article_snippet.sent: I am living in a market, in one of the empty shops.
article_snippet.sent: Neighborhoods that were once massively over-priced cliques of foreigners living in "poppy palaces" -- villas allegedly bought from profiteers of the opium trade -- are now empty.
article_snippet.sent: Even Chicken Street, the hackneyed pedestrian shopping road where new Western arrivals would buy carpets or local trinkets, is more or less deserted.
article_snippet.sent: It is the same for the restaurants here that used to brim with contractors and NGO workers.
article_snippet.sent: the restaurants here that used to brim with contractors and NGO workers are now empty, the sound of the restaurants here that used to brim with contractors and NGO workers heavy metal doors echoing across deserted tables.
article_snippet.sent: Huge lines of excavators, cherry-pickers, and forklift trucks sit idle.
article_snippet.sent: Yet today, the machines that could have once moved small mountains do little more than gather dust.
highlights_snippet.sent: Interpreters are out of work, NATO trucks sit idle on roads, restaurants are empty .