Writing
About everything Afghanistan: food and restaurants, travel, getting papers done, culture, and plain explanations of the rate and the calendar.
Photo: Farhad Ahmad
Renew 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.
Photo: Mohamed Olwy
The 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 people in Kabul talk about, each one seen open in 2024, 2025 or 2026. Restaurants change, so the list says how we know.
Photo: Zb travel
Famous 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 and qurut, Panjshir's mulberries. Here is what each city is known for, and the restaurants travellers and locals have eaten at recently. Where we could not confirm a restaurant, we say so, or leave it out.
Photo: Eliza Ari
Fourteen 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 the east. These are the dishes you will find on a dastarkhan across the country, and the ones Afghans abroad miss most.
Photo: Qasim Mirzaie
Why 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, and once you know which ones, the differences make sense.
Photo: Qasim Mirzaie
Why 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 how the lunar calendar works, and saying so is more honest than printing a date that may move.
Photo: Qasim Mirzaie
The 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; trade with the world on the Gregorian. Of the three, the solar calendar is the one most foreigners have never heard of, and the one most Afghans think in.
Photo: Mirwais Mohammadi
How 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 so that a wrong or stale figure is caught by the system before a reader has to catch it.
Photo: Qasim Mirzaie
How 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 in one market in Kabul, with the central bank stepping in when it wants to steady it.