Ten Days of Movies

It turns out you CAN go to the movies in Islamabad. There are still no movie theaters here, but for ten days a "film gala" is running at the Pakistan National Council for the Arts. The PNCA is housed at a beautiful building right by the Parliament in downtown Islamabad, the film nights are free and include an extensive buffet of tea and fried things (samosas, egg rolls, fish fingers) before the show. I couldn't pass it up.

I went to the opening night of the festival with a group of friends. The movie was "Tin Cup," telling you right away what kind of film festival this wasn't (artsy, independent, serious) and what it was (sponsored in part by Pakistan's new movie cable channel, "Filmax"). Even still, I thought "Tin Cup" was a strange choice. I happen to like the movie, and I know at least one person who considers it his absolute favorite, but a golf movie starring Kevin Costner from 1996 is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think "film festival in Pakistan." Looking at the brochure, I realized the movie choices only got weirder. Girly teen flicks seemed to predominate, with "What A Girl Wants" and "A Walk to Remember," but the festival redeemed itself by ending on a high note with "The Wedding Singer."

On Night One, the crowd seemed excited about doing something a little different on a Thursday night in Islamabad (Hong Kong or New York, this isn't), pleasantly stuffed with fried food, and ready to settle into the adventures of Roy McElroy and his leggy love interest. Things hit a small snag when the disc turned out to be defective and the host had to entertain us for 45 minutes with impressions in Urdu of famous Pakistanis while his cohort ran out to Radio City to buy a new disc. None of this was surprising in the least, and all in all, I'd say the night was a success.

I hit up the film gala again a few days later for the most respectable movie of the lineup: last Tuesday's "Casablanca." Sandwiched between Sunday's pick "Breaking Up" (I thought this was a typo for the Jennifer Anistan/Vince Vaughan flick but I was wrong) and Wednesday's tearjerker "City of Angels," the Bogart-Bergman classic seemed a bit out of place but welcome. The movie was garishly colorized (horrifying to purists and a little unsettling even to me) and the sound pretty echo-ey, but I had a good time at the movie and eating chocolate waffle ice cream cones afterwards.

Even more entertaining than either of these movies themselves was my first exposure to Pakistani censorship. The film gala was sponsored in part by the government, an announcement that meant nothing to me until partway through "Casablanca," when Rick and Ilsa are rapturously falling in love in Paris, clutching each other under the Eiffel Tower as their faces draw close in a passionate...pixellated murk. Censored! Fifteen minutes later, Victor Lazlo moves in to plant a decorous kiss on his wife's forehead...pixellated! Even this tepid marital peck was deemed too racy for the suggestible masses, even though those masses were decked out in jeans, texting on glowing cell phones all through the movie, and in every other way behaving exactly as moviegoers do all over the world. Sometimes I forget I am living in a conservative Muslim country.

It's hard to have any complaints though, when the movies are free, the tea is pink (special Kashmiri style), and the samosas plentiful. Sign me up for next year!

HGTV Pakistan

I'm redecorating. After living in Pakistan for nine months(!) I guess it's finally time to really settle in: hang curtains, paint rooms, remove old cabinets, get new lighting, replace an entire bathroom. Somewhere along the way, while trying to entertain myself in a country without bars, malls or mini golf, things may have have gotten a little out of control. But you know how it is with home improvements.

I got the landlord to let me renovate the upstairs bathroom in lieu of paying rent money for a little while. It's a good deal for him: I do all the heavy lifting of finding a contractor, designing the bathroom, picking out the fixtures, finding another contractor after the first contractor turns out to be sketchy and incompetent, managing the second contractor, making the second contractor go back and fix all his mistakes while he tries to blame them on first contractor--you know, the usual.

Perhaps home improvement is always an adventure. I don't know: I've never tried it in the United States (I'm a renter, not an owner.) But let's just say putting in a whole new bathroom in a country without access to Home Depot, IKEA, the Yellow Pages, the Better Business Bureau, or the ability to speak Urdu offers a whole new set of challenges.

There was the tussle over where to put the Muslim shower (if you don't know what that is, google it). There was trying to figure out how much a reasonably-priced toilet should cost in Pakistan. Or calculating how many ceramic tiles I would need for the floor in meters, when math isn't my strong suit on the best of days. Or the morning I realized I was brushing my teeth in a pool of water (the new sink was draining directly onto the floor). Or the shower floor that slopes away from the drain, leaving a perpetual mini lagoon in one corner. Or finding scratches on my brand-new mirror left by the housekeeper's overzealous scrubbing. Let's just say the bathroom, now finally completed, feels like one of my most incredible accomplishments since moving to Pakistan.

Another huge personal accomplishment was getting curtains up. I've been talking about needing them since July. After all, the guardshack is directly outside my front window, and I'm sure the last thing the guard needs to see is me lounging on the couch eating bon-bons in comfy pajamas as he comes off the 12-hour overnight shift protecting my life for $1 an hour. My point is that a little discretion seems called for.

In the U.S., if you want curtains, you scoot over to Target (recession) or West Elm (if you're still living large), plop a few rods and some pre-measured, clearly labelled curtain panels in your cart, and throw them up on your walls when you get home. What is it, a 3-hour job, max? That's not exactly the case here.

After living in Islamabad for a few months I tried going to the "curtain store," which was a huge warehouse room full of bolts of fabric and about ten men sitting around drinking tea. Was there something for sale here? It was unclear. How would this fabric become cut, stitched, united with rods and hardware, and installed on the walls of my house? It was unclear. What was clear was that the tea-drinking men didn't like their party interrupted by some girl yammering in English. At that point the power went off and the store went dark, putting the damper on my curtain hunt for another few months.

