Quote of the Day:

This quote comes compliments of my co-worker Lokhon who likes to show off his English speaking skills when we eat lunch together.

"Your Bangla is getting much butter."

I just about died laughing.

Property of:

I saw a black ambulance today. I thought that was odd until I read the side. "Property of Bogra Dead Person Collection Society" I'm still wondering why they had to form a society to collect dead people but consider the decision to paint the ambulance black very rational now. Now let's hope no one I know gets a ride in that ambulance.

This should be an interesting week in Bangladesh. The out of office party is calling for a strike on Tuesday. In the days leading up to that, I'll be traveling to a couple of different partner organizations with my boss for meetings. The strike should make for a nice quiet day at the office assuming that I come in early before the strike starts and leave late after it finishes. If it lasts longer than just the scheduled day they have, it might eventually get annoying. I haven't really thought through what I'll be doing the last two days after the strike but I'm sure I'll have plenty enough to do when they arrive.

I've been living "bachelor" for the last week or so. We haven't had our cook here this past week as he was off for holiday and we've been quite lazy. Last night I had mashed potatoes for supper. That might not seem all that odd unless you consider the fact that mashed potatoes were all I had. Tonight, I'm having mashed potatoes yet again. Tomorrow night Kalam will be back and that should mean a good meal. I have been eating fairly good at lunch this week though as I've been having lunch with the staff. This has typically meant that I get rice, dal, fish, some cooked spinach, and cauliflower (the in season vegetable right now). All the basics that your body needs and little more! It really is pretty good though.

Also, I should mention that I was pleasantly surprised at how my pies turned out. They were better than I would ever have imagined. Everyone thought that my cranberry pie was the best they've ever had (no one had ever had cranberry pie before).

In less than two weeks I'll be in India! I just thought I would mention that.

4 foreigners walk into a bar...

Actually it wasn't a bar it was a toy store. This past week was a busy one and part of the activities of the week was showing a visiting American and Nepali person around Dhaka. One of my newer expat co-workers joined us since he hadn't seen the parts of Dhaka we were going to. The first place we visited was New Market which is a very large market in Dhaka. We spotted a toy store and expat co-worker decided he needed to check it out to buy a toy for his host family's 3 year old son. We went inside and had many laughs at the absurd nick-knacks that were available (most of which would be extremely terrible gifts for a 3 year old boy). Then it happened, expat co-worker and I discovered the most awesome thing ever. They had a magnetic dartboard! We had to try it out of course. The shopkeepers were more than willing to oblige our desires by telling us where to stand and holding up the board for us. The epic game began with us standing in a corner throwing magnetic darts at a board being held 4 feet away from us. Expat co-worker struck first with a 60 point shot to the third ring. I followed that up with a lot of luck when I hit a bulls-eye for 100 points on my first shot. Expat co-worker followed my luck up with a bulls-eye of his own to get the crowd of 4 (2 visitors and 2 shopkeepers) excited. I then fired the next two shots which ended up being a 40 pointer to the 4th ring and another bulls-eye. The suspense was in the air as expat co-worker said, "watch this" and proceeded to throw his third and final shot underhanded!!! Now, if you didn't catch it in the last sentence, I think it is time to point out that expat co-worker used the infamous last words that all men (and women?) have a knack for using right before they do something really stupid. In this situation, the dart flew up and over the board in a beautiful arch before coming back down to land on a glass shelf which promptly shattered dropping its load of snow globes and ceramic boxes onto a similarly loaded glass shelf below it which also shattered and dropped all off the previously mentioned objects on the tile floor where they joined in the fun by shattering themselves. What followed was a first for me. I've been in many crazy situations in Bangladesh, the one that stands out as the craziest was when I hit a child with my bicycle, but I've never seen something actually stun a Bengali person the way this did (though just seeing me in some villages does seem to stun quite a few people). Both shopkeepers just turned and stared drop-jawed at the mess on the floor. Visiting American and I clasped our hands to our mouths to keep ourselves from laughing out loud. I have no clue what visiting Nepali did since he was quiet and behind us the entire time this occurred. Poor expat co-worker had an "ah crap" moment of silence. After about 5 seconds the "ah crap" moment struck me as I realized that I'm the only one in our group that knows enough Bangla to sort out how much we owe these guys. It took about 20-30 minutes of haggling before we settled on paying the store manager about $45 for all the stuff we broke. Judging from the fact that he kept apologizing and saying that he wasn't the owner, I think he felt somewhat like we should be mad at him. Judging by the smile on his face when we paid, I think it was one of the best selling days he's had in awhile.

Moral of the story: never say, "watch this."



