Thursday, May 04, 2006

Just after my week poncing around Italy and a final sign-off with the customer in Germany, I headed up to the Netherlands to catch up with Mr. Rohan. Now his name is actually Rohan but I've picked up the sub-contintental habit of calling calling people "Mr." followed by their first name. For example, I get called Mr. Christopher by my "protocol contact" in Karachi. Perhaps it's a legitimate way to get more in contact with my black side, I dunno. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Tim is a collegue of mine from the deep south of the states, so naturally this gives rise to plenty of opportunity to have plenty of laughs at the expense of his stereotypical southern bretheren. He moved across to Europe with his wife a few years ago and now lives with his wife in Madrid and loves to lamenting about missing the good life back home. He's a roaming consultant in the same group as me so is taking over the project in Frankfurt and we agreed that we'd do some kind of apartment share. When I'd be off being nomadic in some random country for work, he'd live in Frankfurt and during the weekends when I come back to use the washing machine, he'd head back to Madrid. It works out pretty well, since he's well domesticated he'd usually leave all sorts of foodstuffs my fridge has never seen before - vegetables, fruit and whatever else is required to make a meal. I reciprocate and leave him beer and marmite. On saturday morning the apartment had a distinct bachelor "chic", which is often a euphanism for "unclean shithole" so I gave the place a good spruce up before I left for the Netherlands. As usual these things take a lot longer than expected so I arrived in Utrecht early in the evening.

Rohan is studying in the student captial of the Lowlands (as the "Netherlands" literally translates in German) and living with 15 other dutch people. Usually there is at least one party going on in one of the kitchens, but this time the place was pretty quiet so we headed out to see Syriana at the movies. It was a bit of a dissapointment, but the Islamic theme through the movie got me all primed up for the following week in the Islamic Replublic of Pakistan. They didn't play up the stereotype of middle eastern / persians all being terrorists as Hollywood is prone to do but instead started off with the Cloonser (George Clooney) blowing the shit out of some dudes who he had sold a rocket launcher to in Tehran. Since a lot of the dialogue was in Farsi, Arabic and Urdu, it was tricky to follow the only western subtitles in Dutch. Watching that sort of movie in Belgium is even odder. There are usually two sets of subtitles - one in French and the other in Flemish so you've got no lack of choice as to the language that you can't follow to try and misunderstand what is going on. No wonder the Belgians often have a look of complete confusion on their face.

The trip to Karachi took me through Dubai. I knew I was on a flight to a subcontinental country. Just before we started the takeoff roll, some lady got up to use the bathroom and no sooner had the cabin attendant wagged their finger at that passenger had another got up to rummage around their cabin luggage to make sure they had packed their essential contraband from Dubai. On the flight I met Karl, an American living in Dubai who was in Pakistan for a couple of weeks. Since we were both interested in visiting other parts of pakistan over the weekend, we agreed we would meet on Friday evening to catch a flight up to "somewhere North". A few months ago, he had driven from Peshawar across the Afghanistan border to Kabul, so I was delighted to hear he was also lacking the survival instinct that is deficient in many antipodeans. This considerably broadened up the scope of places we could visit.

The week passed relatively unevenfully. I headed out to Zamzama a couple of nights in Karachi, which many people reccomend as a place to go eat. Obviously the people that dish out these reccomendations are interested in everything but Pakistani food - Subway, Dunkin' Donughts and Arizona Grill was the most obvious places there. I was still able to find a really nice curry place that was still open around midnight that made a fantastic butter chicken. One of the evenings I flagged down a tuktuk driver and after many gestures and charades, we were off to "Clifton seaside". This is a dimly lit beach with people selling all sorts of food and trinkets...and camel rides. I enjoyed a good wander around the beach checking the different foods and soaking up the atmosphere of the place while making sure I dodged the discarded red hot coals that food vendors no longer needed. Fadi, the manager of the middle east region for the guys our team joined me on Thursday for the last couple of days on the project. He's good value and is always great to have around and loves our conversations were I try and poke holes in the Koran's doctrine and he gets great satisfaction in showing that it as holeless as a Dutch dyke. He headed back to Dubai on Saturday before flying across to Ryadh later that day.

In the meantime Karl had arranged for us to fly to Lahore that Friday. He was well connected and one of his contacts had arranged a hotel for us up there as well as a driver for the weekend. The 747 that took us the 90 minute trip north was completely packed and in true Pakistani fashion, people were still wandering around the cabin 10 metres before we touched the ground at Lahore. The Pakistani carefree attitude is everywhere. Out of the several accidents we saw on the roads, people just got out of their cars or off their motorbikes, sniffed at any dents then drove on. Most likely they spent 2 minutes discussing the latest byriani recipie rather than the mangled metal next to them. If the bike was unrideable, they'd causually flag down a passing donkey and cart and get the thing taken back to their buddy who does gentle-touch metal repairs with a mallet to bring it back tip top shape.

Of the two major visits of the day was the Lahore fort, which was built initially in 2000BC, changed hands several times then finally used by the British from the late 19th century to the early 20th. It's an impressive fort and is in the middle of the old Lahore town. Later that day we headed out to the border between India and Pakistan to catch the changing of the guard. More on that in the next update.