Greetings from Kandahar, Afghanistan!

Well we made it! It was a looooong ride but we made it Kandahar finally!  We ended up leavin Saturday (May 5) at about 8am or something. I dont really know, over the past few days time has become a completely abstract thing, I am just know starting to know what time and day it is here.

We left El Paso and flew directly to Hahn, Germany which is near Frankfurt, about an 9.5 hour flight, I dont really know what time we arrived there, something like 7am German time. It is an old Airbase and now serves as a transit center for people flying from here in the Middle East back stateside.  It looks a lot like an old prison, rundown buildings with barbed wire and stuff.  Kind of crazy.  We were there for all of about 2 hours and didn't leave the little reception area they had us in.  Kind of disappointing but I guess I can say I have been to Europe?  I got myself a German pretzel though, pretty delicious.

                              Manas AFB and the mountains along the side, pretty sweet.


So we boarded back on the plan about 2 hours later and took off from Frankfurt, Germany and then flew towards Manas AFB in Krygzstan.  Its the only country I have ever seen with almost no vowels in it so I have no idea how to pronounce it, thus I will not.  But its was a very beautiful place.  Mountains, like legitimately big mountains that I have never seen before.  I thought the mountains in El Paso were cool, these made those look like southern Ohio.  It was cool though, there were all the NATO countires there and people coming from and going to Afghanistan.  The Air Force runs that base and its a deployment site for them.  There was a bar that they could drink at, some movie theatres, USOs, awesome 24 hour DFACs.  I wish our deployment was there the whole time! It was pretty cool I liekd it there a lot.  Unfortunately, we were only there for about a day and slept for about 3 hours of that time.  The time difference kicked our butts real bad and then you add in minimal sleep and bam, exhaustion sets in.  So on our 2nd day there, we boarded a C-17 and began our trip down here to Kandahar. 

We did a combat landing into KAF (Kandahar Air Field), basically you land like twice as fast and drop altitude extremely fast in order to avoid the Taliban locking on to your plane and shooting it down.  It was nuts.  So we landed and the rear of the C-17 opened up and we got our first view of Afghanistan and it was hot....Oh so hot.  Again, I went into no grass, there was a couple of random trees which was weird.  We loaded on to some buses and drove to our CHUs where we will live for the next 9 months or so.  Then we drove past the poo pond.....Its pretty self explanatory and the smell is pretty epicly bad.  It smells like crap piled on top of crap and then set on fire.   KAF itself is really hard to describe in words.  There are concrete T-walls EVERYWHERE along with bunkers for pretty much daily rocket/mortar attacks (dont worry they are extremely inaccurate and random, pretty much they are always aimed at the flightline where the jets and helicopters take off).  The CHUs themselves arent terrible but are pretty tiny, we have 3 to a CHU.  We are still in the process of setting everything up but so far so good, I'll post a picture now and then one later after its all done.

I got to see a lot of my friends fromthe 84th and thats been really good to have them here to kind of show us around and see what its all about.  Today I met up with Freeders, Kreger and Tomey and we went to the Boardwalk. Its crazy theres a TGI Fridays, KFC, pizza shops and a bunch of Afghani shops n such.  Pretty cool.

So I am going to go and pick up our TV and stuff from Freeders so thats pretty sweet.  Hopefully by the end of tonight we will be about set up.  I will try to post more stuff as we go, Im still kind of figuring everything out here.  I'll answer questions if you have any I guess!  I will post again soon, love you all!