Calm vs chaos |
I BELIEVE I manifested this getaway to Islamabad.
For the past three months, life in Karachi has been so frustrating that I have been saying out loud that I want to get out of here. It is difficult to take the state of the roads, people’s driving or the complete absence of any road etiquette, besides my own increasing road rage, any longer. And then of course, there is the mess that DHA has turned into. One does not even need to get into the daily life struggles that we all face.
I did not realise that by saying ‘I need a break’, someone would actually grant me one. So here I am, a suitcase filled with everything warm that I own, as well as things loaned by friends and family.
This is not my first time in the capital but it is my first time on my own. You see cities through a different lens when you’re a solo traveller. Previously, when planning this visit, everyone had an opinion about my neighbourhood, choice of commute, where to eat, etc, and a lot of it was based on their own experience, but there was also a lot of hearsay parading as fact. One had heard that the food in Islamabad was terrible. It is not. One heard the city was very clean. It is not.
The gap between perception and reality........