Islamablah

I returned from Karachi to my latest home away from hygiene, Islamabad. There’s a severe shortage of hotel rooms here, so if you come to Islamabad (and I don’t see why you would) reserve in advance. For myself, I’ve been bounced from one hotel to another, and have most recently been demoted from the luxuries of 5-star digs to a comfortable if moldy guesthouse across the street from my favorite strip mall. That Islamabad has strip malls should tell you most of what you need to know about the place. That I haven’t posted any pictures of it (yet – I must get some snaps of the wacky, 70s-style government buildings, assuming I won’t be beaten for it by the security forces) should tell you the rest.

It’s not a bad place. The city is surprisingly green, with fecund-smelling parks running alongside the wide streets. The sewers run underground. I can walk about without a headscarf, if I don’t mind being shadowed threateningly by eager cabbies. They trail slowly behind me in their yellow and black jalopies, tooting their horns and craning their heads at me out their windows as they crawl past. It’s really annoying when I try to cross a street, and can’t move forward because the cabs are determined that I should get inside rather than get across.

The cabbies go through this ritual every time they drive past a pedestrian. I want to yell at them that if I wanted a cab, I wouldn’t be walking down the sidewalk; I’d be standing at the edge of the street facing the traffic and waving, and STOP FOLLOWING ME!

But that remains a fantasy. I don’t speak Urdu, and while most people speak English here, they don’t speak it well enough to be told off in it. Besides, there are far too many cabs.