So, after 3 days and 3 nights of traveling we arrived from Eastern Iran to the capital of Pakistan. Our Chinese friend left us and we continued with Hameed whom I met on the bus. Hameed speaks a pretty good English and as I found he's a very mindful and honest person. He's from Quetta, Baluchistan (so he's also one of the people wearing pyjamas and a beard :), studies in Islamabad, soon finishing. He helped us to find some lodging which was not easy because more hotels refused letting us stay for being foreigners. They said they might have problems with the police if we stayed there or something. Without Hameed it wouldn't have been easy to understand them. Then, after we found some place Hameed gave us his number and told us to call them the next day, after we had a big sleep, and he'd show us some nice places. And so it happened.
Islamabad is an artificial capital, it's been built in the 60s next to Rawalpindi. Today these two are so-called twin-cities, separated by a big overpass as two very different worlds: Rawalpindi is dirty, while Islamabad is pretty clean. Rawalpindi is all noisy of horns blowing and packed with rickshaws, while in Islamabad there are only taxies, rickshaws are forbidden. Rawalpindi is a chaotic, natural city, while Islamabad has an artificial grid-like plan, dividing the city to equal-sized "sectors". Rawalpindi is brown and gray, while Islamabad is green and white.
We stayed in Rawalpindi.
Our friend Hameed is a great guy, after we slept a half day we called him, he fetched us in our hotel and took us around in lots of interesting parts of Islamabad. He showed us many kinds of Western-like and Pakistanian shops, then this modern mosque we mentioned (we went inside too but it was forbidden to take photos in there), a beautiful park ("Rose & Jasmine Garden"), a fancy but fairly cheap restaurant and surprisingly many transvestites protesting for legalization of gay marriage:
Our experiences in Pakistan so far are that people are very nice and helpful and as there are hardly any foreigners in the country, they stare at that little a lot, which didn't frustrate me much but it did Judit. While talking to Hameed it turned our that "love-marriage" (as they say here) is as rare here as it is in Iran, it's more likely that the family picks a partner for their children, and the rest is up to them: getting divorced is not impossible if they don't like their partner but it's looked down upon and so it's quite rare, they are more likely to accept the situation. Men are quite famished for women though, for example Hameed sent us about 10 SMSes after we left, many of them with the purpose of tempting Judit back to Islamabad. Anyway, not being offended by this, we are very thankful for Hameed, he made our stay in Lahore a much deeper and nicer experience.
We left Islamabad quite quickly because we only have a 7 days visa to Pakistan, and we still wanted to see Lahore.
