Lahore

The first thing you do when you get into a foreign country is…try and get the local currency in your pockets. the remaining Indian rupees saved our asses the night before cause we managed to exchange them in Pakistani rupees and pay for a dodgy hotel and lousy dinner. The problem we faced was that…all the ATMs in Lahore were either not working or they did not accept any other cards than the ones issued by their own bank…a few hours have passed until we found out there is a Citibank in town…..hidden beneath heavy barricades and fat bodyguards.

Once the money issue solved and with the next evening train tickets in our hands, we took a rickshaw to the Lahore fort. I guess that rickshaw had the carbon footprint of a WWII Antonov plane, for it was small, barely advancing the hill…but it was making the noise and the smoke of a fire dragon. I was not to find out until later that unlike Delhi, where all rickshaws and transport was forced to turn to LP Gas a decade ago, this is not the case in Pakistan, where rickshaws were THE major source of city air pollution.

Though not quite politically correct, I guess pollution is the first word that comes to my mind when someone’s asks me about Pakistani cities. After the first night in Lahore I was experiencing flue-like symptoms – a snotty nose and a sore throat complemented by tearing eyes. In just a few hours I realized handkerchiefs were of no use anymore, since spitting snots was a permanent occupation, whether in public or private… and this is not to mention the morning ones :-((

A stroll through the old bazaar in Lahore took me to the vibrant essence of Asia: ambulant sellers shouting their goods in the middle of the street, children playing, dogs barking, rickshaws hurrying within millimeters from porters carrying large packs, shop tenants dusting off their goods or chatting one another at a cup of tea. Every street or neighborhood is still specialized – only one type of goods are on sale in a particular area: spices bazaar, jewelers bazaar, textiles bazaar, clothes bazaar, sewers bazaar, an entire neighborhood for plastics of various shapes and sizes and another only for bathroom appliances…here and there, some chaikhanas and food stalls….the first outcome is that if you need to buy a toilet paper, a plastic glass and a scarf, you need to get lost for hours among endless arrangements in display, to the point that it is impossible to recompose your way back. The only solution out…was to keep walking straight ahead.



Typical stronghold of Moghul architecture, the fort in Lahore looks like the one in Delhi...but only from the outside. For the inside, although not as richly decorated as its Indian brother-in-law, combines an more austere look with an exotic charm, as if taken from classical movies where Indiana Jones would appear on an elephant back after the first corner.


“Hello, Sir! …..Where are you come from?”…”Your name is?”…”I am tourist specialist, authorized guide, I know everything about this place…come with me, I show you …please Sir, come…” – I was about to hear this approximate sequence in an endless number of occasions, several times at once and whenever I was paying an entrance to visit something…ah, those annoying touts, you’d say, nothing new about them?

Punjabi capital

The Golden Temple in Amristar, Punjab - aka the vatican of the Sikhs.

One thing was most annoying to me in this city: the prohibition to smoke, in private or public places. While muslims do not eat pork and do not drink alcohol and hindus do not eat meat, the sikhs DO NOT SMOKE...I do not understand where this comes from, since cigarettes were not available by the time of their prophet (guru), around 1200 A.D.

Since communist religion has already prohibited mobile phones in North Korea, I just wonder…is there any faith or religion in this world that prohibits Tic-Tac or Kinder eggs?

WELCOME TO PAKISTAN

The Attari - Wagah is the only land border crossing between India and Pakistan and was opened half a century after partition. The daily ceremonial of closing the border just before sunset has since become a show in its own right, and a daily occasion for the locals on both sides to shout their sympathy to each other, over the wired fence. We saw the show from the Pakistani side, since we crossed the border one hour before the show was supposed to start...but not before drinking one last "secular" beer before we got into the "islamic" world.

A show of bellicosity so full of machismo, angry gestures and coregraphic looks that i found it difficult to hide my laughs.

Precision nastiness to show how angry you can get!

