This is the full entry for week 1
Thursday (Day 1) - I'm here, unpacked and fed, so here are a few
first impressions and events before I hit the sack for a siesta:
BA are pretty good really as I've no complaints about the food or
film options ("Charlie's Angels Full Throttle" was pants but "Pirates
of the Caribbean" was most entertaining) but would have throttled the small
child behind me who screamed and kicked my seat for hours on end without the mother
blinking an eye lid.
The flight was full of old Bengali women who reminded me of those
characters off "Goodness Gracious Me". Colin would be proud.
The baggage reclaim, customs and leaving the airport was not as
slow and stressfull as I'd been led to believe. I was even invited to go through the
diplomatic channel at passport control!
"They do humidity well here" as Allison remarked as we
stepped out of the airport's air-conditioned building.
I had my first experience of eating with only my right hand at
lunch amongst Westerners at the VSO office. I wasn't expecting it and was feeling a
little sleepy so just got on with the job "in hand".
I surprised myself with a reflex reaction of not brushing my teeth
with tap water but grabbing some boiled and filtered water from the fridge.
The beds are very hard and I like that.
There are basically no street signs to speak of so it's all about
local landmarks or counting left / right turns. The distance from the office to our
flat is ridiculously short but when I'm not sure of the way in a strange land it's
amazing how unadventurous I can become.
2 guys in trousers and shirts sitting on mopeds in a dirty back
street drinking afternoon tea out of a matching china cup and saucer set. Classy.
Power cuts that take away the fans / air conditioning and let the
heat back in.
Friday (Day 2) - After a cracking night's sleep (no seriously) I got
up around 9am though could have sworn it was 11. The girls had been up since dawn
due to the jetlag - ha! To be honest I didn't really achieve a great deal today
other than go wandering around the area to get my bearings (very important), check
out my e-mails (keep them coming chaps), a meeting at the VSO office to go over our
induction schedule and a spot of shopping for dinner and a few essentials. Once
again the prices were astonishing, and on the way home we bought some snacks from a
street vendor at 1 taka a throw i.e. 1p!
This evening 2 volunteers come round to say hello. Alan (crafts
designer from England) and Harrison (HIV/AIDS counselling advisor from Uganda)
stayed a few hours and chatted, amongst other things, about porn in islamic
countries apparently. I say apparently as Allison and I nipped out to the local and
very cheap Internet cafe (15 taka / hour) and I negotiated a way of connecting my
laptop directly to the network. This time tomorrow my web site will be up and
running, well hopefully.
To add to my first impressions I have to say how overdone some of the
guidebooks and personal views are about people staring and/or bothering you. We have
not had anything remotely like that, and to be honest we have been delighted with
the friendliness of the people we've met. Fingers crossed that it continues that way.
By and large things are going great, I can't wait to start Bangla
lessons, and I'm looking forward to watching Wales - Canada at the Canada club with
a cold beer or 2 a week on Sunday. Seriously, I could kill for a cold beer right now...
Saturday (Day 3) - Having been out a few times, had an extended
shopping trip on Saturday (yesterday) and had my first few rickshaw rides I feel
reasonably qualified to share a few views of life in Dhaka:
It's safe, not at all dangerous in fact. The people just get on
with their lives, look at us with curiosity, but generally don't bother us. If you
walk too far in busy areas then after a while beggars will follow and tap you on the
arm but nothing aggressive. They are persistent but can you blame them?
To avoid the above mentioned hassle, and to sweat less, the best
way to travel is by rickshaw. We avoided this initially as we didn't know our way
around or how to guide them if things went wrong but now we do and use them more and
more. Dhaka has more rickshaws than any other city on Earth (600,000) and they are
extremely colourful and breezy.
It's a very dirty city, extremely poluted with all the trafic, and
very noisy. I'm not just talking about the noise of the trafic as you also have the
calls to prayer and just people everywhere as there are 13 million people here!
With the dirt and poverty come the smells that are also just
everywhere. Funnily enough, it was only waiting outside the airport that I took
offence to the odour as since then it's been a mixture of the sweet, the tolerable
and the appetising.
We seem to spend out lives boiling and filtering water to drink,
and buying food in the markets as nothing keeps in this climate. We are always wary
of being ripped off as obviously we look rich but are in fact only marginally better
paid than our colleagues. Our Bangla isn't good enough for haggling (no really?!) so
either we avoid the hassle and buy or just go elsewhere.
Things change here at an unbelievable rate. Buildings seem to grow
out of the ground over night, mobile phone networks installed, new cheaper cooler
shopping centres opened etc. It's all very dynamic and hopeful but can also be quite
destabilising, especialy for landmarks for rickshaw rides!
I'm quite big compared to everyone else! I was a M in Europe, I'm
XL over here. I bought a shirt yesterday and brought it to the till (a M), the
assistant took one look at it and went and got me a XL!