Almost four years ago an excited Mohammad Reza jumped into a bus to bring him and his family home to Afghanistan from years of exile in Iran after US-led forces toppled the Taleban government. Now he's trying to go back.
"I wish I hadn't come. I had a better life there," said Reza, 47, as he stood in a queue outside the Iranian embassy in Kabul, trying, with hundreds of others, to get an Iranian visa.
"I was thinking positively for a long time but I think it's time to go. What we're hearing on the radio about a prosperous future is just a dream."
Nearly four years after the Taleban were forced from power, the country remains mired in poverty and corruption, and frustration with the government is growing.
While some main provincial road links have been rebuilt and new buildings, including shopping centres and a luxury hotel, have gone up in the capital, prices have also been rising fast and many people feel their lives have not improved.
A problem for President Hamid Karzai, a year after he formed a new government following a sweeping election victory, is that people's expectations have been raised, but not met.
"Only make promises you can fulfil," said an old man who approached Karzai while he was on a recent visit to Herat, Afghanistan's most prosperous city, near the border with Iran. Just before that encounter, Karzai had made a speech to Herat citizens in which he spoke of his government's determination to improve the economy, the livelihoods of the people, and to rebuild roads, schools and hospitals.
Karzai has made many such promises since becoming interim leader in late 2001, but raising living standards and bringing a modicum of prosperity to his people after 25 years of conflict is not easy.
"People have become fed up with promises and not seeing much improvement practically," said Wadir Safi, a law professor of Kabul University.
Despite a flood of billions of dollars in foreign aid for reconstruction and recovery, Afghanistan remains one of the world's poorest countries.
While foreign aid workers and top government officials drive around Kabul in luxury cars and live in smart houses, some costing $5,000 or more a month, rebuilding has been slow and even non-existent in many places while corruption is rampant, critics say.
Kabul has endured intermittent blackouts for weeks - not a problem for those with generators and money to fuel them but infuriating for most people.
The government recently announced the fulfilment of one of Karzai's long-awaited promises; increasing salaries of civil servants and teachers.
The pay rise of nearly 40 percent sounds impressive but for most it worked out to a pittance - just $7 a month - taking an average salary for a civil servant to just over $20 a month, according to officials.
Many of those who got the pay rise ridiculed it and the next day, dozens of women teachers from Zarghona High School, a famous Kabul school, protested over the paltry raise in a rare display of assertiveness by women in the conservative Muslim country.
"Karzai promised to raise government employees' salaries more than three years ago," said a woman teacher Nadira Ahmadi from another school.
"But with this rise you can hardly pay for one meal a day for our small family."
Accommodation costs in the capital have skyrocketed in the past four years. Rent for a three room mud-built house is at least $200. Commodity and transport prices have also soared.
Many people make ends meet by taking up second jobs, such as running market stalls, at least part time.
Patience is running out, another government worker said.
"The rise is like giving chocolate to a crying baby to calm him down, but without thinking whether he is sick or wants milk," said an information ministry official.
"We are being treated like kids and the situation is getting intolerable for people. It is more than enough".
Karzai's chief of staff, Jawed Ludin, agreed that people had high expectations and said the government was doing all it could to meet them.
"The people expect that all their deprivations caused by the past 25 years of war to be annihilated quickly," he said.
"Improvements have appeared, there are problems, we wish to solve them, we wish to have had resources to have solved them during the past four years."
Afghanistan gets more than half of its annual budget from donor countries.
In this year's $678 million budget, police and law enforcement agencies got $157 million, defence spending totalled $126 million and education was allocated $117 million.
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