Adventure around Every Corner

5/10/2009
From Chris:

Dear Blog-readers,

I typed this post up over a period of two days, fell asleep last night before fnishing it all, and am now leaving in 30 minutes for our 4-day village visit with Grameen, so I must be brief with thus introduction. Life here is exiting, exotic, and pretty unpredictable. You never know what you might find here, in the palces where many people might not care to look. I think if you're really going to see Bangladesh, you have to see it in the details. So, for our friends and families back home, here are some details that might spark your imagination.


Three days ago, (5/7), we had a tasty breakfast at the Grand Prince before rickshawing over to Grameen. Banks won, again. I resent him for it.

BANGLAKART standings:
Banks—1st place with 12 pts.
Tommy—2nd place with 8 pts.
Trey—3rd place with 7 pts.
Chris (still) last place with 6 pts. Dangit.

Don’t ask me about my Banglakart performance, I don’t want to talk about it. I keep thinking that the driver’s teeth will be a good indicator of his pedaling-ability, instead of his calves, or what color sandals/ Lungi (the man skirts) combo he is wearing. Rookie mistake.

Once at Grameen, we met with Babor to nail down some logistics for our 4-day village visit. We covered it all pretty quickly, so after our discussion we had some down time at the bank. We noticed that there were several other people on the 8th (the intern floor) floor who didn’t look like they were from Bangladesh, and when we introduced ourselves to them, we found out they were fellow interns. Yippee! We met the French group (Adele, Astrid, Abel, Alex, and Marine), Simon the red-head German, Alessandro (whose mother is from Colombia,from the same city as my mom (saludos mama)), Benjamin from Chile, Tomas (the other goofy French guy), Harrison and Shannon from Pepperdine (the grad. Students), Fariha, the strange German girls, and Sarah and Simon (from Canada). We also got to meet Matt (the American who works for Pfizer), and Samir (a Bengali employee of Grameen who is speaks and acts like a Westerner). More on them later.

We headed back to Grand Prince for "lunssz" (as Babor says), but we decided to walk rather than take a rickshaw. On the way back to the hotel, we witnessed something incredible. A street snake-charmer was putting on a show right outside of the bank as we were walking by. We whipped out our cameras, camcorders, and 50TK (about 70 cents) as we watched him and his assistant pull 4 wooden boxes, about the side of two Lunchables stacked on top of each other, and set them on the ground. He slid the top of the first box open and reached in quickly, grabbing the king cobra inside and tossing it onto the ground. It hissed and turned to face him, bobbing it’s head up and down as the snake charmer grabbed his flute and started to play. His snake charmer apprentice opened up the next two boxes, which had a cobra in one, and a strange yellow snake in the other. The three snakes slithered in the center of the crowd that had gathered around the sidewalk to watch the snake charmer perform. He put down his flute and started taunting the snakes, keeping his hand steady as the snakes struck him over and over on his hand and wrist (their fangs had been removed, of course). He picked one of the cobras up while his apprentice stuffed the other two snakes into their respective boxes, and took out the final box that hadn’t been opened yet. He slid the lid off and a mongoose squirmed out of the box, growling at the snake and tugging against it’s leash as it barred it’s tiny teeth. The snake charmer set the cobra down, and all the sudden the snake serenade had become a battle royale between the cobra and the mongoose. They circled each other, hissing and growling, lunging at each other until the mongoose landed a solid bite on the snake’s neck (or whatever you would call the upper part of its body. The fight was over and the snake charmer packed away all his animals, collected his tips, and we were on our way. It was certainly one of the more entertaining life experiences we’ve had in Dhaka so far.

After lunch, we went back to Grameen where we got to spend some time with our fellow interns, until I got assigned to data entry (data entry is the worst. I hate it). We got to talk to Samir some more, and realized that he is a very interesting fellow. He was born in Bangladesh, but he grew up all over the world, speaks perfect English, has a western mentality, is very intelligent, young, social, and had saved us many times from being lost in Dhaka with his Bengali-speaking abilities.

