Holidays part 2 - Islamabad

Continued from part 1.

One more Daewoo Express ride took us back up to Islamabad, where we intended to spend one night before getting the plane to Gilgit.  However, our plans didn't quite turn out as we'd hoped.  You see, the flight to Gilgit (further north) is in a small plane which flies up a valley between big mountains (rather than over the top) so it only flies in clear weather.  So even though they let you book seats months in advance, this is no guarantee of being able to get on the flight.  The weather was good on the day we wanted to fly so the flight went, but it hadn't gone on several of the preceding days, meaning there was now a long waiting list of people trying to get on the flight.

When we arrived at our guest house we met another family who live and work up that way who had already been waiting for several days, so our hopes were not high.  The airline never let slip where you might be on the waiting list*, so you are faced with the delightful prospect of an interminable wait in Islamabad punctuated by fruitless calls to the PIA call centre in Karachi.

*my conspiracy theory says that this must be deliberate, otherwise they couldn't operate their complicated system of priority lists, VIP seats and backhanded deals through "my brother has a friend behind the PIA desk - I'll see what I can do".  According to this family we met, you used to not be able to book tickets ahead, and you just turned up - and it mostly worked, you got your flight usually within a few days.  Now, since the advance booking system started (and given that one can easily get a full refund if you don't fly, so people often speculatively book lots of seats in case they need them, thus throwing even more disarray into the system), people have been known to go to the airport 15 days on the trot, and still not get on board.  Trying to be organised doesn't suit this country.

We decided to give it one more day, which meant we had an afternoon to look around Islamabad, courtesy of lots of tiny yellow taxis.

Taxi races - what's that, a seat belt?!

We took a nice little walk up to Daman-e-Koh, a viewpoint up on the Margalla hills overlooking Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

A steep climb to Daman-e-Koh.

Interesting little flowers.  Also on the wildlife front we saw a large mongoose,
some wild boar and a couple of jackals in the woods.

Busking Pakistani-style.

Looking down on Islamabad.

Faisal Mosque.

Botanical inspections.

Back to our travel plans:  we took one speculative trip to the airport at 6am the next day to see if we might get some no-show seats, but after failing to get on 3 flights to Gilgit and one to Skardu (which would have involved an additional 6 hour jeep ride to Gilgit), we decided to cut our losses - especially given that my parents had to be back in Islamabad in a week's time to catch their onward flight, and there would be no guarantee of getting back again even if we did make it there in the first place - and move to a hastily concocted Plan B.  Which involved hair-raising jeep rides, glaciers and sliding down mountains, and of which there will be more another day...

Holidays part 1 - Lahore

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.

The Badshahi Musjid (Mosque) in old Lahore.  (click for full size)

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.

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!

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).

Chacha (uncle) Pakistan faces off towards the Indians.

Revelry in the crowds.

Menacing guards.

Stomp stomp.

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.

Nice headgear at Cooco's.

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.

SWH project part 11 - panel beating

Or perhaps more accurately, squeezing, sticking and nut-and-bolting.

A quick catch-up to where we are now - tried to post this 2 weeks ago, but a combination of temperamental internet and holidays prevented that.  So...

Frames are up.

Our sheets of aluminium had grooves pressed into them by a guy with a
hydraulic press.  This should enable the fins to be made in one shiny piece...

...or at least it would have, had the guys at the metalwork
yard, on finding that they didn't have a die the right size,
not gone ahead and done it anyway with the smallest one
they had...

...meaning that we had to improvise a method of squeezing the fins so that
they fit tightly around the copper tubes for good thermal transfer...

...which in turn meant slicing up our nice big shiny multiple-grooved sheets
(or at least paying a guy in the bazaar with some big scissors to do it for us)...

...and slicing up our left-over sheets to fill in the gaps...

...thus giving us double the number of nuts and bolts to do
up.  Sigh.  And just to further illustrate the way things work(!)
here, we were well into our third panel (with around 286 nuts/
bolts per panel) before my boss casually mentioned "I've got
an electric screwdriver here - do you want to use it?

Panel 1 of 10.  Two of us managed six between us before
we went on holiday, by which time the guy I was working
with had learned enough to carry on and finish them by the
time we arrived back yesterday.  Twice the amount of work,
and not as aesthetically pleasing, but after 2 or 3 thousand
nuts, bolts and washers and a dozen or so tubes of silicone:
Job Done.

Mathematical plants

We've got a nice variety of shapes and patterns out in the
hospital grounds at the moment.

These ones have multiple blooms on a single stalk, arranged in a staggered
manner offset one above the other like parts of a wedding-cake on a stand.

I have no idea why this one gazania (out of dozens like it) had its petals
folded up like this, but looks pretty cool.  (click to see full size)

Fairly special even when closed up for the night.

Less beautiful perhaps, but nonetheless fascinating structure-wise.

Check out the multiple layers of symmetry in this plant - 5 then 3 then...

