Horseback Riding and Luxurious Lunches

This past weekend was without a doubt very interesting. On Thursday morning, the Afghan Saturday, I woke up at six to go horseback riding with Rina and Annefleur, a Dutch mother and daughter. The car ride that took us to the stables was very adventurous already and took us over very bad roads, but the horseback riding was amazing! We rode around the old palace of Zahir Shah. He was one of Afghanistan’s most modern kings and he had to leave the country before the invasion of the Russians in 1979. The palace was quite an amazing building and still is, check the pictures! Anyways, it is pretty special for women to ride horses and it is even more extraordinary for western women to be found on the backs of horses and we definitely drew lots of attention!
The next day I was invited for what I thought was tea time at the house of the brother of an Afghan friend in Holland. Of course there was tea involved and lots of nice Afghan snacks but at some point a tablecloth appeared and all the women of the family came in with bowls and plates full of food! There was fried chicken with fries, home made obviously, meatballs in tomato sauce, rice, coriander pasta, Afghan bread, yoghurt, another kind of meat in some sort of sauce (I didn’t dare to try that one), salad and lots of fruit for dessert. It was really wonderful to experience Afghan hospitality in this way I can tell you! The family is not rich, but not poor either, and I somehow was afraid that all Afghans were living in the poverty I’ve seen with the women I have visited these past few weeks, but that was not the case. Unfortunately, there are not many families like this one, filling the gap between rich and poor here in Afghanistan.