In another one of my adventures from this past week, I went to a tailoring shop last night to have some pants made. While I was there, a middle aged man puffing on a cigarette took special interest in me. He started asking all sorts of questions about who I am, where I'm from, and what I'm doing. Having nothing to hide and being in a good mood, I answered honestly. Eventually after they get done measuring me he motions me over and has me sit down next to him. After a few minutes of additional conversation he turned to me and said, "your country...(pauses to take a puff on his cigarette which he promptly blows in my face)...is sexy country." That was my opportunity to be stunned. How do you respond to that?!? I finally settled on telling him that this wasn't proper English and then scurrying along.

It has been an amusing week. Now I'm off to bake pie!

Beef, it's what's for Eid.

This week is the week of the second Eid. It is my understanding that this Eid (Eid al-Adha), commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael. God of course provided a ram instead. You might also notice that the Islamic version involves Ishmael instead of the Jewish and Christian version which had Abraham offering Isaac.

This is the sacrifice Eid. All those who can afford to purchase an animal to sacrifice are supposed to do so and then divide the meat into 3 equal parts. One third goes to the family who bought it, one third goes to friends, neighbors, and relatives, and the final third goes to the poor and needy. In Dhaka, this means the streets flow with blood in the morning because most people who own property can afford a cow or goat here. The sacrifice is followed by lots of visiting and the consumption of more meat than one should ever consider rational. The limited experience I've had with visiting a family on Eid involved every dish (including the rice) having some form of meat in it.

Eid is also the worst time for traffic in Bangladesh. Most of those who live in Dhaka are actually from various villages all over Bangladesh. Everyone wants or is expected to go home to their village for Eid. This makes the already terribly crowded roads in Bangladesh a big logjam. Today is an exceptionally bad example of how horrible things can really get. In reaction to some political issues, the opposition party to the ruling party of government called for a transportation strike. This essentially means that no motorized vehicles besides ambulances are allowed to go anywhere from dawn to dusk. Now, add in the fact that today is right smack dab in the middle of the busiest annual transportation jam and you have yourself a real difficult situation. Tomorrow you'll have all the people who wanted to go today as well as all those who want to go tomorrow. This is the kind of thing that leads to situations like last year. Last year the timing of Eid meant that everyone wanted to leave on the same day. It took some of our staff up to 26 hours to get home by bus. Think how far you could get in the US in a 26 hour time period now imagine what it would be like if it took 26 hours for you to get to another portion of the state you live in because Bangladesh is only about the size of Illinois or Iowa.

That is why we as expats stay put wherever we are when it comes to Eid time. It may make like a bit boring but we kind of prefer boring to nightmarish.

Insights or Reminders

Ever have those days where you are reminded of how strong parts of your personality are? Today was one of those days for me. I had an all day meeting where 3 of us were working out a plan for a future project. I started off the morning tired since I didn't sleep well last night which totally killed my ability to be patient. That was reminder number 1 (I have a terrible time being patient when I'm tired). Then we started working together as a group to do our long tedious job. I personally like to work in spurts. Sometimes that means that I work with reckless abandon and other times that means I think far to thoroughly about something before I do it. Unfortunately, that isn't a working style that is conducive to good group work at all times. If I'm confident on the subject, I'll often times be really pushing the tempo but if I don't feel like I grasp the subject well, I might annoy people by asking all sorts of questions. It takes a lot of energy out of me either way. After several hours of group work I always have to have some time to myself to recoup. This is the part of my personality I might guess that most people don't really always understand. I'm an extroverted, carefree, go with the flow guy but I have to have time to sit back and process things later. When I'm processing things I often go over all the events and recognize all the dumb or awkward things I've done (yes I do indeed recognize that I've done it eventually). I also spend a lot of time pondering everyone's reactions to everything. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, I don't always turn this reflection time into wisdom later on. I suspect that I might eventually get better at this since I do seem to be trending that direction. Let's hope that holds up, I say a lot of stupid things even at 25.

On a mildly related note (since I have no clue where I was heading with that last paragraph), I did some baking the other day and that was fun! I finally managed to bake something in my pyrex dish that didn't burn. It was a chocolate chip cookie bar recipe that I got offline. It wasn't all that great but I think if I added some peanut butter to it, then it might be kind of tasty. Oh, I should probably explain that the mild relation was that I find baking to be very relaxing and therapeutic. One thing you have to watch out for in Bangladesh though is that the power goes off a lot. This can make for a lot of frustration. I avoid this as much as possible by baking late at night or early in the morning when the electricity is the most consistent, which actually explains why I'm so tired today. That reminds me, I should go home so I can go to bed.