Pakistan. Part II. Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Abbottabad

November 6–13, 2011

Pakistanis are incredibly friendly and positive people. As soon as anyone spots a white man with a camera, they immediately start demanding to have their picture taken. Sometimes they’ll even grab you right by the hand and refuse to let go until you snap a photo. Taking a photo of a woman, however, could get you beaten up.

A major holiday called Eid al-Adha is celebrated here annually. Families all gather together for the holiday, and then the country spends another two days in a relaxed and peaceful state; almost all the shops are closed during this time.

On the eve of the holiday, cattle is decorated and brought to the market to be sold. It’s probably nice when the goat you’re buying for tomorrow’s sacrificial offering is all spiffed up with pink spray paint.

The animal is taken home.

In the morning, everyone goes to the mosque.

And then disperses back to their homes, where they slaughter their goat, cow, sheep or what have you right at the front gate.

Those who are unable to butcher their animals on their doorstep take them to the city’s makeshift slaughterhouse. There, they receive a number token, take a seat and wait while one butcher reads a quick prayer and slits the animal’s throat, another skins it, and a third cuts up the carcass.

The color of the blood is incredibly bright, it turns out. Like paint from a can.

All that’s left of the pretty cows and sheep is a few strings.

Everything is cut up into familiar meat-counter-sized pieces right here on the street.

Islamabad

A completely uninteresting, sterile, boring, soulless and empty city, designed from scratch some fifty years ago. Islamabad once again proves that it isn’t possible to build a good city from a blank slate (other examples of such failures are Brasilia and Canberra).

Islamabad is a city of civil servants and embassy workers. There’s a high-rise hotel being built in one spot, but other than that it’s all generic two-story buildings.

Roadblocks are slightly more frequent here than in other cities.

One of the capital’s bus stops.

A trash can.

Who would have thought that Islamabad’s trash dumpsters have relatives in Uglich. The dumpsters here also have flat runners instead of the usual wheels.

The city is designed in such a way that all electrical boxes, transformer vaults and other infrastructure equipment is housed in green cabinets right on the street.

An illegally parked car being towed away.

A trained monkey.

Food cooking in a street stall.

Rawalpindi

The satellite city of Islamabad, where most of the population lives. There’s cheaper housing here, normal markets, picturesque streets, crowds, heat, fumes, smoke, stench, life. In some ways it resembles Hurghada.

Minibuses, ornately decorated and adapted to local capacity standards, course the streets.

Compliance with traffic rules is nominal at best, the chief instrument used when driving is the horn.

A sign separating traffic flow into lanes.

The pedestrian legs which can be seen trekking all around Australia make a sudden appearance here.

Chickens for sale.

Women.

A boy.

A young man.

A middle-aged man.

Junkies shooting up heroin.

An old man smokes heroin.

The city has an open sewage system. Wastewater flows through ditches right in front of the buildings.

There’s a river that runs through the city. Its banks have been thoroughly and lovingly covered with shit.

Oh! And here’s the process itself (also see the beach in Liberia).

There aren’t enough bridges, so an enterprising local resident created a manually powered cableway.

Abbottabad

A brick factory in operation.

There’s nothing particularly special about this city.

Some major military academies and schools are located here. Otherwise, it’s just life running its course as usual inside concrete houses protected from prying eyes with tall fences.

This is the place where Bin Laden chose to live.

Here’s his house—the white one in the center of the picture. It’s impossible to get any closer because everything is guarded by the military. Why they’re guarding a house where no one lives any longer is a mystery.

Cows graze on a burning trash dump and send greetings to their girlfriends in Shikotan.