A glimpse of being a reporter in Afghanistan......

[Flabbergasted]

http://blogs.reuters.com/2006/11/30/return-to-kabul-from-wood-burning-stoves-to-wi-fi/?src=120206_12_ARTICLE_PROMO_also_on_reuters

Return to Kabul: from wood burning stoves to wi-fi

November 30th, 2006, filed by Paul Holmes

I have been visiting the Kabul bureau this week and reflecting on how things have changed since I reported from Kabul in the heady days after the flight of the Taliban in November, 2001.

The Reuters office is a house in a relatively upscale neighborhood of Kabul with bedrooms where foreign journalists sleep during their stay. When I first stepped through the front gates of the compound five years ago I entered a world of controlled chaos.

All of us, writers and photographers, worked, ate and socialized in a single room on the second floor. It was cramped, thick with smoke from all the cigarettes and stuffy from the wood burning stove that jutted into the room. Evenings were spent under curfew in the same room, often huddled around a laptop watching a DVD. The best we could get on the television was a snowy image of Afghan TV. The sound would fade in and out, often during news broadcasts.

The food was, to say the least, basic. “Please get them to stop serving us cauliflower all the time. We’re fed up with it,” one of my colleagues pleaded when I arrived to help bring some order to an operation that had exploded almost overnight from a single correspondent under the Taliban to about a dozen journalists. The only way to file photographs and news stories was over satellite phone. I later learned that one of the monthly phone bills hit $150,000.