‘American Idol’ season two runner-up Clay Aiken, who acts as an education ambassador for UNICEF, most recently in post-Taliban Afghanistan, spoke with Yahoo! Music in a Q&A. Asked how he felt to be an American in Afghanistan and if he was welcomed in the towns you visited, Aiken responded, “One of the main things to remember is that people in Afghanistan did not like the Taliban, either. I was worried going in, imagining what I was going to be involved with and what I was going to find myself running into. But, it was quite different. The people were nothing but hospitable, they were completely welcoming and so wonderful. We really just had nothing but a warm welcome everywhere. I thought [Kabul] was going to be a lot more antiquated. It’s a bustling metropolis. There was wireless internet in our hotel, glass elevators, it was right inside a shopping mall like we’d see in the U.S. It’s not some sort of deprived and destitute city like I expected to see.”
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