|
|
|
Thursday, September 14, 2006, from Islamabad |
|
|
|
Sitting in Hot Spots, an Islamabad coffee shop, sipping my 150 rupee banana-peach smoothie (US $2.50), listening to US pop music and checking out all the Hollywood movie posters on the wall - a profusion of them, with a particular taste in horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. Over the door there is a case with small dioramas of movie villains holding their bloody weapon of choice. There's a Scream mask in the corner on top of the speaker and a Chucky doll hanging above my head.
The place itself is small on the inside - what appears to be a converted trailer - but big on the outside with plenty of garden seating, rustic picnic tables scattered haphazardly inside a leaning bamboo fence, the place packed with trees and flowering bushes.
The fifteen minute walk here was uneventful, except that I had to wander a bit to find the place - "Don't look lost; stay low profile," I'm reminding myself. On the way over I did see two men building large heating ducts on the sidewalk with a big roll of metal and an old pair of tin snips; two more men getting two goats out of the back of a taxi; a man standing high up on a homemade wooden ladder in the middle of a flower-covered wall pruning the vines; a man standing by the side of the road selling corn from a dilapidated wooden cart, one ear held up high on a stick to advertise his wares; five men smoking a hookah outside a 22 hour cafe (open 7 a.m. to 5 a.m., they advertise); and two boys swinging on a swingset in an overgrown park and laughing at me. I laughed back.
Note that I've been talking exclusively about men, the dominant gender in any public place here. The only women I remember seeing on my walk was one waiting in the passenger seat of a running car, and another who caught my attention for wearing what looked very much like a tuxedo. I keep seeing scarf-covered women in parked cars and they are sitting in the left-hand seat and I think, "Yes, a Pakistani woman driving!" but then I remember that I'm in a former British colony and she is actually in the passenger's seat.
Yes, everyone drives on the left side here, at least when they stay on the proper side. My first drive out with Jules I kept wanting to tell her she was on the wrong side of the road, and I've had to train myself to look both ways before I walk across any kind of street, just so I'm not looking the wrong way with my US instinct. Traffic rules are generally followed, though there's lots of close calls (at least by US standards) and honking, and if you want to drive faster than the guy in front you just pass them. Bicycles appear all over the place, and the small red Honda motorcycles, sometimes with a whole family on them - Dad driving, six year old up front, Mom sitting side-saddle on the back rack holding the three year old. And the margin of allowable space between car and pedestrian is much smaller here than I'm used to, which can be unnerving.
Islamabad is a planned capital built in the early 1960s, as I understand it, and it's laid out on a grid pattern in discrete blocks two kilometers square. These blocks each have a letter (E - I) and a number (6 - 11), with each square divided further into four quadrants; so for instance, I am staying in F-7/1. Each street within a square is numbered, then, so it's all fairly logical, though the numbered streets pop up somewhat randomly.
In the middle of each square, generally, is a market, and a mosque. My walk today took me through the Jinnah market, where Jules and I wandered until eleven last nite buying some pirated DVDs for cheap and eating fifteen cent fries from the guys with their little makeshift fry carts who cut the potatoes with a rippled knife right in front of you. And since Jules, despite a mild lactose intolerance, likes ice cream as much or more than I, we ate some at a small ice cream shop that reminded me of a parlor that might have been in the US twenty or thirty years ago, with sit-down booths and little guys in bow ties running around taking your order and delivering stemmed glass bowls heaped with ice cream and topped with sauce, nuts, and whipped cream.
Pakistanis eat and stay out late. As we walked home around eleven the Kabul Restaurant's patio was packed with men dining. And on a weekend evening recently the Jinnah market was a buzz of activity, small cars bumper to bumper around the big U of the parking lot, brake lights glowing, horns honking through the dust of a Friday night.
Kevin, a USian who arrived a day after me, gave a good first impression of Islamabad- "It's one big suburb." And indeed, it appears to be a fairly wealthy place, with plenty of good restaurants (but no bars), mobile phone shops, relatively upscale clothing stores, and a decent infrastructure. Walking the streets of the city, at least the parts that I've seen so far, when you're not walking past a park or a market mostly means passing large walled compounds of boxy-but-varied cement and brick houses, their second story veranda looming out toward the guard in blue who sits outside his little guardhouse, maybe toting a shotgun on his lap.
Poor people's houses I've seen little of, though there are sections of small shacks every once in awhile - apparently most of the lower income folks live in Rawalpindi, just south of Islamabad proper. You won't be accosted by beggars here any more than you would on the streets of DC, and there are enough wealthy Pakistanis around that just because you're white doesn't mean you're the best target. It's kind of nice not to have one's pale skin be the exclusive symbol of excessive wealth.
I've been passing my days working on this website, doing some writing, venturing out to the market sporadically for vegetables or other groceries. Jules works during the day, and we go out to eat or cook dinner nights.
We did get out into the hills that rise north of town this weekend, hiking a well known trail about two hours up to a summit overlooking the city. It was hazy and hot, and we had little water, so it wasn't the most pleasant hike, but it was nice to get some exercise and the haze lifted enough that we had decent views of the city on the way down.
Thunderstorms came through last night and the night before, shooting light bolts out of dark clouds and throwing hail against the windows. It's cooler now, no more 100 or so degree weather, and the air is lighter. Something like fall is coming here, I believe, as it perhaps is to you where you sit and read this.
So I'm here and am safe as one can be, maybe safer than in Kenilworth :), and I probably stick out about the same in the end. Of course I know no one - Jules keeps playfully reminding me that she's my one friend in Islamabad - but now that I have unpacked physically I am beginning to unpack mentally and will see what life Islamabad has in store for me.
|
|
