Video
Foreigners try Pakistani food 🇵🇰
· 18 min · Watch on YouTube
Foreigners try Pakistani food 🇵🇰
A day in Karachi spent with Abdul Raheem, a local freelancer who attaches himself to the trip, negotiates prices on their behalf, drives them round the city, and refuses — repeatedly and successfully — to let Harry or Mac pay for anything, including a meal he doesn’t eat.
Harry asks him directly whether that is Pakistani culture or just him. The answer is the most useful thing in the video: it depends on the person. Guests generally get looked after, but Abdul is clear that another local might well have paid only for himself, and that Harry shouldn’t generalise from him.
Two harder edges keep it from being a soft day. Police stopped them for not carrying passports and were, in Abdul’s reading, looking for a payment rather than a document — his advice was to hand over a small amount and leave rather than argue, because arguing with the wrong officer goes badly. And children asking for money at an ice cream shop got ice cream instead, which Harry explains and which immediately produces a request for more.
Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles, which are garbled in places; amounts the transcript leaves ambiguous are marked unverified.
Itinerary
Markets in the afternoon → picking up a car for a driving tour of the city → the national cricket stadium → a public sports park → Burns Road for chicken curry → an ice cream shop → back to the Airbnb.
Key moments
- [00:00] Abdul has already paid for their meal and their taxi and won’t be argued with. Harry’s phrase for it: he won’t even let us pay.
- [01:05] Hospitality, qualified by a local. Asked whether the host always pays here, Abdul says it depends who you meet — he won’t let them pay, someone else might not offer. Harry notes that three people in three days have all refused his money.
- [04:24] The national cricket stadium, and next to it a public sports park — running track, javelin, archery, football — that they walk into free, no membership.
- [05:35] A race against a sprinter training for the next Olympics, over a short stretch, which Harry loses respectably and enjoys enormously. A five- minute improvised workout on the equipment follows.
- [08:40] The police stop. Neither of them was carrying a passport, and the officers looked for a payment. Abdul’s advice, given afterwards: pay something small — he puts it at 500 to 1,500 rupees (from video – unverified) — and leave, rather than argue, because an officer who has been drinking can make it much worse. In the event they paid nothing.
- [09:46] Burns Road, which he compares to Bangkok’s Khao San Road: a strip of independent food shops.
- [10:27] Chicken curry cooked over fire, with chapati and a yoghurt sauce that takes the heat down. 1,230 rupees for two, about $7 or £5.
- [12:34] Abdul tries to pay for the meal he hasn’t eaten. They refuse and pay it themselves, which takes some doing.
- [14:42] Ice cream instead of money. Children asking for cash get pistachio ice cream — five of them — because Harry says he doesn’t know where money would go. They ask for more straight afterwards. See buy the thing, don’t give the cash.
- [16:16] Back at the Airbnb: a mouse and several cockroaches, on night three. Harry is careful to say he doesn’t think it says anything about Pakistan.