Islamabad the Beautiful

"Welcome to Islamabad the Beautiful", road signs right after Shaheen International Airport greeted me. The surprise is this wasn't just a typical advertising lie but fairly close to the truth. Enough for the standard travel guide talk about an artificial new capital with a New York kind of street pattern and filled with nothing but ministries and embassies.
A few hours later I found myself snoozing away my jet lag in the shiny green garden of a luxury four-room house with enough exotic plants and bird varieties to call my consular host a very constant gardener indeed. Early in the morning while driving to work you'll cross the typical colourful Asian busses, bikers in shalwar kameez (the unrespectfully dubbed 'pyjama' style local outfit which is also found next door in Afghanistan), lots and lots of soldiers and all brands of police but also actual street cleaners - reputedly unseen in any other Pakistani town. The streets themselves are awash with flower beds and grassy taluds, and the state of the roads explains how the armoured diplo-car used here is not the Toyota 4WD jeep which awaits me in Kabul, but a "normal" BMW limousine. People do actually stop in front of red lights, and follow their lanes most of the time. All of this makes it neat and clean, but there's even something close to genuinely beautiful to this place: some of the recent buildings - like the French Embassy, the presidential palace or even some Court houses - have quite a bit of contemporary architectural clout. "Islamabad is a city at 15 km from Pakistan", my provocative host would say. Landmarks like the Aga Khan's Serena Hotel make it look more like a gulf state capital indeed. But with every km you move closer to the messier sister city Rawalpindi, you also gradually come closer to some "real life" - improvised shops, hardline stoically designed madrasas, you can get all you want from this part of the world - without ever making it really ugly or even just boring as the thing you'll probably experience in say Doha or Dubai. And the very last bit of the Himalayas, the Margalla hills towering over the city from all sides are just adding a simply monumental touch to it all.