Haven't been very inspired to do a lot of writing lately (note the several-week lag between this post and the previous one), but I have been brave enough to take my camera out a little bit more, so thought I'd post some pics with a little commentary.

Jules has some shoes that she's very proud of, bought from the Fluevog store in San Francisco.  (You know your shoes are special when they say "old friends are good friends" on the bottom.)  Anyway, the Fluevog site wanted pictures of their shoes in unusual situations, so we figured what better place to put them than being shined by a Pakistani shoe-shine guy?  Besides, it gave me a chance to take some photos of a Pakistani for once, something I'm normally leery of.

These shoe guys sit in the markets with their little boxes full of shoe shine stuff, and also full of whatever old scraps of shoe-repair stuff they can keep on hand.  And they'll sit there and shine or repair your shoes, if you wish.

That's pretty typical whenever we walk around that there's a guy in close proximity, staring, like the guy in the background in this picture.  They stare at me some, but mostly they stare at Jules.  Since most Pakistani women are cloistered at home, and the ones who do get out are often very covered, ogling Western women (in print and in person) is one of the few ogling chances they get.  It's unfortunate, really, because it gives them a skewed view of women, and Jules hates it so much it's sometimes annoying just to go out and walk around.

 So we got some good stares on this shoe-shining expedition, thankfully not so much Jules-ogling as the simple fact that we, a Western couple, were in the Aabparra Market (one of the grittier markets where Westerners are much less common) and here we were using a shoe shine guy and snapping pictures.  I showed the pictures to the guy on the screen of my digital camera, then, and he got a kick out of it.

A typical Islamabad house.  Most of the houses here are really nice, since Islamabad is the city for the upper crust of Pakistan.  Here and there you find pockets of crowded apartments, or simple huts of brick and tin, or a little collection of folks living in tents in a park.  But for the most part the lower class folks live in Rawalpindi, sister city just to the south.

Buildings are made almost exclusively from concrete here, since wood is scarce.  I saw a rough-cut 2x4 in a store once, and it was selling for about ten dollars.

This is Jinnah Market, a collection of stores that is like an outdoor mall and is really hopping on weekend nights, with the parking lots crowded with cars and the sidewalks with people until midnight at least.  It's one of the more upscale markets in Islamabad, and is close enough to the house I'm  staying in that i can walk there in about five minutes.

It's where I grocery shop, and where the electronics store is for adaptors and such.  But often Jules and I just go and walk around at night and get some street nibbles, like the fries that guys sell from their little fry carts, freshly cut from real potatoes (not frozen!) and nicely seasoned.

Here's Jinnah Avenue, a main road that cuts through the middle of town.  The Blue Area runs along it, a two mile or so stretch of stores and offices that's equivalent to a downtown commercial area.  The streetlights running down the middle are pretty cool, and hold slick advertising signs that make it look like any commercial corridor in the US.  And there's a few of the (few) tall buildings in Islamabad.

Here's a trail that Jules, our friend Jim, and I went hiking on one day.  We were trying to make it up to the hills that you can see beginning to rise in the distance, but only succeeded in bushwacking for a time along a dry streambed.

There are a number of trails that lead into the hills north of town, and it's a favorite means of recreation for many expats here.  Islamabad is a pretty green city, and it's nice to have such natural surroundings when one wants it.

This is Faisal Mosque, which is like the city's cathedral, and is supposed to be one of the biggest mosques in the world.   It's a really cool building, architecturally.

Mosques are all over the city, kind of like churches in Grand Rapids, MI, almost one on every street corner.  Well, ok, not that many, since there's not the proliferation of denominations like in Protestantism which necessitates a different brand of church on every corner.

Friday is the holy day here, and everything shuts down in the afternoon for prayer services.  The corner mosque near my house was packed this past Friday, since it's close to the end of Ramadan.  Kind of like churches in the US tend to get packed close to Easter and Christmas.

This picture isn't full-on of the mosque cuz it's recommended not to take pictures of such things without permission...  So I took it from a spot where I was conveniently hidden by trees.  Maybe one of these days I'll get over there by myself and get inside (by myself, since I'd have less chance of feeling welcome with Jules along, as women don't usually enter mosques, not even Pakistani women as far as we've been able to tell), and then maybe I'll work up my courage to ask permission to photograph the building as well.

So there's some pictures of the things that make up my everyday reality these days.  It's different, yes, but still people want and need and do the same things.  And so the place begins to feel a little like home.  Peace to you all!  Or, A salaam alaakum, I should say.