The language barrier here is so intense. Most of the places that I’ve traveled to, the people either speak English or Spanish or both, which is mighty convenient. But in Dhaka, English speakers are rare, especially with the older, poorer Bengalis (who are usually the ones driving the taxis and the rickshaws). Gestures are really the only form of communication (at least for me, but I gesture a lot anyway. I should take up miming). It’s very strange not being able to communicate with most of the Bengalis that we find on the street, and aside from the fact that it makes moving around Dhaka and adventure (and a logistical nightmare), it really limits how much you can know about the people you meet. I’m not used to it at all.

We stayed at Grameen for a while, and afterwards we were invited to a farewell party for one of the interns who was leaving the next day. It was an interesting experience getting to the place by rickshaw, but we got to see a lot of Dhaka that was new to us. The party was on the patio of this apartment building, and all of the interns showed up. Things started out slowly at first, but we started talking with the other interns and it wasn’t long before we were laughing with them, sharing stories about our home countries, learning about each other’s lives, and taking one small step for US foreign relations (one giant leap for us facebook friend count. Yeah!) It was so much fun. We especially took a liking to Samir and to the group of le French interns. The French interns were very good-natured, funny, and sassy to boot. The night went on and we talked, laughed, ate a little, awkward-danced to strange selections of music, and squashed cockroaches.

After the party, we bid farewell to Simon, the intern who was leaving, and Samir took our mighty four to Golshan, the ritzier (but it’s still Dhaka, mind you) ex-pat area of Dhaka. The tuk-tuk ride there was about the most intense one we’ve had, complete with a rickshaw accident that sent the poor passenger tumbling out into traffic (thankfully, she managed to scramble back into the rickshaw before any more cars came, and she was fine). Samir took us to a Mexican restaurant (bizarre, I know) there, where we ate our tasty Mexican food (that isn’t readily available in Nashville, but certainly is in Dhaka. Who would have thought) and talked to Samir about his perspective on Grameen. It was very interesting. We toured the very fancy"Westin" hotel after dinner, and then hopped back in a tuk-tuk to the hotel (it was getting pretty late.)

And that was the end of that day. Although we didn’t do more than we usually do in a day, it seemed like a very long day because we met and befriended so many new people. It was all very exciting.

And then two days ago, (5/8), it was the first day of the weekend, and we were ready to go exploring, but little did we know tha our adventure was going to be 8 hours of sensory overload. It started out simple, with the usual routine of breakfast and lunch at the Grand Prince (steamed rice, chicken fried rice, plain knaan, buttered knaan, chicken butter masala, and 4 large bottles of water, and a Pepsi for Tommy, but only if it’s in a glass bottle), but after lunch we got two tuk-tuks (the three-wheeled motorized super-scooters, to clarify) and headed south from Mirpur, the area of Dhaka where we’re staying/ where the bank is located. We drove south to New Market for the day, an area of Dhaka that supposebly had a gargantuan bazaar. Southern Dhaka is the old Dhaka, where many of city’s historical sites are located. But, although it’s more touristy than Mirpur, Old Dhaka is just as gritty as anything we had seen so far, sometimes even more so.

We didn’t know what to expect from New Market. We knew it was worth seeing, we knew they sold knock-offs cheap there, and we had heard rumors of monkeys being sold for 2000 Taka (about 30 dollars). Unfortunately, we did not see any monkeys-for-sale, and we didn’t buy any cheap knock-offs, but New Market was so much more than just a market. It was it’s own organism; bustling with life.

