3 thoughts on “Expats in Kabul: Their love lives are not as exciting as you imagine”
Lols, there is a British movie called “Kandahar Break” (2009) and a British novel “Under a Million Shadows” (2009) which are mostly about the love life of aid workers in Afghanistan. In the former, a blonde Englishman is making out publicly with an Afghan girl! in Kanadar! during the Taliban rule! …… in the latter, an English woman falls in a passionate love with a Pashtun drug lord from Jalalabad, an American lesbian woman turns straight after having drunk sex with a French journalist…. it goes on and on like this!!!
after watching that film and reading this novel you would kick your own ass! …..
both stories are so lame and badly told, especially the novel witch is the first book of a former News of the World journalist who has been in Kabul for a short time. …..The movie is a plain insult to your intelligence, in terms of faithfulness to realities — I know it’s fiction, but come on….
I cringed just reading your descriptions of those films. Very few fiction films, novels or memoirs about Afghanistan have been anything but ridiculous since the mid-2000’s. Here’s hoping the novels and memoirs slated to come out later this year will break from that trend!
“If only we had the sex lives Afghans imagine we do,” a journalist friend of mine said at dinner the other night. Very true. I know a few Afghan rookie guards who’ve been sorely disappointed to learn on their first gig that most nights in expat houses involve men and women in sweatpants, hunched over laptops, cursing the slow internet and making cynical jokes about their gastrointestinal illness. Instead of, say, non-stop ladies mud wrestling and orgies.
Transitionland 
Lols, there is a British movie called “Kandahar Break” (2009) and a British novel “Under a Million Shadows” (2009) which are mostly about the love life of aid workers in Afghanistan. In the former, a blonde Englishman is making out publicly with an Afghan girl! in Kanadar! during the Taliban rule! …… in the latter, an English woman falls in a passionate love with a Pashtun drug lord from Jalalabad, an American lesbian woman turns straight after having drunk sex with a French journalist…. it goes on and on like this!!!
after watching that film and reading this novel you would kick your own ass! …..
both stories are so lame and badly told, especially the novel witch is the first book of a former News of the World journalist who has been in Kabul for a short time. …..The movie is a plain insult to your intelligence, in terms of faithfulness to realities — I know it’s fiction, but come on….
I cringed just reading your descriptions of those films. Very few fiction films, novels or memoirs about Afghanistan have been anything but ridiculous since the mid-2000’s. Here’s hoping the novels and memoirs slated to come out later this year will break from that trend!
“If only we had the sex lives Afghans imagine we do,” a journalist friend of mine said at dinner the other night. Very true. I know a few Afghan rookie guards who’ve been sorely disappointed to learn on their first gig that most nights in expat houses involve men and women in sweatpants, hunched over laptops, cursing the slow internet and making cynical jokes about their gastrointestinal illness. Instead of, say, non-stop ladies mud wrestling and orgies.