Welcome to Pakistan!

So, yes, I am in fact alive and well, since I arrived here in Karachi 2.5 days ago. Can I just say I have never spent so much time in airplanes and airports as those 36 hours between Montreal, Heathrow, Dubai and Karachi. 3.5 meals, 3 movies ('The Reader', 'Frost Nixon' and 'Three Coins in the Fountain' -all excellent films, this last being a 1954 classic with the same dashing actor, Louis Jourdan, who plays Gaston in 'Gigi' (1958)), 1 book (Confessions of a Shopaholic... hey, we all need a little light reading every now and then!), 5 hours of sleep, 1 creepy dude sitting next to me on the plane, and 13 hours spent waiting between flights later... I finally got to say 'hey' to the very sweet girl from Human Resources at the Aga Khan University who got me all set up with a luckily air-conditioned dorm room prior to my arrival and met me at the airport with her driver. Yes, this is how it works here, people have drivers (and just like the South Asian colonial 'motherland', they drive on the left side of the road).

I was welcomed with some 40+ degree Celsius heat (with humidity) -apparently, this is too hot for the mosquitos (so at least these are minimal, as are my risks of acquiring malaria, fingers-crossed). I was met at the dorm by 2 other Canadian ex-pat interns / employees of AKU who brought with them a healthy dose of welcoming care, unconditional friendship, wise advice re: locking up your stuff so it doesn't get stolen, where to eat and how to dress, and bearing bottled water, OJ, TP, chips, cookies, tea and sugar. Soon after my dear family friends arrived at the dorm with further supplies, including local currency and cellular telephone. Yes, I was very pampered, taken care of and quite honestly, spoiled (which has continued up until now so far).

Meanwhile, I did notice the rainbow-splashed buses with locals literally jumping out during 'rolling-stops', families of 4 sandwiched onto a scooter weaving its way through traffic, and children selling balloons in the middle of the street over the last few days, with a dusty haze of heat rising up between run-down strip malls, construction sites and apartment buildings, and frequent power outages across the city (some recently dying electrical wire near one of the dams was apparently the culprit, and well, if you thought Hydro-Quebec was bad at fixing stuff like this up in an efficient and timely manner, you ain't seen nothin', which sucks particularly for the less wealthy who do not have generators, and so some literally stay up all night fanning their children to sleep for lack of functioning fans or AC).

I slept strangely that night (hey, there's a 10-hour time difference, so it's gonna take me a few days for the circadian rhythms to entrain to this new light-dark cycle). The following morning, I was given a tour of the AKU campus (which is really gorgeous, lots of marble and red brick, and architecturally-environmentally-adapted 'weeping plaster' walls, trees, fountains, beautiful Islamic architectural motifs, the libraries are beautiful, the medical facilities are quite impressive, as is the athletic complex... the campus landscaping and motifs are breathtaking and so much so that I shouldn't bother describing them, but will try to take some photos in the near future to share with you), watched some orientation DVDs, learned that the Primary Investigator for the project I'm working on is actually out of the country until the end of the month, met instead with her under-supervisor and other research assistant, acquired a thick background and protocol packet to read and was then told to go home, read up and rest up for a couple of days before showing up to work.

So naturally, I called up our good family friends again (I really should just say 'family' from now on), their driver came to pick me up and they having been taking care of me since yesterday evening with such love and hospitality in their lovely home, with the comforts of air-conditioning, a comfy bed to sleep in with no little ants crawling around the floor (I know, for a dorm in Pakistan, this really isn't that bad, but after scorching in the heat and the exhaustion of jet-lag, not having to deal with this is very, very nice), home-cooking (various chicken and ground beef curries, green lentils, fresh chapattis, rice, home-made baked fries, rice, a diversity of pickles -carrot, lime, garlic -and chutnees, homemade lemonade with salt to rehydrate), lots of fresh fruit (different kinds of mangoes, delicious green apricots, lotus fruit, almonds, lychees, etc...), family chatter, and motherly TLC. Today I met more of the family, helped out with some shopping (even in Karachi, a mall is a mall is a mall... except you can get your leather wallets and bookmarks engraved with your name, and buy Indian suits and jewlery, and the DVD store sells pretty much a very wide-range of knock-offs, and you can buy books at the bookstore for literally half the price we pay in North America!), visited a local fabric market, ate some more, tried on a bunch of my adopted-mom's clothes to borrow while I'm here and accessed some internet at last (it will probably be at least another day if not more before I get connected in my dorm room).

Anyway, it's back to AKU tomorrow morning to take care of said Internet concerns, and tie up some loose ends before starting work, most likely nice and fresh Thursday morning. I felt kind of badly at first about 'slacking off' so early, but I guess I was given permission to do so and I haven't even been here 3 days yet, so might as well take a bit of time to get started on the 'right foot'.

That's all for now -will keep you posted on my adventures over the coming 7 weeks! Love and hugs to you all...