Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!)
The airport terminal was ugly, a study in sterile white geometric '50s Bauhaus architecture. Fortunately, we wouldn't be here long. We were going to Afghanistan, and we were running late.
Everything about this trip was last minute--so last minute that the company hadn't even given me a chance to pack. I was going halfway around the world with nothing but what I was wearing, which fortunately was a comfortable shirt, jeans, and boots. My coworker had had a little more chance to prepare, but not much. He didn't have any luggage either.
I didn't remember going through security but it must have been a breeze. We strode up to the desk at the gate to get our seat assignments. My coworker was of Arabic descent like the gate staff, so I let him take the lead. I didn't speak Arabic but the discussion got pretty heated as they discussed a printed-out seat map. Finally they all seemed to settle on a solution, and the staff colored in a couple of the seats with a blue crayon. I looked out the window and noticed that while they were arguing, we'd somehow gotten on the plane, which was taking off at that moment.
My coworker and I walked to the back of the plane and got off at our destination, which turned out to be a shopping mall. Now that we'd made it to Afghanistan there was less urgency to our trip, so I took a moment to duck into a clothing shop. I wanted to blend in with the locals and jeans weren't going to cut it. As I browsed, I noticed a robed figure in the store who seemed to be stalking me with a bow and arrow. I tried to move to put some of the clothes racks between us, but before I knew it, there was an arrow lodged in a mannequin behind me--it had missed me by inches.
Enraged, I walked up to the shooter. It turned out to be a young girl in a blue burka. I snatched the weapons away and yelled at her for a few minutes in English, which I knew was probably ineffective. She fled. I looked at the weapons she'd left behind. The bow had turned into a rhinestone-encrusted figurine of a snake. I stuffed it and the arrow into my pocket.
I'd lost my coworker by this point so I had to catch up. I walked out of the mall, down a sidewalk with grass growing out of the cracks, and turned right down a narrow paved road. Shortly I came to another ugly building, this one a plain rectangular reinforced-concrete structure. I walked in past a row of elevators, the old kind with the round black buttons that you always see in medical buildings, and headed down the main passage. There were quite a few people walking in and out, and I realized that the building had been converted to a brothel. But that was not why we had come.