The taxi pulled off to the side of the road and the driver started pointing to a long line of tarps set up on a long sidewalk to the left. “New market, new market” he said and pointed at the tarps. We got out of the car and walked along the edge of the market. The stands were packed so close together that they made a wall between the inside of the market and the street. We walked until we found an opening, and when we stepped in, the feeling was like that of a child crawling through a blanket-fort. There were all different colored tarps hung above the stands for shade. Each one was tied to another, and with the sun shining on them, they lit up like bright squares of red, orange, white, brown, blue, green and many more, making the sky seem like a patchwork quilt of vibrant color. The merchants would yell at us as we walked through, asking us to buy something of theirs, or take a picture of them. There was color everywhere—in the tarps, in the garments the merchants were selling, and in the little trinkets hung from racks (or put behind glass to give the appearance of being genuine).
We came out of the tunnel of tarps and stepped out onto the main street of New Market. It was so interesting; everywhere you looked, there was something worth noticing. The street was full of people who were very interested in our group. Some were after money, holding their hands out and tapping us on our arms relentlessly, bringing their hands from their stomach to their lips and making a pouty face. The dilemma of whether or not to hand out money on the streets has always been a tough. We want to be like Jesus, because he always had time for the poor, and he always had compassion for them, but we also don’t want to encourage a dependency on hand-outs. Instead of handing out cash, we bought some crackers beforehand so that we could hand out in place of cash-money. During our walk down the street, we handed our a fair amount of crackers. Some of the people on the street just wanted to meet us, and we were approached many times by random people who would always ask us our name, and “what is your country?” And then some, it seemed, just wanted attention. Especially the kids. They would go crazy when the cameras came out, cheering, dancing, and jumping up and down. They would all ask for pictures, and when you were lining up the shot, they would push each other out of the way to make sure they were the ones in the middle.
We were attracting too much attention in the street. If we stopped for more than a minute, people would start gathering around us, looking at us like we were animals in a zoo. They would take out their camera phones and take pictures of us as we walked by. It was so strange. We walked back down the way we came, and then further into the market where the tunnel of tarps turned into rows of shops, then open spaces, strip malls, bridges, restaurants, stands, traffic, kiosks, and whatever else was in those 2-3 blocks that made up New Market. It was all connected, all together—you could never tell where one part started and the other stopped.

It was so hot in that market, we were sweating buckets and our heads were throbbing, maybe because we felt dehydrated, maybe because of the adrenaline of always watching your back, and maybe because of the intensity of some of the things we saw there. We saw blind beggars with no eyes, their hands stretched out as a thousand people passed them on the stairs. We saw maimed people, dragging themselves around, and deformed people being put on display to encourage the shopper’s charity. There was so much humanity, and so much of it just seemed broken. It was really a sobering experience. But that's why we're here for, the destitute. I hope that as this trip goes on, we take advantage of thos opportunities to love those people, even if its uncomfortable. It's so easy to overlook them, and think that the next person might pick up the slack, but that's not who we've been called to be. Pray that we're able to live that out, and not just write about it in a blog.

We were so hot, so sweaty, and so overwhelmed after an hour in the market. We got two tuk-tuks (which was a long and difficult process that involved Samir translating for us over the phone, again) and headed over to our next stop in Old Dhaka, the pink palace. The palace was large and, well, pink. We met four Bengali college students there and befriended them at the palace, touring the inside with them, and then afterwards, we went and sat in the lawn in front of the palace to talk for a while. Again, a large crowd of people began to form around us while we were sitting, and before we knew it, there were 30 Bengalis surrounding us, just having a field day with their little camera phones. Our Bengali friends seemed very excited to be making American friends, and after sitting for a while and exploring the palace, they offered to rickshaw to the nearest taxi-hub with us and help us get a taxi back to Mirpur. The rickshaw ride was so fascinating, there were so many interesting people to see, but it was also very tense, because we got separated multiple times (due to faulty rickshaw drivers). We got to the taxi-hub, but saw that right there was an old Fort that we were also told to go visit. So, we decided to explore that as well, and we went with our Bengali friends and explored the fort. It was certainly a worthwhile stop.
After all was said and done, our Bengali friends helped us get a taxi back to the hotel. We exchanged emails and then were on our way, riding back through the streets of Dhaka until arriving at the G.P., were we spent the rest of the day decompressing. Nighttime pool talk with the Frenchies was fun, and then we spent the rest of the night talking about the day, the trip, and our thoughts/ feelings thus far, what we wanted out of the trip, etc. This is something that I’d certainly like to share, but at the moment, we’re about to leave for our trip. We’re so excited! I’m sure we’ll have plenty of stories when we get back, as well as details on our adventure yesterday. But until then, dear readers, say a prayer for us, and enjoy life in whatever corner of the world you might find yourself.

There's so much adventure here, around every corner. I love Bangladesh.

Keeping it fresh in the dirty Desh,
Chris