Well, you don't really expect that when having a short snooze listening to radio 4 on the internet after a hard days sightseeing to suddenly hear that you are living under martial law and in a state of emergency. Not a pleasant thing to wake up to. Especially given that earlier that day we were driving around the area with the Supreme Court and PM's house (and the Red Mosque, which is actually white and rather small).

But if I didn't have any access to the news, I wouldn't really know that anything was going on. Last night we were told to stay in (technically known as hibernating), so what do girls do when living under martial law? - watch Becoming Jane on DVD. It was pretty good. We also tried watching Musharraf's speech on TV but given that it was in Urdu (with a few random but fairly important English words scattered in it like democracy, Supreme Court etc) we had a rather limited understanding. There are no TV stations operating now apart from state run ones (and National Geographic ?! last night) but we have been able to get news from the internet. Although the BBC have said that mobile phone networks are down, ours are all working fine.

Today, we have been at the VSO Programme Office learning to cook Pakistani style. The end result was fantastic (and not very spicy so I didn't have to resort to yoghurt). But the day started by having to go down to the market to buy the vegetables.... A slightly embarrasing experience given that I forgot all my Urdu, tried saying please in Spanish and then tried paying a guy in dollars. Oooops. It was all a little too much for my poor brain, which doesn't bode well for the following weeks when I'm going to have to go by myself. Also, the seller person seemed a little overwhelmed having 6 western women coming up to his stall trying to practice their Urdu, and getting him to respond was like pulling teeth. But we did manage to buy the vegetables in the end.

At the moment the streets seem calm, and our guest house is miles away from any government buildings. We are keeping a low profile and basically waiting to see what happens. Think we might watch a few more chick flicks tonight.