Pretty uneventful trip over. Flew Etihad for the first time. Nice enough and the flight was at least half empty, so I got a pair of seats to myself. I'd never been on a long-haul flight that empty; I wondered if they were losing money on it. Managed to sleep fitfully for seven (!!!) hours. Maybe I'm getting better at this napping/sleeping sitting up thing. On the flight I also read Elmore Leonard's Cuba Libre, which I'd picked up at the Stone Ridge book fair. Not a great book, but good plane reading.
Got to the hotel around 3:30, then unpacked, flossed and brushed, and popped two benadryl and an ibuprofen. This morning, MJ and I had a meeting with an economist from DFID (British USAID) over breakfast. He was bright and knowledgeable and, as MJ and I discussed after he left, quite blunt and realistic about his questions and views. It's refreshing to meet civil servants like that.
Our first meeting at the office is in twenty minutes so I'm back in the room, writing this with Al Jazeera in the background -- seems the chief prosecutor in the corruption case against Benazir Bhutto (who is dead but who was major-league corrupt, guilty as all get-out) was assassinated earlier today. Other major Pakistan headlines: the government is going to deploy 70,000 troops to guard polling sites on May 11; an Indian prisoner on Pakistani death row for espionage was beaten to death earlier this week and yesterday his body was returned to India; 74 people "and counting" have been killed in election violence already. Islamabad is very calm, though.
More later.
Got to the hotel around 3:30, then unpacked, flossed and brushed, and popped two benadryl and an ibuprofen. This morning, MJ and I had a meeting with an economist from DFID (British USAID) over breakfast. He was bright and knowledgeable and, as MJ and I discussed after he left, quite blunt and realistic about his questions and views. It's refreshing to meet civil servants like that.
Our first meeting at the office is in twenty minutes so I'm back in the room, writing this with Al Jazeera in the background -- seems the chief prosecutor in the corruption case against Benazir Bhutto (who is dead but who was major-league corrupt, guilty as all get-out) was assassinated earlier today. Other major Pakistan headlines: the government is going to deploy 70,000 troops to guard polling sites on May 11; an Indian prisoner on Pakistani death row for espionage was beaten to death earlier this week and yesterday his body was returned to India; 74 people "and counting" have been killed in election violence already. Islamabad is very calm, though.
More later.
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