Women, Men, and Bangladesh

I'm going to ramble a little bit in this post, I hope you can forgive me.

I went to Dhaka once this past week. It was just a day trip. To achieve a day trip to Dhaka you do have to put yourself through some paces. For instance, I got on the 5:15 am bus from Bogra. This meant that I needed to get up at 4:00 to get ready and go. I overslept and woke up at 4:30. Needless to say, that woke me up rather quickly and I moved fast. I got to the bus stand itself about about 5:10. I figured I'd be there for a few minutes since the buses typically run at least 15 minutes late. I was right but I saw something while waiting that I've never seen before. Two women were out jogging. They were wearing full exercise jumpsuits (think late 80's early 90's running suits)and had head/face coverings. I must admit, I stared. I couldn't help myself, it just seemed so out of place. Besides, when Jodi used to run at 5 in the morning the landlord and all our coworkers told her it wasn't safe. Speaking of women here in Bangladesh, I don't normally look at them. This mostly pertains to when I'm riding my bike. I find that if I look at them and they are looking at me, it just becomes awkward for both of us. Then by social custom they are normally forced to look away when all they really want to do is stare at me. As a result, I typically stare at the road ahead of me and give them the freedom to stare. Maybe that gives them some small amount of joy in a world that treats them pretty poorly. I also typically try not to look at men when I'm riding my bicycle but that is for different reasons. If you look at men it gives them confidence to annoy you to no end. Don't get me wrong, they are usually fairly harmless and just curious but when you have thousands of them who want to be your best friend for the vanity and prestige of being the friend of a foreigner, you tend not to want to encourage them. On the other hand, I have learned the problems of being a celebrity without ever having become one. Sometimes it is nice to have your original assumptions proved correct, I didn't think I'd like being a celebrity and I don't like the attention that I draw here. Even in the village that I have now lived in for over a year has not gotten used to me. I ride my bicycle through the village and children come and yell at me. You would think that they would eventually tire of this since I ride in and out of the village pretty much every single day, but they haven't yet. It could be that this is just a foreshadowing of what parenthood is like.

I know what else was odd this past week. When I was in Dhaka waiting for my return bus, the guy working the bus counter had a ringtone on his phone that really creeped me out. Have you ever seen Charlie the Unicorn? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5im0Ssyyus It is a fairly harmless and bizarre youtube video that was popular when I was in college. This man's ringtone was the candy mountain song where they are trying to entice him to go into the cave. Every time I heard his phone ring while I waited, I got the creepiest feeling that I was about to go into a cave (the bus) and they were going to steal my kidney. Odd but true.

Also, when I got on the bus, it looked oddly familiar. Then I realized the afternoon bus that I took back to Bogra was the exact same one I had taken at 5:30 that morning. This was later verified by the bus conductor who took my ticket and made comment on the fact that I went to Dhaka just that morning.

On a final completely unrelated note, our electricity has been crazy for the last week. Crazy in a bad way. At night it consistently goes off for about half the night. During the day, Nate said that it's been off for about 6 hours a day pretty consistently. On Friday though it was worse than usual. It went off at 8 am and was still off when I gave up on it and decided to head into the office for a bit. Later when I returned, Daniel and Nate informed me that it was only on for about 1 hour between 8 am and 6 pm. That's an ugly day. I'm not sure if this is going to continue but the amount of time it is off each night is startling and somewhat disruptive of my sleep. I guess this is life in Bangladesh.