A place where the closeness of Afghanistan attracted me as never before - after all it was only half an hour to the border. It is said that Kabul would look like this if not the war.
I visited Pakistani Peshawar twice.
The climate of Peshawar is heavy and sticky. Women here often cover the whole face, including the eyes. The city is very restrictive and strongly rooted religiously.
The color of this place is sandy. Dust, smog and disorder everywhere
I contacted Muneeb, who hosted several other travelers known to me. Together with him, I managed to visit the Old Town and the local bazaar.
The number of intriguing corners is countless, as well as the diversity of people staying there. Each of the narrow streets begs you to turn into it.
Every 10 minutes someone invited me for tea, asked where I'm from, greeted us, or invited to buy anything from his stand. It was not intrusive in any way, quite the opposite.
Chubby cats, donkeys, horses, porters, motorbikes, rickshaws, wedding dresses, flowers, kitchen equipment, key rings, rings, carpets, corn, barbecue, hanging meat, donkeys parking - you can exchange without end, you can find everything here. The richness of smells and other stimuli makes it difficult to focus on one thing. Jewelers street, filled with gold jewelry, thousands of unsightly cables hanging overhead, reminiscent of installations from a museum of contemporary art, residential houses, small restaurants, excited people wondering what we are doing here. Some of them have not seen tourists for many years.
Muneeb walked confidently, telling me a lot about this place. He let me to look everywhere where I felt like, and even enjoyed himself at the same time
We decided to visit the beautiful family house of Sethi Mohalla - Hindu traders who came to Peshawar in the 19th century. Legend has it that they kept millions of rubles in the basement, but after the Bolshevik revolution, everything lost its value, and one of them for this reason committed suicide. Muneeb also showed me the beautiful, hidden mosque Mahabat Khan from 1670.
We also visited Karkhanai Bazaar, which was once famous for smuggling things from Afghanistan to Pakistan through the autonomous region of FATA bordering Afghanistan. You could also buy weapons, hashish or opium there. Now the situation has changed a bit, but we can still meet traders from this region there. We did not buy hash, but a nice perfume that you poured into a shapely bottle with a 20-person audience. They only cost 3$.
At one time, Peshawar suffered terribly from the hands of terrorists. Weekly suicide plantings ceased to surprise, and most people fled the city. After the largest attack on the military school in 2014, which killed 132 children and several school employees, the government tried to control the situation and for three years there was nothing equally serious there.
Unfortunately, 2 weeks after my departure from the city, terrorists with suicide vests again carried out an assassination in which more than 10 people were killed and several dozen wounded.