Kabul’s New Five-Star Hotel
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 11.09.05 | 1:30 PM ET
We just noted the new luxury hotel planned for Baghdad. Not to be outdone, Kabul hosted the opening of a five-star hotel this week, complete with a swimming pool, health club and pastry shop. It’s apparently just the latest sign of progress in Afghanistan. An AP story about the hotel also notes the opening of a fancy Kabul shopping mall this year with the nation’s only escalators. Remarked Ahmad Jan, a 23-year-old tailor visiting from out of town, “I am amazed by these moving stairs.”
Moving stairs aside, you might not want to jet off to Kabul just yet. Reports the AP:
It has electricity for only a few hours a day. The vast majority of its residents are poor, living in single-room, mud-brick houses and drawing water from wells that are sometimes polluted with cholera.
Militants occasionally fire rockets into downtown and the threat of kidnapping forces many foreigners to live in tightly guarded compounds ringed by concrete bomb barriers and to travel in armored convoys.
But other than that, the place is perfectly safe. Sort of.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
Aj 11.09.05 | 7:24 PM ET
The hospitals are like mechanic shop, greasy and 5 star hotel next to it?
CRAZY
Mer A. Alam 11.09.05 | 7:51 PM ET
My comments are for those responsible people that are in the government of Afghanistan. These guys were in Itally, Germany, USA and Britania and elsewhere at least should have learned something about building the cities.
First they should map the city, Draw the roads and industrial sites, bring water, build waste and water filtration. Just like the former and present kings’ government
they just don’t care if the country needs a deep planing.If the government apparatus feel that they do not leave the country soon, probably they work important things first, then build five star hotels.
A. EHSAN 11.10.05 | 8:55 AM ET
I AM SO HAPPY THAT KABUL HAS A NICE HOTEL. I KNOW THAT AFGHAN CAN NOT AFFORT TO PAY $200-1200
PER NOTE BUT ATLEAST 350 AFGHANS ARE WORKING AND 70 OF THEM ARE WOMEN. I HOPE TO SEE MORE BEAUTIFUL BUILDING LIKE THIS IN THE FUTURE.
EHSAN
Wahid Amirzada 11.12.05 | 4:06 PM ET
It’s good to hear that the country which been in war for 20 years is now moveing on and getting better, I know that this country needs hospital and school’s but still one at a time..