CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

Kabul was peaceful for the last semester and many of the expats were beginning to relax. I brought my family. Today we went shopping at Finest grocery store, and there was another family with small children there, and I remember thinking to myself, “This is good, other people are bringing their families too.”

Anyway you probably read by now, there was a terrible terrorist attack on Finest against expats. What is scary is this wasn’t against a military target. It was against us… by which I mean, me. And the Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack and say they did it at a time when foreigners were shopping. This is new. Previously the Taliban had been striking military targets and had been (or so it appeared) making efforts to limit civilian casualties.

The attack happened about 2 hours after we were shopping. I am not saying I had a premonition or anything, but I did have a strong unaccountable desire to go back home, which in retrospect seems a bit like a premonition.

Anyway I did an interview with the BBC about an hour ago.

Vanessa and I are a bit freaked out and don’t know what to think. For the time being we’re just hunkering down in the house. All my colleagues are freaked out. Very disturbing. Things really seemed to be settling down.

You may have read about the terrorist attack on a bus in Manila. Ironic we just missed it, it was in a location where we frequently are. Ironic because we came to Afghanistan and escaped a terrorist attack. Anyway there’s no snow in Kabul and we’re a little disappointed. You can see snow off in the mountain peaks. There is actually a drought and the dust is ridiculous, it gets into everything. I think the dust freaked Vanessa out at first. And unfortunately our maid is a rather lazy girl who thinks adjusting the angles of the furniture is cleaning so we still have one room full of dust. The good news is no work today. There’s a surprise meeting of parliament and if the Taliban are going to get frisky, it would be today, so we’re off. I have heard no explosions and my security alert phone has not gone off so nothing appears to have happened (it’s 5PM Kabul time).

Watching CNBC and they’re at Davos, and all I can say is God I miss snow and skiing!

Vanessa was a bit freaked out on arrival, predictably enough, but seems to be settling in. Life here is pleasant enough after the initial shock. Afghanis are nice people and Kabul used to be a tourist mecca actually, before the wars. Indeed I’ve often remarked that if the damn war would end, Kabul would be a nice place.

Regarding investments, first I would like to point out that I have said about 500 times that the eurozone crisis is overblown, and look, now people are starting to settle down and the euro is rising. I do think it moderately likely that one or more of the peripheral EU states might exit the eurozone, but this would be somewhat of an investing non-event. I remain bullish on the US market and will probably put my money back in in a day or two if and when an uptrend commences. I am looking at the pound sterling to stabilize at a low level, at which point I will probably buy pounds. When it is clear to me that the commodity selloff has ended, I plan to buy palladium and platinum, however the noble metals are clearly in distribution (ie selling) mode right now. Finally, I don’t know if I mentioned this before in this blog, but for the last 6 months I have diversified myself into Irish markets. I chose a country I know a bit about and am willing to read about, and Ireland fit the bill. AIB and IRE remain risky investments. I am looking for the Irish budget bill to be passed so that they receive EU bank bailout funds, at which point I will put some money into AIB and IRE. I regard IRE as the better investment but AIB is tantalizingly cheap and unless Ireland (the owner of AIB) goes bankrupt, which it wont, then AIB is an investment akin to Citibank a few years ago, when it was valued below a buck.

We’re leaving in an hour and everything is ready to go. Bug is watching cartoon network, Vanessa is primping, Yit is napping, and I will take this opportunity to catch up on blogging.

First of all there were a bunch of concerns with leaving the house for four months. We are in a gated compound with guards but this does not preclude robbery, particularly the inside job kind of robbery. We changed the deadbolt lock yesterday. The windows are barred. It would take an extremely talented burglar to get in here, and we can’t stop the really talented burglars no matter what we do. I have been careful to seal up the whole house, this means electric tape over drains etc. This is to prevent cockroach invasions. This is the jungle and there are ten billion zillion cockroaches just looking for somewhere to invade. We turned off the fridge and have the doors open. Think we’re good to go. We’re fully insured actually so if somebody does burgle the place, it wouldn’t be a tragedy.

Bug is 4 and going through an extremely difficult stage. He got his second genuine tanning from me today. Second in the entire history of the Teggatz family. Corporal punishment is not the norm here. A week or two ago, however, Vanessa and I decided we need to discipline the Bug more and to not tolerate any more nonsense. This has been a difficult project because Bug is very hard-headed and determined. Maybe this is the Libra in him, don’t know Libras well. Anyway Bug has promised to be a good boy. Hope this lasts for approximately 36 hours because travel is difficult enough without a bunch of nonsense from a 4 year old.

It’s kind of hard to believe my vacation is over and I have to go back to work for 4 months. Sad, really. We had a good vacation though. I miss Bora already.

Traveling in a fried out combie, on a hippie trail head full of zombie…

So anyway we’re flying out of here tomorrow, Manila-Hong Kong-Dubai-Kabul. We’ve been preparing for several months so it seems a bit of an afterthought at this point. As the husband you would really be surprised at the amount of preparation and money that went into this. I have to transplant a wife and two children to one of the most remote places on earth. Inoculations, visas, tickets. These are just the start. We had no winter clothes. Vanessa is forbidden by her immigration department to go to Afghanistan, so we have to go to Hong Kong first. (Vanessa has a round trip from Hong Kong). The list goes on. A lot of money and preparation.

The last of a series of dental work finished today. Thank god for that. I was manly and didn’t take the anesthetic and this one was painful. Anyway my teeth are in good shape again. The dentist loves me. She is the most expensive dentist in Southeast Asia and she has a personal relationship with the guy at my health insurance agency.

