For the last couple of weeks we've been enjoying some time off. Jo's parents came out to visit, and we took the opportunity to see a few more bits of the country. After a couple of days of letting them recuperate from the journey and showing them the compound and our workplaces, we took a quick trip down to Lahore. We'd been before (Jenny twice, Jo three times), but for conferences and business trips, leaving little chance for sight-seeing - time to remedy that then:
We took a trip into old Lahore to have a look at the Badshahi Musjid and Lahore Fort. Normally you can go inside these, but unfortunately there turned out to be a Sikh festival involving many large beards going on in their adjacent building, preventing visitors from entering the area. As we were wandering around deciding what to do next we were hailed by a lady coming down the street with "Hello, do you speak English?". She was a British Pakistani over visiting, and her relatives/friends kindly invited us up onto the roof of their nearby restaurant for a better view of things.
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| The Badshahi Musjid (Mosque) in old Lahore. (click for full size) |
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| Cooco's Den, reserved for dinner later. |
Next on our haphazard agenda was a hunt for "that street where they make the musical instruments" in the Langay Bazaar. It turned out that the Langay Bazaar actually covers a rather huge area, so it took us a rather long time, and many helpful directions* to find it. On our quest we traversed many little alleys lined with a fascinating array of shops and stalls, the most striking being a whole section seemingly dedicated to cooking pans (it's hard to see how they make a living - I mean, how many times in your life do you need to buy a dozen-piece stack of shiny metal pans, ranging in largeness from small family to medium-sized community), and another to shoes (and shoe components - crates of rubber soles and rolls of leather, real and imitation).
*People are generally quite helpful, in attitude if not in the actual help part. If you don't know where something is, you should always make a random suggestion rather than lose face by admitting that you don't know!
After a while a little old man showed us the way, and we wandered into a few shops, with the idea of seeing about a musical souvenir of some sort. In the second shop I tried out a baja (harmonium) or two - of the simpler ones (i.e. cheaper, not double-sounding, no drone stops, no octave-altering mechanisms) they didn't have the colour I liked, but they did have one that wasn't quite finished yet. They said they could finish it for me in half an hour.
This being Pakistan, we went off to find some lunch, and came back an hour later to find a guy finishing the tuning of the reeds**, only slightly hampered by the virtuoso performance of the little old teacher they'd brought in to demonstrate how it should be done. We bargained the shopkeeper down a little, but the readiness with which he accepted our price suggested we perhaps could have aimed a little lower. Never mind.
**a process which involves physically removing little bits of metal from the reeds with a file. For each note the top is flipped open to reach the reeds to be filed a little bit, then swiftly flipped closed again to seal the airbox so that the note can be sounded. Repeat until acceptably in tune.
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| Baja. Not Badger. |
My parents were introduced to many exciting forms of transport. Five people plus two rucksacks and a baja were a bit of a squeeze in this rickshaw!
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| Hold on tight! |
Next, a quick jaunt out to the Wagah (or Wagha, or Wahga, depending on which road sign you read) Border to watch the famous daily closing ceremony (which I have described previously here).
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| Chacha (uncle) Pakistan faces off towards the Indians. |
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| Revelry in the crowds. |
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| Menacing guards. |
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| Stomp stomp. |
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| They definitely pick the hugest guys for this job. And/or with the largest lung capacity. |
Lastly, back to the old town for dinner on the roof terrace of Cooco's Den, overlooking the mosque and fort. Part 2 tomorrow.
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| Nice headgear at Cooco's. |
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| Badshahi by night. |
Oh yeah, forgot to mention one of my favourite moments: as we were waiting at the traffic lights in our taxi, on the other side of the junction, executing a u-turn through the flow of traffic coming from both sides was a car balanced precariously on the top of a small forklift.
We watched in mild incredulity as the car made its stately sideways progress in the opposite direction to the flow of motorbikes and rickshaws diving around and under it. Wonderful.
