Walking.Biking.Dancing

Sometimes cultural difference can rather be seen in the small than in the big scale. Sometimes it's not found in human rights, ideals or ideas of a nation, but in the day to day life: things that we are used to and that we start to miss.

Walking. Biking. Dancing.

These are the things that I really miss, when you would ask me (next to some bread and cheese, to be honest ;-)

Walking. For everything the car is being taken. Even though it should just be 500 metres to another spot. I like to walk on my campus in the morning, although the walk might be half an hour (I told you, the campus is big!). Astonished professors asked me later, if everything was ok with me, as I didn't take a bus or a cap for the distance. I enjoy the morning sun over the green hills, but I think they already marked me as a weird european for being so stupid not to take a car...

Biking. You'll see a lot of Pakistanis riding their bikes in the crazyness of 'pindi's traffic. But when I say Pakistanis, I mean male Pakistanis. Since my arrival in Pakistan, two months ago, I haven't seen a single female person riding a bike. Not that there is a written law against it. But law is not always written down. Law can be encoded in social taboos, and a woman riding a bike in Pakistan is simply a no-go. Nevertheless I couldn't stand it and borought once a bike from european friends, who had come all the way from the czeck republik to Pakistan by bike. It felt like having a little piece of Berlin in my pocket when riding along the pakistani highway. Just for some minutes.But it was enough to give me some part of home.

Dancing. The most normal thing, when you are a young european: you go dancing on fridays or saturdays, sometimes combined with an alcoholic drink. Not in Pakistan. At least not in the official society (as I know that there are possibilities to go out dancing where a normal restaurant or a private space suddenly transforms into a dance-nightclub, if you know where to go and on which door to knock). But normally, dancing in public is forbidden and there don't exist things like discos (maybe aswell because this would be a mingling of the different sexes, which isn't accepted in a mostly gender-segregating society as Pakistan). Maybe this is also a reason why marriages are so huge and long celebrated (4-6 days), as they give a good reason to celebrate and dance.