Afghan Guide

Articles

About everything Afghanistan: food and restaurants, travel, getting papers done, culture, and plain explanations of the rate and the calendar.

Ariana aircraft at Kabul airportPhoto: Farhad Ahmad How-to11 Mizan 14055 min readRenew your Afghan passport onlineIf you live abroad and your Afghan passport has expired or is about to, you may not need to travel to an embassy any more. The Afghan Consulate General in Dubai now renews passports online through a portal called E-Afghans, and posts the new passport to your door. Here is who can use it, what it costs and how to do it without a rejected application.
Kebabs on a charcoal grillPhoto: Mohamed Olwy Food11 Mizan 14054 min readThe most famous restaurants in KabulKabul eats well. From clay teapots of lamb in the old city to kebab houses on Shahr-e Naw's Sulh Road and riverside tables in Paghman, these are the places… Fruit piled high in a Kabul marketPhoto: Zb travel Food11 Mizan 14053 min readFamous food across Afghanistan, city by cityEvery part of Afghanistan is proud of something on the plate: Herat's saffron and kichiri, Jalalabad's chapli kebab, Kandahar's pomegranates, Bamyan's potatoes… A plate of rice with meat, nuts and pomegranate seedsPhoto: Eliza Ari Food11 Mizan 14053 min readFourteen Afghan dishes everyone should knowAfghan food sits between Central Asia, Iran and South Asia, and takes something from each: rice like Persia, dumplings like the Silk Road, kebab and karahi like… Shah-Do Shamshira mosque in Kabul, in daylightPhoto: Qasim Mirzaie Explainer11 Mizan 14052 min readWhy prayer-time apps disagreeTwo phones in the same room can show Fajr a quarter of an hour apart, and Asr an hour apart. Neither is broken. They are answering slightly different questions,… A half moon among the cloudsPhoto: Qasim Mirzaie Explainer11 Mizan 14052 min readWhy Eid is marked "expected"On the holidays page, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Ashura and the Mawlid carry the word "expected", while Independence Day does not. That is not hesitation. It is… White spring blossom on a branchPhoto: Qasim Mirzaie Explainer11 Mizan 14052 min readThe solar calendar, Hamal to HutAfghanistan keeps three calendars at once. Rent, school terms and the seasons run on the solar Hijri calendar; prayer, fasting and the Eids on the lunar one;… Kabul in the morning haze, between the mountainsPhoto: Mirwais Mohammadi Explainer11 Mizan 14052 min readHow this site keeps its figures honestA figure without a source is a rumour. Everything on this site that can be checked says where it came from and when it was last checked, and the site is built… Kabul from above, with the mountains on the horizonPhoto: Qasim Mirzaie Explainer11 Mizan 14053 min readHow the afghani's rate is setThere is no single office that decides what a dollar costs in afghanis. The rate is made every working day by money exchangers trading with each other, mostly…
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