles. For some reason, I had decided not to wear a long top that night, so my rump was exposed to these guys and I was feeling extra uncomfortable. Before you judge you have to remember this was date night...I had to look somewhat sexual. The situation in which we found ourselves was totally shady for a couple of reasons - a) because it was night time, and b) we are never allowed to walk anywhere, at any time, for security reasons.

At the end of our five minute adventure on foot, we found ourselves at the doorstep of an adorable, albeit slightly run down Italian joint. We ordered a caprese salad, brushetta, pizza, an awesome spinach and ricotta special and a couple of glasses of wine. The wine was fizzy but hit the spot. The crazy Croatian who's family makes the homemade moonshine told me there is no way to control the temperature of the wine as it's getting transported into Afghanistan, so it often ends up slightly carbonated.

Overall, date night was a total success. We found out later that the restaurant is located inside an International Forces compound, and the guys with guns were just there to protect us. I guess some things just aren't as scary as they seem.