😎 Likedeeler rising 😎

likedeeler (66)in #travel • 7 years ago (edited)

Some popular Karachi sites, courtesy of Wikipedia

After a short nap, I woke up refreshed and eager to take on the wonders of Karachi.

I went down the hallway where I was greeted by a Pakistani guy in his forties.
After the exchange of a few pleasantries he asked me if I was German. I was not too pleased that he had figured out that one so quickly, apparently my at that time admittedly very thick accent had given me away. When I affirmed his suspicion, he continued the conversation in almost flawless German!

Here I was, travelling all the way to Pakistan and the first guy I spoke to at the YMCA apart from the receptionist spoke fluent German, just did not seem to be able to escape.

It turned out that he had studied chemical engineering in Germany, could have got a decent job in Germany, but patriotic as he was, had returned to Pakistan to help develop his country, but alas, his country was not interested. He had lacked the necessary connections to get a good job in the chemical industry (it´s about whom you know, not what you know), so he decided to use his other skill acquired in Germany and started to teach German as a foreign language at the Goethe Institute in Karachi. He was still single and lived permanently in a room similar to mine, albeit with a few more appliances to make life easier.
Since I was a native speaker he invited me to visit his students at Goethe Institute.

I had met the best possible guy!
A modern, westernized, liberal Pakistani, fluent in German, so whenever we did not want other Pakistanis to understand our conversation, during our excursions through Karachi, we spoke German. I think we spoke German anyway most of the time when it was just the two of us, because he was happy to have a native speaker as his new friend and wanted to practice.

What is the most important ingredient for a memorable travel adventure?
It´s not the sightseeing, not the temples, the forts, the sights of which you can also buy on postcards. It is sometimes nature. I have experienced sunrises over the Himalayas where I was just sitting there in awe, thinking, if I fell down dead right here and now it would be perfectly ok, no regrets, that´s how happy I was at that moment. I had encounters with tigers above and sharks and even a swordfish under water, so animals were an important ingredient of my travels, or nature, in all its wonders in general.

But the one aspect which makes your adventures truly memorable are the people you encounter on your way. That´s true for all areas of life, so also for travelling. The more and deeper you connect with the local people, the more languages you speak, the richer your experience.
But you have to give the people you meet on the way a chance to spice up your life by being flexible and for this you need an open and flexible mind, that´s your most important ingredient.

In Part One I mentioned that I had planned my trip meticulously, alotting each place I would visit the exact amount of time it deserved in my opinion.
I don´t remember exactly how much time I credited Karachi with, a few days I guess, since I wanted to head for the mountains as soon as possible.
Karakorum highway, Chitral, Swat, Gilgit, Skardu, Nanga Parbat, names and places increasing the heart rate of any salt worth his salt (ok that´s a maritime pun, not really appropriate here, but I´m just a sucker for wordplays, by any means necessary).
So to cut things short, instead of a few days, I ended up staying in Karachi for three weeks, because of this one guy and all the people I met through him and, spoiler alert!, a few days after we had met he told me that soon classes at Goethe Institute would take a break for summer holidays and he wanted to go to the mountains and asked me if I wanted to join him.

Being the beautiful and flexible mind, I of course agreed, who wouldn´t have jumped at the chance to travel with a local whose mindset was closer to my own than that of his countrymen, but who of course understood their mentality and spoke their language.

So already at my first destination, just a few days into my carefully planned adventure (sometimes I think careful planning and adventures don´t go well together), I threw all planning over board, and I can tell you, whenever I did that during what would end up being five and a half instead of the planned four years (could not even get the duration of the trip done according to plan) things would work out just fine.

Now, for the linguistically inclined, of course there are different languages in the different parts of Pakistan, but if you speak Urdu, the national language, like my new Pakistani friend did, you get along fine.

I myself had prepared for my travel adventure by taking up South East Asian Studies, Ethnology and Indology for one semester at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
Those were the good ol´days when you did not pay anything at all for university education in Germany and even got good health insurance and other benefits with it.

I quite enjoyed my time there, delving into the weird and wonderful world of Linguistics, where you first had to learn like a whole new language, all those terms, to be able to understand what the fuck the professor was talking about. Fascinating, but probably also as much ivory tower as it could get, as far away from the real world as possible, the real world for me being the rough, rude and ready-mix world of German construction sites, with the occasional hammer being thrown at you.

Word of advice: If you cannot travel to foreign countries for whatever reason, or you are a sedentary vegetable who doesn´t want to, the next best thing you can do is changing spheres in your home country, exploring a different parallel universe, like from bricklayer to university geek. That will also broaden your horizon.

My main subject was SEA studies were I was mostly learning Bahasa Indonesia, so when I finally arrived in Indonesia after about two years into my travels, I was like semi-fluent there, leading to nice interactions with the locals.
Whereas the Indonesian language class was three times a week, it was an intensive course, the Hindi class I took as part of my Indology course was only once a week. I could have also taken Sanskrit additionally, but even a genius like me doesn´t take lightly to learning three languages at the same time, so I declined that offer, though it was free.

And in typical academical fashion we started our Hindi class by studying the Devanagari alphabet first, then some stupid sentences based on grammar rules, meaning when I finally arrived in India, my conversational Hindi was next to non-existent. But, in a country with a literacy rate of 52.2 % in 1991, I could read everything and could pronounce it! I would not necessarily know what it meant, but if you read out loud the writing on the wall, people think you understand everything.

So whenever I would go to one of those small eateries where the menu was written in chalk and Devanagari on a board and order “Ek aloo gobi, teen chapatti!“ (it´s not tin bread I´m ordering, but three pieces of Indian flatbread), while pointing exactly at the place on the board where it was written, the idea of not giving me the local price never occurred to the owners. I know because the price was written there too, albeit in Indian numbers.

But I am getting ahead of myself, since we are still in Karachi.
It so happens, that Hindi and Urdu are quite similar, the difference being sometimes in the use of loan words. Whereas Urdu would borrow from the rich treasures of Persian and Arabic, especially of course in matters of religion, Hindi would also borrow generously from Sanskrit, also many times on religious grounds, the differences probably more pronounced in the official, written, “high“ forms of the two languages than in the everyday usage by the people.

So while in Pakistan people sometimes applauded me for my “beautiful Urdu“.
Now being the rude, blunt German, I immediately told them that I spoke Hindi not Urdu, not exactly an icebreaker given the history of on and off tensions, including full-blown wars between the two countries, but people ususally forgave me my blunder, some even kept on insisting that it was Urdu I spoke, even offering to teach me the alphabet which I respectfully declined, reasoning that I would be only in Pakistan for three months.

Now 25 years later, with a mind even more open and flexible than in those days, I sometimes think, I should have given it a try, if only to do the people offering to teach me a favour. They were obviously quite happy to meet a foreigner who could speak a bit of their language and wanted him to be able to write it too. But since the Urdu alphabet is based on the Arabic alphabet with all those circles and dots, I was simply too lazy at that time, just couldn´t be bothered.

Ok, since this has become quite long already, thanks to tangent after tangent, I learned the art of blowing up trivial stuff by the mesmerizing magic of language from @heart-to-heart, we will venture into Karachi next time.