In Pakistan

So we have reached Pakistan safely. We are in Islamabad right now but will be leaving for Wah Cantt (in-laws) later today.

Michelle did well overall during the journey, but it still was very tiring for her. It was a really long for one thing. For another, she likes to sleep in absolute quiet. So her sleep was very disturbed and in small patches. Also, the change in air pressure caused her lots of ear pain. Since she absolutely refused to drink from her sippy cup at the time, it was a bit of an effort to get her to stop crying.

Michelle loved Frankfurt airport where she walked about all over the terminal. She wasn’t too fond of Dubai but didn’t like Islamabad airport at all, wanting to be held all the time.

Child meals on planes are just useless. This is exemplified by the fact that Delta had fried chicken in Michelle’s dinner and skim milk in her breakfast.

Emirates rocks as an airline but they need to move their headquarters because Dubai sucks. It looks more like a shopping mall than an airport. When we got through security, we entered into a huge mall. There were no signs close by which said anything about the “transfer desk” or the gates. Also, we were just changing planes in Dubai but had to go through security twice. Why? Have transfer passengers been known to do crazy stuff?

Car rental with Avis turned out to be nightmare since their airport office didn’t have any record of my reservation while I had records from the Avis webite as well as email/phone conversations with Avis-Pakistan. Finally they decided to honor my reservation, but I hated their process overall and wouldn’t recommend them to anybody.

The car seat and the seat reservation for Michelle in the plane worked really well. It took some pressure off us and we were able to rest as well. However, I didn’t get to read anything during the journey, something that hasn’t happened before.

And is it just me or has pollution in Islamabad increased a lot in recent years? Right now I cannot really see the Margalla hills from my parents’ study and they are close by.

While in the US, the US-VISIT program photographs and fingerprints visitors, Pakistanis have decided that it would be a good idea to do the same for their own citizens. At the immigration desk at the Islamabad airport, we were all photographed, though some of the photos I saw on the guy’s computer screen were very badly framed with the chin cut off for example. At least they are not fingerprinting.