Hotel Melrose Inn Lahore

... Hurry up! Hot! Hot!'<br><br>The old man turned out to be a con man-cum-tour guide for the mosque. He gave me a bit of information about the place in his nearly indecipherable English and then showed me a few tricks with regard to the acoustics of the place. In the end, he made about three bucks worth of Pakistani rupees off me and I ignored him as he sad faced me for more. Nearby, sitting in the cool shade of the interior of the mosque, was a large family of Pakistanis who ...

... that we'd been doing in the last couple of months, got some breakfast and then went to see his family. While I was there one of the neighbours came round to 'tidy me up' after my time in the northern area and threaded my eyebrows. I just had time to get back to the hotel for a quick shower when M arrived - he's got 5 days leave so we could explore more of Lahore together and it was great to see him again. I'd seen most of the ...

... on a ring similar to Princess Di's engagement ring, except with a large pink tourmaline as the center stone. They made it specially for us. On Valentine's Day, we had our driver take us to the Pearl Continental Hotel in Lahore. After the bombing in Islamabad, they had really stepped up security. We had a security check with six guards at the main blast ...

... such as a whispering wall and spots with strange acoustics - J showed me a few tricks there. Cooco's Den restaurant - it's expensive to eat here but luckily for me I was allowed to go and have a look before it opened in the evening. They plugged in the generator so that I could see the inside of the old mansion building including some original features and an unusual collection of art and religious statues. It also had an amazing rooftop view of the ...

The trip had been almost too easy up to this point, so I suppose that we should be glad that our time in Pakistan has been hard. Most of our days have been spent next to the wonderfully hygienic and easy to use toilets of Pakistan - I really don't know how people get used to these holes in the ground; it's tough on the knees of Englishmen. Beyond the inconvenience of failing to master this toilet method ever since exiting Europe some two months ago, our stomachs have finally ...

... not at all unlike a third-world rave. Lonely Planet even goes so far as to suggest that you should schedule your trip around it and so I did. My last night here would be spent watching the Pakistani Sufis, whom unlike their whirling Turkish cousins don't work themselves up in a spinning frenzy to transmeditate -- rather they smoke hash bongs fashioned from fruit and throw up a lot. At 22:30 in a courtyard packed cheek-by-bearded-jowl with swaying Sufis I sat scrunched up ...

... madam". I assured him that at 5' 10" with paper white skin I was not about to blend in no matter how hard I tried. While very appreciative, I humbly declined because well, I don't care for wearing pajamas outside the house and no amount of frequency of seeing these costumes will change my mind. That said, I still knew better than to run about like a harlot with free-flowing mane in hot pants and Candies. Wearing a head scarf and a full-coverage caftan, and ...

... in a tight green t-shirt and shiny black boots sat sipping his chai. He offered me a seat at the plastic table, and we waited for his superior officer. I was a bit nervous, but the guy who came out was making jokes nonstop, and I soon forgot to be angry at the Indian officer on the other side. Three bus rides and three hours later, somehow I found my way to the Regale Internet Inn, the only respectable backpacker hostel in Lahore.

... in one of those deafening Middle Eastern tongue-wagging-death-shrieks just for good measure. Shell shocked I stand in a parking lot in Pakistan looking haughty and practically daring someone to bother me. I throw up in my mouth just a little bit and I'm pretty sure I turtled. I'm standing next to a truck that's parked in the middle of a row and is empty -- it's leaking gasoline. Flashes of recent car bombings dance in my head. Two men in matching long white shirt dresses walk ...

Lahore is on the east side of Pakistan, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and is the second largest city in Pakistan after Karachi. I instantly liked the city and it had a nice vibe about it. I visited Lahore Fort which was built, damaged, demolished and rebuilt several times before being given its current form by Emperor Akbar in 1556, when he made Lahore his capital. The fort had an appealing empty kind of feel as I walked around it and some nice gardens ...