Video
Foreigner Meets Crazy Pakistani Locals🇵🇰
· 15 min · Watch on YouTube
Foreigner Meets Crazy Pakistani Locals🇵🇰
Harry and Mac’s last evening in Karachi before the sleeper train north: the national mausoleum at sunset, and then dinner on the street.
Two things carry over. The security is the strictest he has met anywhere — no bags at all, checked or unchecked, so he leaves his with the police at the gate and films the rest on a phone. He puts it down to terrorism and says Pakistan is the only country besides the UAE where he has had this.
And the meal is where his haggling quietly stops. Two cheese parathas, two pomegranate juices and a complimentary dessert come to 2,100 rupees against a figure of 1,160 he saw earlier. He says on camera that they were given the tourist price, that he is getting used to it, and that sometimes it isn’t worth arguing over — which is the closest he comes in the series to a rule about when not to bargain.
Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles, which are garbled in places; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.
Itinerary
Market stalls and a park on the walk up → the national mausoleum → the evening flag-lowering ceremony → back through the crowd → cheese paratha and pomegranate juice at a street place.
Key moments
- [01:02] No bags, at all. Security didn’t want to search the bag, they wanted it not to come in — so it stayed with police officers at the gate, GoPro included.
- [01:34] A holy day, and the grounds full of families. Guards initially say the upper level is closed, then that it isn’t; Harry reads an offer to get him further up as wanting a payment and doesn’t take it.
- [03:46] The flag-lowering ceremony at sunset, which draws a crowd, and a guard who gets brusque at the end of it — Harry’s guess is that they wanted to go home.
- [06:37] The police hand his bag back, which he notes as its own small relief.
- [07:07] His verdict on Pakistani security: the strictest of any country he has been to for taking cameras and bags into places, matched only by the UAE, and driven by terrorism.
- [08:54] Cheese paratha again, this one crisper, spicier, with less cheese and some chicken in it, and a yoghurt sauce on the side.
- [10:56] A practical worry, said out loud: they can’t establish whether the juice was made with filtered or tap water, the language gap defeats the question, and they have an eighteen-hour sleeper train that night.
- [11:26] A complimentary Arabic syrup dessert (basbousa), which Mac rates the best thing on the table.
- [13:05] 2,100 rupees, about $14, for two meals and two drinks. He believes the going price was 1,160, says they got the tourist price, and pays without arguing — see haggle with a reference price for where that sits against the rest of his bargaining.