afghanistan!

hi. this is not samantha. this is dan/iel.

as part of my inaugural post to “jealousgods,” i thought it might be a fun exercise to showcase all the countries of the world going down the list in alphabetical order. today we begin with afghanistan.

due to the united nations general assembly meetings taking place in nyc this week, my place of employment (i won’t reveal its name yet but HINT: it has to do with “asia” and it fancies itself a “society”), is hosting various asian leaders to speak in our building. one of the side effects of having such high profile world leaders come to visit the place where you work is the heightened security. at the entrance, they had set up metal detectors and bag searches and those wand things just like at the airport! before i went out to get my lunch today (chicken teriyaki lunch special), i decided to stop by the food emporium down the street and pick up a couple of cans of tuna and an apple for dinner later. when i returned to my place of daily employment and had to pass through the security checkpoint, i found myself having to explain that i was carrying cans of tuna fish that might set off the metal detector. i never really had to do that before at the airport.

i’m not actually complaining though. mainly because today’s speaker was quite a draw, a man of notable international importance – the president of afghanistan! now you see afghanistan plays an important role in what we now know as The War on Terror, and so president hamid karzai spoke to the importance of international cooperation in defeating radicalism and terrorism. but what’s even more noteworthy and important is that afghans are HAWT. (not like those chinese)

i think everyone is familiar with the “young afghan girl” from one of national geographic’s covers back in the 80s. those soulful blue eyes, striking against the backdrop of her olive colored skin, peering out from beneath the tattered red burqa. that piercing stare which screamed of horrors untold. hi – hottie!

so naturally i wanted to see if there were any hot afghan security guards. the last time president karzai spoke at previously mentioned unnamed place of employment, he had the sexiest secret service guards. i kept staring at one of them during his speech, but then i realized that the security guard might actually misinterpret my sideways glances to be of some suspicious nature and mistake me for a potential assassin and probably wouldn’t realize that i was just checking him out, so i tried to be more discreet and less suspicious looking.

unfortunately, this time there were no hot afghans.

anyway, before i take my leave to allow sam to continue our country profiles (next up: albania!), did you know that the term “afghanistan,” meaning the “land of afghans,” was mentioned by the sixteenth century mughal emperor babur in his memoirs, referring to the territories south of kabul that were inhabited by pashtuns? i bet you didn’t.