Life in the Land of the Pure

  …  Or all work and no play isn’t quite how I roll   Every now and then I’ll use the blog to let you know what I’ve been up to.    Like anything anywhere, it’s mostly what you choose to make of it.   Starting with last weekend …. Saturdays (unless its raining) I walk the diplomatic zone (DZ) with a handful of other embassy folk.    It’s usually a core of about five with another handful rotating in and out.    It’s about five hours, taken us an hour and a half, and just before the last couple hundred meters to the embassy we stop at the Dz’s Dunkin’ Donuts.    My standing order is an Alaska coffee (cold and blended frothy with whole milk) and a donut.    That walk gets me my 10k steps.    Last Saturday night (sept 21) was a busy one.     A few of us were invited to the South Korean political counselors house for Korean food (sushi, fried chicken, and this amazing spicy fresh pasta) and a ...

 In a departure from the one previous post, I’m going mostly video clips today.   I recorded pieces of my 2-hour-ish walk around the diplomatic zone.  

I  can’t give you much of a visual tour of the embassy compound—the regional security office frowns on it because it’s difficult to avoid including the security features, which would be a no-no.     But I can share and describe the attached map.  As you enter the front gate, or Main Control Access Center (MCAC), you’d pass the American flag on your right and see on your left a two-towered building, the Chancery.    The right-hand tower as you face the chancery is the New Office Building (or NOB, kind of labeled as “chancery”), which includes many of the embassy offices such as the Ambassador and Deputy Chief of Mission, regional security office, the finance, HR, logistics, and IT functions, the political and economics sections, the defense and legal attaches … so that’s the tower I work in.    The opposite tower (New Office Annex or NOX) holds USAID, the cafeteria, the community liaison office, and the sections that deal with the physical pla...

 If you’ve asked me about my past trips to Pakistan or why I wanted to go back, I’m sure you’ve heard me mention the restaurant Monal. ( https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g293960-d1049378-Reviews-Monal_Islamabad-Islamabad_Islamabad_Capital_Territory.html ). Maybe repeatedly. It opened in the early 2000s, and I’m pretty sure that I visited it during most of my short trips (2007, 09, 11, 16, 17, 18) and at least twice in 2019-20. It is massive, with over 1,000 staff and the spac e  to seat several hundred at a time. It has a small parking lot, so some people park as far as a kilometer away.  The food is quite good—Pakistani and Middle Eastern fare—but you go for the view.  It sits in the Margalla Hills north of Islamabad, and overlooks the city at 3800 feet.  I tell people it’s also the best lesson on political economy in Pakistan. On a warm summer night, you can see the lights of the city. Then, as air conditioners in town turn on (it’s much cooler in...