Cricket Mania

If Europe is all about football these days, Pakistan is all about cricket – any day. In public parks and in open areas people will gather in order to play some rounds. At first wasn’t very fascinated; a guy is pacing up before he is throwing the ball over to another player who is simply trying to forcefully shovel the ball as far away as possible with his bat. Impressing enough the batter misses the ball in almost half of the times he tries. After having watched some hours of the sport on television, I have come to learn the rules a little better; in fact I find it quite an enjoying sport. And there’s always cricket on television. If you can’t watch a live match, you can always watch British West Indies play New Zealand in the Cricket World Cup of 1979. Knowing that I will get to see plenty cricket during my stay, I throw myself onto the bed in lack of a coach and plan to see the Euro Championship matches when I get home in the evening. I plan to, but I never actually do. Either I decide to fall asleep or I fall asleep without deciding to do so, and if I don’t, you can bet there’s going to be another load shedding just about kick-off time.

Load shedding

Ok, I feel I owe you an explanation here. “Load shedding” was one of the first new Pakistani concepts I got to experience in practice. As the power supply of Islamabad, and the rest of Pakistan for that case, is rather insufficient, the electricity is cut off for several periods of about one hour each every day. The Telenor offices of course have a power generator, and luckily my guesthouse has one too. However not everybody has, and the load shedding is creating loads of frustrations throughout the country.

Margalla Hiking

One of my new spare time activities here in Islamabad is hiking the Hills of Margalla. After my abandon attempt to make it up there described in my previous blog, I found a Pakistani, Fahad from the Finance-division to show me the trails of the Margalla Hills. Last week we made three Margalla trips after working hours and the hiking is an excellent way to get a little exercise while enjoying the locale nature and weather. On the end of one of the trails, there is a restaurant serving ice cream and mango shakes, so there goes my exercise. I still get to enjoy the nice weather though; in a typical Norwegian fashion I believe that the sunnier and warmer the weather is, the better it is. I clearly understand I have to revise my perception of good weather. Actually the Pakistanis are blessing the rain and it’s funny to see them being so satisfied with a grey, cloudy and rainy day.