For Gavin

An innocuous little box of screws, complete with manufacturers label:



So imagine my surprise and delight at discovering this inside:

That's Pakistani Reuse & Recycle at its finest...

SWH project part 10 - temperature logging 2

Like I said yesterday, in the quiet patches between the bulk of the project making any headway, some progress has been made on my temperature monitoring system.  It all works happily enough on the desk; the next step is to get all the sensors mounted and wired up in a waterproof way and see if it still behaves out in the wet muddy real world.

Green and happy.
(no sensors plugged in just now, so values are nonsense.)

Nice and ordered in theory...

...a little more disorderly in real life.

Turning a 2D layout into a 3D structure and mounting it all in a tapering
cylindrical tub is an interesting challenge.

The multiplexer board will be mounted out at the panel site (in another
plastic tub), gathering together the inputs from 16 temperature sensors.
This means I only need 2 bits of wire 40m long instead of 16.

When panel overheat, SolarBot angry is!
He may even have a tantrum of irritating beeping noises until someone
does something about it.

Tribal wedding part 2

Our second tribal wedding experience was equally colourful. The groom was the son of neighbours of the family we were staying with and the two families are very close. Things were made more dramatic when the groom-to-be was involved in a motorcycle accident a day or so before the ceremonies. No-one wears a helmet here and he was no exception, so was kept in hospital overnight for observation after a head injury before being given the all clear. A carefully placed bandana was then an integral part of his outfit to conceal the worst of the abrasions on his forehead!

Once again we attended the Mehndi ceremony with the groom’s side of the family first; more food, more dancing this time including a spectacular one with multiple coloured dupattas and more guests sleeping in corners.



Most of the guests stayed the whole night and then travelled with the Barat (the groom’s party of family and friends) on a bus to the bride’s village. We snuck off for a couple of hours sleep in a bed before heading on to the wedding itself - departure time 4:30am.

The walk across the fields to the bride's village.

The groom being escorted into the village.

There was some food and then some dancing.



We went into visit the bride who was sitting in a small room with her face covered, surrounded by female relatives. The bride isn’t meant to look happy at the wedding, as:
a. she is leaving her family,
b. if she looks happy people might think she has met her husband before the wedding and that there has been some sort of hanky-panky.

After some more biryani there was some circle dancing followed by the wedding ceremony itself. This involved a few words being said, some rings and then the bridal couple walking 4 times round a pole in the middle of small tent that the ceremony takes place in.

It was all incredibly colourful.

The groom in all his finery.

The bride's face is covered by a dark green veil for the duration.

Walking round the pole, tied together with a piece of cloth.

The groom's procession, with new wife in tow, heading back out of the village.

Loading up the dowry.  The bride leaves alone on a bus full of strangers.

Following this there was more dancing while the bride goes back into her house to get ready to go. This part is called the “Rukhsati” where the bride, (complete with her dowry of household goods,) leaves with the groom and his family. Apparently this can sometimes take hours but at this wedding she came out remarkably quickly. She does this ritual crying and it is often pretty emotional as she leaves her family and the only life she’s known behind.

She then goes back to the groom’s parents house where they start their married life!

SWH project part 9 - framing up

The project continues forward in bounds and thuds, much like a sack race where the competitors have labyrinthitis.  If the momentum is not kept up then the workshop guys get diverted back onto their other work (fair enough I suppose!), so it's taken a little while to get things moving again since our little break.  So I've had a fairly quiet couple of weeks working on my temperature monitoring electronics - more on that another day.

Still, this week we've started making some progress again, with I and one of the guys making a start at getting the frames put in position.  A decent trench has been dug for the pipes between the array and the laundry - and will probably remain open for a least a couple of weeks until we get our pipes and pipe insulation sorted out.

The frames are covered in several coats of nasty brown oily stuff which apparently stops the termites getting interested in our wood, and also keeps the rain out.  The downside is that you get covered in nasty brown oily stuff while working on them.  Which begs the question "why didn't we wait until it was assembled before coating them?".  No idea - they were already being painted when I came into work one morning.

We've had a couple of teething problems to work round, of the "how-do-I-screw-this-screw-in-now-that-I've-placed-things-in-such-a-way-that-I-can't-get-at-it-with-my-screwdriver" nature, along with the more expected little-bits-of-drill/saw/file-work to make things fit together properly, but on the whole I'm quite pleased that it's coming together more or less as I'd expected.

I'm not really sure what this little concrete step is for...

A little old man with a huge beard was hired in to dig this trench for the pipes.

The first cross-piece about to be fixed in.  Note our safe and healthy
collection of home-made extension leads in the foreground.

We managed to get the nearest 3 lined up rather beautifully (though I say so
myself); the ones on the far side might require a little judicious application
of power-tools to get them quite right.  There needs to be a gentle slope up
towards the middle to prevent bubble traps.