story-tellers

Where are you from. Where are you going to. What did you like the most. How about Visa XY.

Meeting other travellers can be tireing in the respect that most of them ask the same questions and most of the time the answers might determine whether the talk goes on or not.

A friend and I thought about alternative first questions to begin a talk between travellers. What do you like to do the most in your life. Where are you in your daydreams. Tell me a story.

Because the most loved of all travellers are for me the ones that can connect a story to their travelling. My friend's story was that he loves to learn new things all the time. Mine was maybe that I don't want to accept fear as a determining boundary for myself and the search for something behind the news. Another traveller was travelling to mediate in Burma and another one cycled to a friend in Singapor to visit him. All these little stories found their way to the campspace in Islamabad.

There are just certain spots in Iran aswell as in Pakistan where overland-travellers seem to gather, exchange, find other people to travel with or re-meet. The camping place in Islamabad is certainly such a place. Next to the Rose and Jasmine garden where you can take a nice evening walk and the Aabpara market with fries wrapped in newspapers or mango milkshakes with a extra bowl of ice cream. The campingspace is just a small piece of green grass and old trees, some toilets and a cold shower, unfriendly personals, who seem just able to say “stay or leave today?“ “ 50 rupees“ (understandable in the case that the campingspace should get government support and doesn't see anything due to corruption. Even the electricity for the electric wire is taken illegal as there's no money for it).

Sometimes this little piece of land can mean home. When a good group of people gathers, sharing chai and ideas, playing tarot at night and cooking together near the caravans and tents. Then questions more than the „where from/where to“ can be asked, or can be skipped with a good story.

where I'm mostly

Quiz
Where do I spend most of my time?

Possible answers:
a) drinking tea in a chai-shop b) learning at university c) chilling at home d) roaming around bazaars....

no

it is answer number e) in traffic jams.


Being stuck in a bus somewhere between horrenduously honking cars, overtaking with maximum speed in a taxi while there is no place at all but place is being made by the persistently shoving of the driver, or just listening to bollywood songs while "rien ne va plus"(although everyone tries to tell me that the traffic is far worse in India, I can already see the similarities of what I have heard about...).

While being stuck one starts to look closer. And I am still every time amazed on how much you can put on a car


or a bike


and where you can find additional space where there has been none before

(although most of these pictures don't show the described traffic jams, believe me, they are there!it was just easier to picture its phenomenas without the buzzing traffic around...)

honesty

Not all the things that one might discover in a new country will be pleasant. To be frank: sometimes the things were disgusting or horrifying to me. For example, when I saw here a lot more people without arms or legs than I would be used to in Europe. Or when smelling the burning of waste or people searching in there for anything eatable (well, you can see that in Europe aswell but maybe not to this extend...). Or when seeing the displays of the butchers or the animals stuffed together.


Most of the time the animals were sitting in a small cage while they could hear the screams of their fellow mates being killed above them. They must feel the fear, the death, I thought.


And it is hard sometimes to look at the hanging meat here and there when you pass through bazaar streets (maybe just for me as a vegetarian, I don't know)


But on the other hand, I feel it is much more honest. We're killing and producing animals in a massive scale in Europe, most of the time accompanied with an overproduction that we put again into the waste-bin. Here just the animals are being killed that can be sold and eaten aswell. And the people see the animals first, before they decide to take one of the head-cut off fellows with them.

I think in this regard, the dealing of this society is much more honest than in my own, as there most of the people don't have any connection between the meat on their plate and the animal that probably has never seen the light in his fabric-produced life...

Pakistani curiosities

Pakistanis love kite flying.
I had already heard about it from my Urdu teacher, when I was in Germany, but I couldn't imagine to what extend it would be.


Every now and then by looking around you'll see the kites over the roof tops of the next houses. And there's also a kite-flying-festival every year. My host always says: people get so crazy about the kites that they forget where they are. And if they should be standing on the rooftop, they will even fall down, just because they are to buisy with their kites...

The only thing that might still top the kite flying is cricket. There are young boys up to businessmen playing cricket in parks and on the greenery next to highways nearly everywhere. In times of Ramadan they install even lights at special places to encourage "night-cricket"...

Another striking thing are the henna painted beards and the hair both of older women and men. I tried to find out more, why they colour their hair in such colours varying from deep red to orange. One explanation given from a lahori friend, was that Islam tells the people to take care of themselves and to beautify them, even if they get older. (well,...different kind of taste, I guess ;-) Another more practical explanation seemed to be that the henna colour cools while the heat of pakistani summers...

