Trip to Mazar-e-Sharif

We headed out on Wednesday to visit Mazar in the north. It took an hour by plane flying over the mountains in a small Beachcraft plane. It would take a full day driving back through the mountains. As we landed we looked around us to pure wilderness everywhere. Flat, brown and not very industrialized. We immediately knew that those who were telling us that Kabul is not the real Afghanistan must have been truth tellers. In Kabul we still see women in burqas in Mazar we rarely saw a woman and there was no one we saw not in a burqa. The more conservative north made me wonder if there was any progress there at all. We were very covered up and still people gawked at us. Don't get me wrong we definitely made people stare in Kabul as in Mazar and the glares of the men made Susanne and I feel like we wanted to don a burqa. Laila told us that 95% of the Afghan men are bad and the other 5% are still not good. I understood her statement more than ever.