So in regard to the stock market. I remain long term bullish on the sock market. I refer to the US of course. At the moment we may see some downward or, more likely, some choppy sideways action. Food commodities I don’t know enough to comment about intelligently and don’t have the energy to learn a new commodity, however, they’re probably a good idea. Metals are likely entering the downtrend I predicted several months ago. DIdn’t think it would take this long but there you go. Nevertheless I am watching metals to make a bottom and then am going to buy as much silver and palladium as I can possibly afford. And I’ll tell you why. Palladium is used in catalytic converters and an ever-increasing number of Chinese and Indians are buying cars. Silver, I’ll give you the inside scoop. The Fed is keeping silver artificially low for various reasons related to their stake in a weak dollar. They are keeping it artifically low through their proxy, JP Morgan. JP Morgan has issued more notes for silver than there actually is silver in existence. The Chinese and others want to accumulate noble metals as the dollar and the euro decline. March, when the Fed meets, will likely see a big rise in silver prices, because futures notes will come due in March, and the Chinese among others have been taking physical delivery of their silver. The same goes for platinum. As I remarked in a previous post, I would accumulate as much of the noble metals as possible. This drop in the market is a good thing, gives us an opportunity to buy cheaper.

Just had oral surgery. Laying in bed with an ice pack. Not a terribly happy camper right now. However the surgery was a success and my tooth was actually in much better shape than they thought. After the gum heals in a few days, I will go back for the permanent filling.

I have had to buy the family winter clothes, as we have none. We got lucky, yesterday we went to the Gap, winter clothers on a 50% sale. Got the Bug cute winter boots. Gap Kids has a skull-and-crossbones pirate motif going for kids right now and so the boys will be running around in pirate hats and sweatshirts. There was a Mango outlet on Boracay where she got a bunch of sweaters etc for surprisingly cheap. Don’t know why there’s a Mango outlet on Boracay. Anyway I’m happy about the whole thing because I spent a fraction of what I had anticipated on winter clothes, and Van is happy because she has cute Mango and Gap clothes, and Bug is happy about his snow boots and pirate hat. Yit is indifferent, he doesn’t like wearing clothes actually. Yit should live on Bora where he can run around half naked all year long. He will be pissed off in Kabul where he’s need to bundle up, he really doesn’t like clothes.

Anyway we have completed all major activities in prep for going to Kabul, now we have a few minor things to do like changing the locks on the condo door as a precaution, etc etc.

I am not in the mood to give a detailed market comment but I am cautiously bullish on the S&P, I am invested long. I am holding physical silver and it’s losing me money right now but I am very bullish on silver, gold, and palladium in the long term, and I hope silver drops big so I can buy as much as possible. Because of inflationary pressure, the little detail that 47 US states are basically bankrupt, and the Fed will continue to devalue the dollar to finance debt, because of these and other factors, I would advise accumulating as much silver, gold, platinum, or palladium as possible. Importantly, in the long run you’ll be glad you did, particularly because there is going to be extreme inflation in food prices in the near term, for example. I’m not going to go into details but the price of food is going to skyrocket. Your dollar is going to be worth less and less each day. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As always I could be completely wrong.

We’re back in Manila and surprisingly glad to be home.

It was a nice beach holiday and I’m sure we will miss Boracay, as we always do. It’s the one place we miss. We don’t miss Rome or Tuscany or Dubai. But Boracay, we miss.

Anyway the big drama was our favorite hotel, the Blue Mango, suddenly went bankrupt while we were there. One day the police put barbed wire around the dive shop. Then the kitchen started running out of food. You can tell there’s trouble when a place called the Blue Mango runs out of mangoes. This whole drama didn’t affect us much, there were good restaurants right next door.

We did try to go golfing, but you try this with a toddler and an infant. Really impossible.

The Blue Mango used to have great wireless, and was one of the reasons it was our home on the island. This time the connection was really sketchy and this caused no end of problems for me regarding business. For example the internet kept getting cut off while I was booking our Safi Air from to Dubai to Kabul, and my card ended up getting charged 4 times, which was more than $2500. It made me insane. They are refunding the money but still, made me insane.

Vanessa had good woman’s intuition and we sold our silver holdings before the big drop.

I looooove doing 4-Square on my iPhone.

Anyway I am eating dinner while I blog and want to concentrate on my food so I’m cutting this short.

We had a slightly uneventful New Year’s because what are you going to do when you have 2 small children. We did wander around the island a bit and Vanessa saw many channel 7 stars. There is also a ladyboy on the beach nearby who is apparently so pretty that Vanessa is jealous of s/him. I find this hard to believe and want to see this for myself but s/he didn’t come out onto the beach today. The other day we rented a dune buggy and went to the top of the mountain, climbed up to the top and took a million pictures. C.f. Facebook. We also went to the bat farm, another pic opportunity. Funny thing there was Yit was not afraid of the bats, indeed, he tried to touch them. They had one giant bat you could pet, which Yit did. I was a bit scared but there is a Facebook pic of me petting the bat. Yit wanted to grab the thing. Kind of hilarious.

I have really gotten into taking retro photos with old film. Also on Facebook if you’re curious.

Booked our ticket out of here on the 8th, going to buy the Safi Air tickets from Dubai to Kabul today. Vanessa and the kids’ visas are apparently under control and on the way from the Afg embassy in Malaysia. (Washington was not helpful.)

I’m going to pay a lot more attention to frequent flier miles, I decided. I’m using AwardWallet.com because keeping track of miles and expiration etc is complicated.