Next I tried a new curtain store that came highly recommended as being posh and helpful. Too posh and helpful, it turned out. The store very helpfully sent men to measure all the windows in the house, offer fabric suggestions and swatches, and then very poshfully (is this a word) wrote up an estimate of 260,000 rupees. (That's $3,000!) After blanching white with shock, I said no thank you and pictured living exposed forever, like a living art installation or a damning example of American failure to be modest.

Ultimately, like everything in Pakistan, it took word-of-mouth, insider knowledge, and the dedicated and vigorous efforts of a crew of locals to get curtains up on the windows and decorum back to the neighborhood. (Thank you, Pilar, for hooking me up with your powerful underground curtain-making operation). There was measuring, there was scribbling, there was Mr. Moktar taking a bus to Charsadda in the NWFP (the part of the country I am not allowed to visit), there was picking up 9 gaz of hand-woven cotton linen panels made with wooden looms on the river by Pakistani women (I really wish I could have gone on this part of the trip), there was washing what felt like 3 tons of hand-woven cotton panels in hot water and picking what felt like 6 tons of the lint it made out of the dryer, there were multiple hunts for rings and curtain ends, there was spraypainting of curtain ends to match the rods, there was more measuring, there was hand-stitching by Mr. Abbas, there was inserting of rings, there was installing, there were curtains. It feels like a miracle.

So, whenever you picture my dangerous life in Pakistan, dodging bullets and living on adrenaline, and that makes you nervous, gently replace that vision with reality: me hanging curtains, thanking Mr. Abbas, picking lint out of the dryer. Definitely my biggest rush of the month.

Chatuchak

I can now report back to all of you that I have found the place in the world where you can buy anything.

It's the Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok, and it's amazing. I spent 5 hours there the other day, and I can confidently say I probably saw about 10% of it. Prized items in my haul include: a super cool string of lantern lights for the terrace, candles in the shape of orchids, a woven purse, a huge bag of saffron for about $2, a cute white linen dress for $9, enough Masaman and red curry paste to make a lot of Thai dinners, woven placements, handmade chopsticks with tiny knife and fork decorations on them (utensil irony), and a beautiful painted ceramic tea set.

But those things were far from the weirdest or most exotic wares available in Chatuchak. After seeing whole stalls delivered exclusively to the following: silk flowers/snow globes filled with Disney princess dolls/life-size bronze elephant statues, I thought I had seen everything. Then I hit the "puppy" row. That's right, an entire endless chain of stalls devoted to selling every kind of adorable, wriggling puppy available in Asia. If I thought I could sneak a dog through Pakistan customs, I would have bought one on the spot. (Not that I support keeping little puppies in cages.)

Oh, and I also got to drink coconut water out of a coconut they hacked open in front of my eyes, get a surprisingly accurate carton of myself done in 6 minutes, and shovel down delicious pad thai from an outdoor makeshift set of "restaurants" in the center of the market that beat the pants off any food court I have ever seen. (Picture little old ladies manning huge wok-like pans sizzling with food that is scooped out and put directly on your plate. Why is the food SO GOOD in Thailand. Everywhere.)

Some estimates put the number of stalls at Chatuchak at 15,000, but no one really knows for sure. And don't go there when it rains unless you want to wade through water up to your ankles, apparently. (Good shopping doesn't always come with good drainage.)

Yeah, you're sweaty, yeah it feels like you're lost in a maze of endless products only some of which make sense to you (an entire stall of fake plastic fruit? spicy cuttlefish tentacles?), yeah you have to be okay with no personal space, quick currency conversion math, and a murky pricing structure, but it's something you definitely don't want to miss if you ever have the chance. Viva la Chatuchak!

Cheeseburgers in Thailand

So: it's paradise here.

I know, I know--everyone told me a million times before I came: Thailand is the coolest, the best, most awesome vacation ever. But I always go into those kinds of things with a wee bit of skepticism. How can you, oh rapturous Thailand-traveler, guarantee that I will like it as much as you did?

The answer is because who wouldn't like the following: pristine beaches, fresh tropical fruit of every description, perfect sunny 75 degree weather in January, delicious spicy brothy curries and noodle soups, friendly hospitable people, easy motorbikes to rent at all hours, a continuous sweet and gentle breeze, gorgeous rolling waves, hour-long massages on the beach for $9, and all manner of other wonderful things to do at what seem like illegally low prices.

I have been wanting to come to Thailand for about 10 years now. That's about the time that Thai food became my favorite kind of food, and when photos and stories of friends' backpacking adventures starting trickling in. (Oh shoot, and that terrible Leonardo DiCaprio movie "The Beach." I wish I didn't have to count that among my influences.) One of the best things about living in Asia is how close you are to a bunch of countries that are really too far away to visit regularly from the U.S. A direct flight from Islamabad to Bangkok is under 5 hours and is fairly reasonable if you book early.

Being here--not worrying about my security, not walking through metal detectors, being able to wear a dress in public, eat food from street shacks without fear of dysentery--feels like a real vacation. Pakistan is a wonderful adopted home, but it is still a foreign and sometimes difficult place: it's still hard for me to figure out how to get things done, to buy stuff I need, to get where I want to go, to navigate an alien and (at times, though only occasionally) hostile culture. It will probably always be like that. Relaxing in a place where everything is simple and easy and warm and light and breezy makes that better. If I stay in Pakistan for a long time, I will think of Thailand as my recuperating pod: a warm and delicious little place to fortify me for a return to whatever comes next. And to eat as much papaya and pineapple and purple dragonfruit as I can stuff in my face.

(Yes, that's the view from my hotel room. Or, more accurately, it's the view from the personal reclining outdoor lounging hut outside my hotel room. Seriously, come to Thailand.)