Pakistan Food

As I wrote previously, Pakistani food is dominated by meat and not as spicy as I anticipated. Here are some some food photos from my trip:


Clockwise from the top-left: lentils, sandwich, a fried sweet, a curry and a plate containing lemon wedges, fried onion and fresh coriander.


Chicken curry


The salad bar at the first wedding reception


The first wedding reception’s main dishes: bread, fish, biryani, chicken, lamb and beef(?)


A type a pakistani pancake in the foreground and the wedding cake in the background


“Thick, Fatty & Naughty Special”. A funny menu heading at the Cafe Zouk’s Karachi restaurant


The BBQ Tonight restaurant’s barbecues, Karachi


Different breads and kebabs at BBQ Tonight. Although the kebabs look very similar to Turkish kebabs, the taste varies.


A full Karachi meal with 3 or 4 different meat dishes


Biryani, lamb and bread at the second wedding reception


Sweets, including trifle, at the second wedding reception. I don’t ever recall eating trifle in Turkey and seeing it here was a pleasant surprise.


A fruit and vegetable stall at the main Karachi Bazaar


Sweets, lentils and vegetable pasta on the Airblue flight from Karachi to Lahore


Chestnuts bought from the Lahore street. The chestnuts are eaten cold with salt sprinkled on them. This was the first time I’d eaten this species. On the Lahore street I drank fresh sugarcane juice, also infused with salt.


A Lahore sweet shop in the old city


Pawpaw, custard apple and chico, three fruits not found in Turkey. The custard apple in particular tasted delicious.


Efes non-alcoholic beer. I found this in a Karachi supermarket and have also seen it in Iran, but not in Turkey where it is produced.

——————-

Pakistan Trip – Air, Plane and Airport Photos

My trip involved 8 flights on 3 different airlines: Atlasjet (Adana-Istanbul, Istanbul-Adana); Emirates (Istanbul-Dubai, Dubai-Karachi, Karachi-Dubai, Dubai-Istanbul); and Airblue (Karachi-Lahore, Islamabad-Karachi).

Here are some flight-related photos:

ON THE WAY TO PAKISTAN


Sabanci Mosque (bottom), Adana Hilton (top) and the Roman Bridge (top right), Adana.


The Taurus Mountains (“Toros Daglari”) north of Mersin. Notice the snow on some of the peaks.


At Ataturk Airport, Istanbul, were many Turkish people waiting to leave for the Hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.


Father Christmas at Dubai Airport

RETURNING TO TURKEY


One of Karachi’s airport terminals


Karachi suburbs from the plane. Karachi is a huge city and the suburbs were visible for a long time in the plane.


One of Karachi’s ports?


This cloud and cloud-shadow formation looked amazing from the air


Emirates above the cloud


A lonely Arabian Peninsula road surrounded by desert


Dubai’s suburbs on the approach to the airport



The above two photos do not fully capture the dreaminess of the sky over the Gulf


A jet in the distance piercing the sunset with its trail. Note the snow blanketing the ground.


The sun setting beneath the plane’s wing engine


A volcano mountain (Mt. Nemrut, Tatvan?) disguised by snow. Eastern Turkey was absolutely covered in snow.


Turkish Airlines aeroplanes lined up at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul

——————-

Pearl Jam, Bologna, 14 September 2006

Pearl Jam’s Bologna concert was extremely hot. By the end every single piece of my clothing was saturated.

The setlist:

Setlist: Small Town, Do The Evolution, Animal, Severed Hand, Given To Fly, World Wide Suicide, Save You, Even Flow, I Am Mine, Marker In The Sand, Green Disease, Daughter/(It’s Ok by Dead Moon), Alone, Whipping, Present Tense, Comatose, Porch

1st encore: Black, Better Man, Life Wasted, Alive
2nd encore: Bu$hleaguer, Why Go, Baba O’Riley (by the Who), Indifference

Highlights included Bu$hleaguer, Present Tense, Baba O’Riley and Indifference.

Here are some photos:



The instructions for the bus to and from the concert area

The support band My Morning Jacket

Some local fans handed out photocopies of the Italian version of It’s Ok by Dead Moon, a tag often added to Daughter. Eddie only sang the chorus in Italian.

