LAHORE RESTAURANT REVIEW: LEMON GRASS

I'm the first to admit that Thai food is not my favorite menu choice. I can think of a ton of other styles of food that I would prefer to Thai and that was one reason I was glad to get out of Bangkok and over to Lahore, if even for just a little while.

But towards the end of the trip I decided to check out Lahore's first (and only) stand-alone Thai restaurant: Lemon Grass, and I'm glad I did.



If I was giving out style points, then this place would get high marks across the board. It looks like Thailand. It feels like Thailand. It even smells like Thailand (lemon grass, to be specific).

They even have several Thai staff members and everyone is dressed in traditional Thai clothes.



When you walk in, you're even greeted with the standard portrait of Their Majesties King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit, something you'll see in every business establishment in Bangkok.



The interior designers of Lemon Grass really went out of their way to make this place look authentic. Their are Thai-style statues:



Paintings:



Masks:



And other details:



The walls really reminded me of walls at the Jim Thompson house (see my article at One Man in Bangkok).



And the food was pretty good too. They offer all of the traditional Thai dishes, and they weren't too spicy for me (which Thai food in Bangkok usually is). Again, I am not a connoisseur of this kind of food, but some of the people I was with have lived in Bangkok for over ten years and one of them commented that Lemon Grass offered the best Thai food outside of Thailand that he has ever had, hands down.



So next time you're in Lahore and have a hankering for some Thai cuisine, look no further than Lemon Grass. You can't miss it, it's the place that looks like a teak-style Thai house that has been magically transported to Pakistan.

FLEETING IMAGES OF LAHORE

I only spent a week in Lahore, but during those seven days I covered a lot of ground. For that reason, I was not able to spend as much time at certain sites as I would have liked to, so I am compiling them all here.

These next three images were all taken at different shopping areas around Lahore. To me, the really illustrate the hustle and bustle that makes the city so vibrant at times.







But Lahore is not all traffic and confusion. It has a reputation as a very green city, with many peaceful parks. This one is called Racecourse Park and it is home to a polo field (one of Pakistan's more popular sports).



Shalimar Gardens was conceived by Shah Jahan in the 1600s and is the only surviving Mughal garden/park in Lahore. It is fairly large and contains a lot of impressive buildings, pools and fountains. The current King and Queen of Thailand visited Shalimar Gardens in the early 1960s.











The Old City is considered to be the heart of Lahore. It is surrounded by a wall with thirteen gates. The Lahore Fort and Badshahi Mosque are part of the Old City, but there is also a thriving shopping district with winding streets where one could really get lost.





There are a bunch of other mosques in the Old City as well:





Getting around Lahore is easy if you have the patience to deal with congested traffic jams at various times of the day. The city streets are places where cars, trucks, carts drawn by horses and mules, bicycles and motorcycles converge to create chaos and disorder.

Another form of city transportation is the auto-rickshaw. People familiar with Bangkok will recognize these three-wheelers as "tuk tuks."



Buses in Lahore are canvases for artists to express themselves through wild and colorful designs. This one reminded me of the bus the Beatles drove in "Magical Mystery Tour."



The Minar-i-Pakistan (aka Pakistan's Tower) is often referred to by locals as Pakistan's Eiffel Tower, although it's not nearly as large. It was built in 1960 on the same spot where the Pakistan Resolution was signed twenty years earlier.





One could spend a few half a day at the Lahore Museum if they had the time to examine each and every article it contains.



Like any worthwhile museum, Lahore's has plenty of historical artifacts:





And not everything here focuses on Muslim culture. There is a Hindu section and this statue of the fasting Buddha is a famed image around the world:



Art both old and new also has a home at the Lahore museum:





On the outskirts of Lahore along a dried out river is what was explained to me as a "gypsy village." I had never seen one of those before.



And while Lahore may be the cultural hub of Pakistan, I'm not sure if the latest James Bond film "Casino Royale" has made it there yet, but in case it hasn't it's nice to know that Pappo Gujjar is around to save the day.

PATRIOT GAMES

If anyone would have told me that a flag lowering ceremony involving Pakistan and India would have been one my fondest memories about my trip to Lahore, I would have thought they were crazy. A flag lowering ceremony???? How exciting could it be???

Well the answer is quite exciting. And fun too. Where else can one go and stand at the "zero point" of the two countries? In this picture, the guys on the horses are in India and I am in Pakistan.



This is an event that has been taking place about an hour before sunset on the border of Pakistan and India every day since 1948 (excluding rainy days and times when the two countries were at war, the last time being sometime in the 1990s). The crowds start to gather on both sides of the border about an hour early, eagerly anticipating the evening's festivies. The event is so popular that grandstands have been built to accomodate everyone (in fact, they were building additional seats when I was there).



It should be noted that men and women have to sit apart from each other. Tourists and other outsiders seem to get the best seats (for whatever reason).





The time leading up to the actual flag lowering is filled with bombastic music (I assume they are national anthems and other patriotic songs) and marching soldiers. Chants of "Pakistan zindabad!" (which means "Long Live Pakistan") are shouted to thunderous applause.





The soldiers do their best to help get the crowd whipped into a frenzy. This mainly involves animated marching and exaggerated moves designed to outdo what their counterparts are doing over in India.





By this time, the crowd is electric. Then a bunch of people run the Pakistani flag back in forth in front of the screaming masses to further incite them. It's nice that kids get to be involved in this kind of extreme patriotism.







Finally, an old guy comes out with the Pakistani flag and a matching shirt, screaming "Pakistan zindabad! Pakistan zindabad!" over and over. Apparently he has been doing this every day for years.





The whole atmosphere is one of a major sporting event back in the U.S. The only thing that was missing was "the wave." If they could somehow manage to coordinate that across the border of two countries, it would certainly be a spectacle to behold.

The crowd on the Indian side of the border was much larger than the Pakistani side, which makes sense when you compare the populations of the two countries. I was told by my Pakistani friends that what they lack in crowd size, they make up for in crowd passion.

The actual flag lowering lasts only a few moments. When it is done, the gates are closed and the two head soldiers from each country salute each other and then march their folded flag back to safekeeping admidst huge ovations.



Afterwards, you can hang out and take photos with the soldiers. All of them were more than willing to pose.



I found the whole thing to be fascinating and I felt an overall general sense of patriotism when the ceremony was all over. It is kind of inspiring to see people coming together to celebrate a mutual love for their country. It was very cool to be a part of. Someday, I would like to witness the same ceremony from India's side of the border (just to say I did both).