Most of the kiosks look like this:

Pepsi, Coke...-advertisement (whatever american brand sponsors) decorates the outside of the shops.

Transport can come in different ways (this is the electric cable of a flatiron)...

And even the nature looks different to me...(but that's maybe just because I'm not enough knowledgeable about botanics)


And what do these guys do at every corner of the street in Rawalpindi?


They are musicians. They wait for work all day and night long, sometimes they practice, on the street. Until someone comes to hire them. Then they get in a car all together and drive off to their gig:

What are you doing here?

(this is not me...don't have dreads, don't worry ;-P )

In my experince, answers to the above mentioned question (I study here for one semester) can arouse two kinds of reactions.

Either a “wow. How did you get to that idea?“ (which is mainly intensified when the person I talk to encounters that my family is not with me in Pakistan and that I am on my own. Then my parents are praised to be brave to let me go...).

Or a “...and what is your research topic?“

The first question is easy to answer. The second one is a bit more tricky and I just found out why and what makes it so difficult for some people to understand what the hell I'm doing here.

In Europe it is a common practice to go for a semester abroad while studying a bachelor- or a master-degree. It is seen as a treat of

being open towards new experiences and some people expect it in your cv. Mostly these half year or year-experiences are organized ventures and you have to apply for them (like the European Erasmus-Programmes or the programmes of DAAD in Germany).

In Pakistan something like this doesn't exist. Not only, that there aren't students normally coming from other countries to study here (an exception might be the International Islamic University in Islamabad), but also that it pakistani students don't go for a semester abroad. If they should go abroad, then it is because they'll study all of their university career in another country (most likely in the UK).

International students might come to Pakistan mainly for research and fieldwork and not for a semester (as it is not a Barcelona-erasmusparty semester that you will study here). The reaction of my fellow students when encountering me, was mainly, to ask me, if I was a new professor at their institute.

The second kind of reaction (what my research topis is) is

likely to be accompanied by the thought, that I must be specialised in something. „Pakistan is so diverse, how can you come here and just learn about „Pakistan“? You must be specialised in the Baluchi way of marriage or in the women in the Skardu region or in a special language? You just want to learn Urdu? Why not a smaller language or Pashto or Punjabi?“.

In these moments I have to explain my background and to tell them that I'm first of all here to get aquainted with all of these differences and that to an average european citizen, Pakistan in general is already a quite unusual specialisation.

So, what am I doing here? Every day life anthropology. Learning by living.

renting a place

What do you do, when you want to live in another society, when you don't just want to pass through, seeing the hotel rooms or camping spaces, but actually plan to stay for longer? How does it function in Pakistan to rent a room? What kind of papers do you need for it and how do you find out about your different options?

After struggling in Berlin to rent a flat, I was prepared to look for internet-annonces, present various identity-proofs and go through personal interviews. But Berlin isn't Islamabad.

How do the people live here? What's an average rent? How do students live? Do they share flats as european students do and party all weekend long in their own space?

First of all: most students that come from further away live in hostels, that are either on the university campus or nearby. The hostels are segregated by gender and boys don't have access to the girl's hostel vice versa. Students who have their family or a relative in the city they study in, live with them.

As I didn't feel like moving into the girl's hostel, I decided to search for a pakistani family.

It is quite common for foreigners, who stay longer and who don't have the priviledge of coming together with an organisation that already provides them with a place, to stay as a paying guest with a family. As a single woman it is better viewed to live with a family and not to live alone. But how to find a reliable family that wants to house a girl from abroad that is studying in Pakistan for one semester?

You ask your pakistani friends.

Pakistan is a society, which is still greatly influenced by the treat of being a face-to-face society. Most of the things are being solved by knowing someone, who knows someone, who can help. Looking in the internet or in a newspaper for an appartment or a room is not seen as being safe. „How can you know that the family is a respectable one? They will charge you a higher price, when you go there as a foreigner than if I speak with them as a pakistani first!“ a friend of mine told me. Ok. I waited.

After two weeks and several researches by different friends, a family was found: my new pakistani family! Consisting of two woman (and a child and the people who help in their household), who are running an artschool in Rawalpindi.

I met them, they showed me the room, we drank tea together and I moved in three days later. No paper work, no financial security to be proven, just a good talk and trusting in the ones that have aquainted us and in the friendship that runs over two corners and extends to me, who is now part of a new family. My pakistani one.

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.