Eddie pointing to someone in the first few rows of the crowd

Matt during his Even Flow drum solo

Stone on guitar and Boom on keyboards

3 guitarists: Mike (lead), Stone (rhythm) and Jeff (bass)

Sweating near the end of the concert

Eddie with the George W Bush mask during Bu$hleaguer



The bastard with the tambourine and the person next to him (out of shot) pushed their way through to the front row. They didn’t have fan club wristbands (so they weren’t let in early) yet they still got to the front. And he got a tambourine! When the guy next to him was pushing through I told him to f*** off. He promised me he wasn’t pushing-yeah right!

The band members line up to bow at the end of the concert

The Bologna concert ticket

Bologna, Italy

The first of Pearl Jam’s Italian concerts was in Bologna on 14 September. To get to Bologna from Bern I had to change trains in Milan. Passing through the beautiful Alps, the weather changed from partially cloudy in Switzerland to overcast and rainy in Italy. There was no passport inspection on the train, a great contrast to any Turkish border crossing.

Swiss Alps

At Bologna train station I met my cousin Graeme. We stayed in a chalet Centro Turistico Citta’ di Bologna. At EUR 65 a night it was good value but in an out of town location. Other Pearl Jam fans staying their included Finn Perttu and 4 Icelandic folks.

As I was in Bologna primarily to see Pearl Jam I only had a short while the following morning to see the city.

Graeme, Perttu and myself in front of a sculpture, Bologna

Pearl Jam, Bern, 13-09-2006

Tonight’s concert was really good. As we had fan club tickets, Karin and I could get in 15 minutes earlier than those with normal tickets. The set contained many older songs and a few surprises.

Set List: Go, Animal, World Wide Suicide, Severed Hand, Hail Hail, Dissident, Breakerfall, Even Flow, Glorified G, Small Town, Sleight Of Hand, Jeremy, Marker In The Sand, Better Man, Army Reserve, Satan’s Bed, You Are

1st encore: Garden, Low Light, Do The Evolution, Alive
2nd encore: Last Exit, Why Go, Rocking in the Free World (by Neil Young), Yellow Ledbetter/(Little Wing by Jimi Hendrix)

The following photos were taken from the second row on the right side (general admission). On this side the crowd was more unruly than the other so we had to watch ourselves.


Jeff, Matt and Ed


Matt doing a drum solo during ‘Even Flow’


Mike, Stone, Jeff, Ed and Matt


Ed near crowd

Bern, Switzerland

Bern is Swizerland’s capital. Like Basel, the main language of Bern is German. Karin, an AIESEC trainee in Turkey in 2003-2004, met me at the train station. I travelled with Karin to Iran in 2004.

Karin lives in a wonderful roof-level apartment. She has decorated it with various pictures and souvenirs from her travels.

The view from Karin’s flat

For breakfast we ate bacon rashers and nothing else. For lunch we baked and ate a delicious tomato quiche accompanied by more bacon rashers and a bottle of red wine.

Did I say I missed bacon?

Bern’s historic center is world heritage listed. In the late afternoon we went for a walk around the city.

Bern has bridges, historic churches, fountains, arcades and many other interesting buildings. It is a wonderful place to walk around on a sunny day.

On the way back home we stopped to buy doner kebabs, ordering them in Turkish. I hadn’t eaten an European doner since probably 1999. It tasted delicious, although CHF 8 is far more than the 2 lira paid for a Turkish doner in Mersin.

At the train station we met Julia, an AIESEC Adana trainee from back in the old days of 2001.

Julia, myself and Karin

I really enjoyed meeting up again and I thank Julia for travelling 1 hour to Bern and 1&1/2 back to Zug just to say hi. It is a pity he could not have stayed longer.

After Julia left Karin and I drank a beer at a beer garden. By that stage I was falling over asleep. On the way home we visited an area full of character and interesting people under a bridge…

Cappadocia Under Snow!

Located in central Turkey, midway between Mersin and Ankara, Cappadocia (Kapadokya in Turkish) is an amazing area. In my opinion, it is one of the two absolute must-sees in Turkey, the other being Istanbul.

Although I have visited Cappadocia three times, I have never seen the sandstone chimneys, formations and caves under snow. Recently, friend C. Gizem sent me the following photo collage. The photos are of the town of Goreme under snow. One day I will witness this first hand…one day…