Welcome to Kabul

Kabul is a fascinating city aurally. Those of us from the West tend to associate certain sounds with big cities: police/fire/ambulance sirens, pulsing bass beats from passing cars, the hiss of steam from passing buses, car horns, and the general hum of conversation produced by hundreds of thousands of human beings in the course of their day-to-day interactions. Kabul is a city of almost three million people, certainly large enough to be considered a sizable urban environment by any definition. There are plenty of ways in which it distinguishes itself from a New York, a London, a Paris, or a Los Angeles, many of which will be covered by your humble correspondent in future missives. But perhaps the most striking characteristic of Kabul in my first week here has been the sounds, both those I hear and those I don't.

Let's start with the latter. Few things about Kabul have stood out to me as much as the near-total lack of sirens in the city. Some of this is understandable: in a place with very little health care infrastructure, the ambulance industry is not exactly a booming labor market. Some of it is also a product of Kabul's ungodly traffic, which will be discussed in more detail in a later post. If the cars on the street are too packed and too disorganized to effectively move out of the way when a siren blares, what's the point of having the siren? But even taking these things into account, the lack of sirens is odd. I have yet to see a fire station or fire truck, which would seem to be relatively important in a generally poorly-constructed city with a very dry climate. The police, who ride around in very macho dark-green pickup trucks, seem to have exchanged flashing lights for roof-mounded tripod machine guns, although thankfully they don't shoot off the guns to alert motorists of their approach. Not that I've ever seen the police actually going anywhere: they all sit at intersections or checkpoints, as if daring crime to try to take a bite out of them. In a week in Kabul, I have heard maybe two sirens. That's about what you would hear in thirty seconds in downtown New Haven.

The other sounds absent from much of Kabul are those of large vehicles. Kabul has essentially zero public transportation (shared taxis may be the only mass transit in town, except for some regional bus services), and once you leave the Jalalabad Road or the nationwide Ring Road, big trucks are quite rare. There are few vehicles larger than a Land Cruiser on the streets of large swathes of Kabul, and therefore the sharp hisses of steam from hydraulic brakes are, mercifully, nowhere to be heard.

This is not to suggest that Kabul is a quiet city. Far from it. For one thing, drivers here use their horns like they're going out of style; side-view mirrors are generally absent or neglected, and turn signals seem to be antithetical to the Kabuli theory of driving, so the horn is used to signal one's presence to other drivers, in addition to carrying its customary "move it, asshole" meaning. Far more interesting, though, are the other sounds of this town. The guesthouse I am staying in is in a substantially better-than-average residential district, one that is pretty densely built-up. And yet every morning at dawn, I can hear someone's roosters crowing loud and clear; they can't be more than 30 or 40 feet away. Generators, hedges against Kabul's irregular but maddeningly frequent power outages, also contribute to the general racket, as do the conversations of irrepressibly chatty Afghans (which is to say, the entire population). And then there are of course the muezzins, whose calls to prayer are, surprisingly, not terribly loud or long most of the week, but who on Friday dominate the aural landscape.

As a final thought, despite the fact that there are no longer official prohibitions on it (as there were under the Taliban), one hears very little music on the streets of Kabul. Car radios are quite often turned to music stations, but people thankfully don't blast their car stereos loud enough to assault the eardrums of innocent bystanders. Indeed, by far the most common music I hear on the streets is that of the ice cream truck, although I've never actually seen said truck.

There will be much more to come in future posts about what I've seen, tasted, smelled, and learned in this town. But for now, I leave you with only sounds, and what those sounds say about the city that produces them.