The excitement of the crowds grows highest during the lowering of the flags, as it is supposed no flag should hang higher than the other at any moment. However, this time the crescent moon of Muslim Pakistan remained a few seconds above the tricolour of secular India, a symbolism which sent crowds to climax.

The video shootings i did are so poor quality that i'd rather not show them:-(...... but you can always goto YT for a good summmary of the Attari - Wagah show

.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeSX6AZ5xEI&feature=related

Patiala

Off the beaten path in Punjab, this small town by Indian standard (nearly 2 million people) was recommended as a good place to get to know the Sikh people, i.e. adherents of Sikhism, a monotheistic religion founded around 1200 A.D, and for its old bazaar.

Sikh Temple or Gurdwara (aka the door or the gateway to the Guru)

The Sikh suffered a lot throughout time, from both the Hindus and the Muslims, so they have the reputation of honest, easy tempered and fierce fighters, and although tradition requires every man to bear a knife all the time, I guess these days’ mobile phones are more common than knives.

What I found unusual with the Sikhs is that the men instead of the women need to comply with some strict customs related to their appearance in public. While with Muslims women have to cover their heads and faces, with the Hindus it is always women who have to wear as many piercings as possible, as for the Chinese it is the same - women were required to have their feet bound from childhood for the sake of beauty. But with the Sikhs, it is men who need not to cut their hair ever, or shave their beard or moustache, and it is also them who need to “suffer” an omnipresent turban even at 30+ Celsius.

Not many foreigners reach here, so.....i was quite a star, being asked twice to give…autographs. No kiddin – first it happened on a peaked cap, for some boys near the temple pool, second on a school notebook by this group of school girls. The tallest one was very pushy and insisted i should come and meet their parents at a cup of tea, proudly saying that they belong to Rais caste. I still don’t know why did I refuse their invitation…..was it the lack of time, as always?


I soon found a deserted Maharajah palace, such a cliché....but i loved strolling around the ruins, imagining how life used to look like from here, where the harem might have been……why did I refuse the girls invitation to tea?...

A tiny bodyguard appeared from nowhere and directed us out, pretexting the walls might collapse on us.

Back to India

A month on the road has just started, with all these exotic places at my feet - these were my thoughts when my excited nostrils sensed the warm and wet air of Delhi. As if time had compressed for the last 10 months since I left the Indian capital, I forgot everything that has happened in between and my eyes were suddenly searching for familiar places… and why not, even familiar faces….

With the luggage deposited in the railway station after fooling the Indian bureaucracy by inventing a fake destination and fake ticket number, of course could not have ended up elsewhere but in Paharganj – the old bazaar district in Delhi, home to our previous visit. And the first familiar face appeared: the waiter boy in what I remember as “the liver serving restaurant” on the main street of the bazaar.

A breakfast to load the stomach and 2 coffees to brighten up the view and off we go to do what we didn’t do in Delhi the last time – travel to the suburbs by public bus. 6 rupees less (60 rupees to a euro), one hour sharing the highest ever density of human beings per square foot, and we reached the Qutub Minar.

Surrounded by a large park of partly luxuriant vegetation....

....“the tallest brick minaret in the world”….in other words, “the might of Islam”, an 11th century gift to the Hindu people, on the occasion of their conquest by the Muslims, constructed with the bricks taken from 10 Jain temples which once stood on the same spot.



I've lost my mojo....after a night long Aeroflot flight, in a plane older than me (Ilyushin II– 96-300).

The late afternoon Amristar express train ultimately proved to worth its’ 10 dollar ticket, not necessarily because of its’ speed or due to the huge size of the senatorial armchairs in the A/C class, but because of the delicious food, tea, snacks, cola, coffee, sweets, etc., which was being served continuously all along the journey. To my cynical amusement, a Bollywood like handy dandy near me was using his last generation lap-top to watch a soap movie in the small screen….i guess he was not acquainted with the full screen option…..not to mention that the schmuck got excited when the monitor turned black in the middle of a 5 minute kiss.....until somebody felt sorry for him and hit any key on the keyboard…but unfortunately the kiss had finished by that time.