| Pakistan update #2: Polishing our mansion |
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2008-07-29, 21:38 Our new apartment is technically a mansion, it seems, since the workmen the owner sent over to clean up used a big metal can of something called “MANSION POLISH” to clean the stone floor of our rooftop terrace. We splurged and decided to get a fancy apartment on the top floor of a big apartment complex a couple of hundred yards from the beach, with the aforementioned rooftop terrace, another side terrace (perfect for bbqs) and wide views of the ocean.
Our apartment building is of a similar size to the one you see in the foreground. Below is the view toward inland Karachi, showing the buildings packed in—and this is by no means a densely populated part of Karachi you see. I'm not sure where the sea fog and haze ends and where the smog begins, but these days the sky is this kind of diffuse white all the time.
It’s far roomier than anywhere either of us have lived before, and we’re a little daunted by how empty is it now. But on the plus side, the rent for the whole thing is about the same as my share of the rent for our apartment in Cambridge, Mass. The apartment also has a servant’s quarters, but we’re not planning to get any live-in help. We liked the idea of putting our washing machine in there, since it’s sort of our only servant. But unfortunately there wasn’t a grounded, 3-prong plug in that room to power the machine. So far, our fittings in the house consist of the washer, a bed, a frig, and some floor cushions we just got yesterday. Getting the bed was an adventure. We enlisted the help of a guy at the office where Sarah works. Then two women that also work there decided to come along, too. With our little Suzuki Alto was packed, and we headed off to the vast furniture market in Liaquatabad (aka Laalu Khait), one of the areas within greater Karachi. A lot of the beds there were the fabulously airbrushed and hand-painted beds like we’ve slept on in guesthouses in Karachi and, last summer, in Abbottabad. The guys running the furniture stores seemed flummoxed that we were more interested in the plain and simple stained wood beds. We were relieved to find a bed we were excited about—a black metal frame with flowers on it, which has some flair without being overwrought. We've told a bunch of people we know here about our getting our bed, and most of them either say, "Where's Laalu Khait?" or "Ooh, I hear it's kind of scary." None of our elite friends, it seems, have been there. But there was nothing especially scary about it, although it was a bit run down and very dusty. The next big purchase will be our own car. For now, we’re driving a rental. I feel better about that, since if it gets dinged, even if we have to pay for repairs, at least when we get our own car, we’ll have gotten through our initial learning phase. The traffic here can be a bit insane, with four or fives lanes of cars crowding into a street marked for only 3 lanes, motorcycles weaving between the cars, plus people walking along the edges of the street (where there are no shoulders), and people crossing the street in random places, sometimes strolling across the street despite traffic bearing down on them. But we hadn’t seen a single accident—until our first day of driving on our own. A crazy motorcycle rider tried to shoot across a road without stopping, and ran right into the front of a car. Luckily for everyone, the car almost stopped in time. But it still pinned the biker's leg between his bike and the car bumper, making him sprawl across the car hood and twist his leg. When he rolled his bike away from the car, the car's bumper fell completely off, although it was undented—making me wonder how it would do in a heavier collision. Since then, we've seen only one or two other accidents—pretty low, considering how much traffic there is here, and that when there is an accident, people don't seem to be in too much of a rush to get the cars off the road. When we saw the accident, were we on our first trip in our car, headed straight to the gas station. When we got the car, it had an empty tank of fuel. So empty that after we drove 3 blocks to our guesthouse, the car refused to start again, and we had to get one of the managers at the guesthouse to drive us down the street to fill up a couple of Nestle water bottles with petrol. With that little bit of fuel, we didn't chance any detours on the way to the gas station to fill up the tank. In a recent New Yorker article, Peter Hessler told about his experience with driving in China, where rental cars also have the special feature of coming with empty, or near-empty, gas tanks. He said that when planning to return a car, people try to put in the minimum amount of gas they’ll need so that they’ll return it empty and not waste any money on gas they didn’t use. When Hessler told someone working at a car rental agency that in the US, they have a rule that you have to return the cars with a full tank, and if you don’t, you get fined. Hessler said this is much more convenient than receiving the car with no gas. The car rental man scoffed, saying it would never work in China. It seems things are the same here. I'll leave you with one last car-related note. Here's a photo from the main English-language newspaper in Karachi, the Dawn.
To make it easier to read, here's the caption:
We saw some tow trucks at work a few days ago on a busy street in the heart of Karachi, where we were parked illegally, although we were still sitting in our car. (Disappointingly, it was just a regular tow truck, not a car forklift.) The tow truck approached a car behind us, also parked illegally, and when the owner ran out to protest, then the tow truck slowly rolled away without a fuss. The towers went across the street and stopped near some other cars, lingered near some cars as if threatening to tow them, but then left. So much for parking enforcement. Stay tuned for more from Karachi, including the tale of the ten-dollar celery, and our budding Museum of Bad English! |
