Exploring Modern Lahore, Pakistan 🇵🇰

A short one. Harry and Mac move out of the big hotel and into a smaller one in Gulberg, Lahore’s modern district, at £50 a night — about $65 — and go looking for dinner on a street of upmarket restaurants.

The genuinely useful detail is the wifi. Ten days into Pakistan they have not found a connection they can work on, including at a $200-a-night hotel measured at 9.3 Mbps. This place runs 20–30 Mbps, which reverses the assumption the previous few videos would leave you with: the expensive hotel was not the fast one.

Dinner is Lebanese rather than Pakistani, and Harry makes a point of explaining why — they have eaten Pakistani food every day for ten days and wanted something different, which he is careful to say is not a complaint about the food.

Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.

Key moments

• [00:00] The new hotel, the Avari Express in Gulberg: £50 a night, king beds, a balcony he won’t use, and a large modern bathroom.
• [01:06] 20–30 Mbps wifi, the best they have found in ten days in the country, and enough to upload video on. He drops it to 15 himself by downloading seven files at once.
• [01:37] Gulberg, the modern side of Lahore: wide streets, shopping, and a strip of upmarket restaurants and rooftop cafés.
• [02:39] Cafe Beirut — a Lebanese place, Pakistani-owned with a Lebanese chef and manager, which is Mac’s choice; he spent three months in Lebanon this year.
• [06:20] Harry’s first shawarma, and his verdict: the garlic sauce is what makes it. Mac’s, as the one with a basis for comparison, is that the Lahore version holds up against Beirut’s and the main difference is the bread.
• [09:34] Saffron tea — no milk, floral, sweet — and the claim from the table that saffron is worth more than gold by weight (from video – unverified).
• [10:05] 2,500 rupees, about $14, for two, which he rates good value and pairs with what he calls the best service he has had in Pakistan.

Extracted pages

• Lahore
• Pakistan
• Mac