Hyperballad

According to my diary, I’ve got about 5 weeks left in Bangladesh and then it’ll be end of chapter, moving right along folks, please GFC clean up after yourself so when I’m done spending all my cash, I can find gainful employment come March. Pretty please.

This gives me 5 weeks to post about the 5 things I’m going to miss loving, and the things I’m going to love not missing. Oh yes, a list, one of my favourite things. Instead of doing the ole’ bullet point number, though, I thought what better farewell to the ‘desh than a long and drawn out departure, spread out over – yep – 5 weeks. So, taking it away at number 5, I bring you:

Things I’m going to love not missing

1. No, no way, oh no, uh uh, that’s not even…you mean it’s…my dinner?

The first thing that probably comes to mind on reading a sentence like that is a scene out of Survivor, you know that old reality TV show where they stuck a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Australia) and made them do silly things like obstacle courses, jigsaw puzzles, and eat rare and exotic food like bull’s balls, spiders, brains etc. But that’s not the direction I’m headed in here.

What I’m talking about here is B – L – A – N – D. Not a word I associated with food from the sub-continent before coming here, but wow, how things change. At first it seemed like a dream. Lentils, naan bread, mixed curried veggies, tropical fruits, roti for breakfast and sweets for dessert. How can you go wrong?

Wrong, though, is exactly the word for Bengali Cuisine. Actually, I take that back. The word I’m really looking for is yellow. Everything here is yellow. Yellow dal, yellow vegetables, yellow meat, yellow bread, yellow fruit, yellow yellow yellow. And while I have nothing against bananas, and think they’re actually on the tasty (and safe) side of the Bengali food equation, there is just something slightly disturbing about an entire nation’s food relying so wholeheartedly on one colour. Especially when you’re from a country that says something about three colours on your plate at every meal (or a rule to that effect). And colour on my plate is something, as a vegetarian, I normally excel at.

Not here I don’t. It’s all yellow.

A typical meal in a Bengali restaurant goes something like this. Get a big bowl of yellow, oily water which we will hereto refer to as ‘dal’, despite the complete lack of, well, ‘dal’ (which means lentils). Throw in a small side bowl of yellow vegetables, or ‘shobji’ cooked to within an inch of their life then thrown into a big pot full of yellow, oily water and simmer until everything takes on a mush-like consistency. Throw in a plate of white rice (which is destined to become yellow as you ‘moosh’ the dal and vegetables together), a side of cucumber, some salt and a slice of lime and there you have it. A la carte, deshi style.




For the meat eaters, it gets slightly better as you get to add yellow, bony, deep-fried fish or fatty, yellow goat/chicken/beef to your plate, depending on Today’s Special.

As a surprise, you never know how fresh the food is when it reaches the table with worrisome speed, suggesting a whole load of ‘here’s something I prepared early…much earlier…maybe even yesterday, or the day before that…’ which can leave you feeling like you’re just a mouthful away from salmonella. Lip-smacking stuff.


Things I’m going to miss loving
1. ‘Hey, kali!’

Bangladesh is deservedly renowned for it’s cycle rickshaws, and the art that adorns them, which some rickshaw wallahs take very, very seriously. Combine this cycle power with the motorised CNGs, and the buses of all types from the dodgy ‘I-need-to-upgrade-my-travel-insurance’ variety right up to the ‘here’s your water, your biscuits, and a blanket, just nod in my direction and I’ll be up in a jiffy to help’ kind, and you’ve got pretty much the whole country covered.

Transport in general is something Bangladesh does well. In fact, it would be entirely possible to not walk more than about 10 steps in any direction for a week or more. All you have to do is walk out the front door, shout 'hey kali!’ to the nearest empty form of transport, and off you go. It’s cheap. It’s everywhere. Come to think of it, it’s like the McDonalds of the sub continent, and just as likely to contribute to the obesity epidemic overtaking the middle class here. It is scarily easy to say ‘why walk?’ when, for 20 cents, you can pay someone else to do your sweating for you. (…Unless it happens to be one of the ten months of the year here when it’s stinking bloody hot and you’ll be sweating anyway…but I digress).



Now every time I curse and swear at the lack of taxis in the city on a Saturday night, I can reminisce about how, “In Bangladesh, we’d be able to just stick out our arm and…”. Oh, I’m going to be such great company when I come home.

Girls just wanna' have fun

Or so I thought until a couple of my favourite girls landed at Zia International Airport in Dhaka about ten days ago. It turns out girls not only want to have fun, but they want electricity to power fans, oral rehydration salts to power bodies, and regular toilet stops to, um, well, yes.

Lucky for Penny, Sally and I, the 'desh has largely been able to provide all of these between the 'race across the nation' cultural program I designed for us. Think glitz and glamour (the outfits), think exotic, exciting overland journeys (yay for travel insurance), think 'authentic experience' (we'd love to stay for lunch in this tiny village with no sanitary facilities but we simply must run...)

The ten days Penny had didn't sound like much until we began. You see, it all started very civilly with Pen and I easing into our Dhaka days with a cup of the desh's finest (okay, only) Lavazza:



Before exploring the wonder that is Old Dhaka (think The Rocks*), Karwon Bazar (think Flemington Markets), the artsy fartsy parts of Dhanmondi (think Newtown), the shopping and eating mecca that is Banani (think...Paddington?), and the expat club scene (think, er, alcohol).

But things became rather hectic once Sal came to town (yes, there were tears, and they were mine), and the brave girls they are have been whisked from one end of Bangladesh to the other via every means of transport that has turned up. Whether it be back of Bangladesh's environmentally sound answer to the ute:



Pen and I on the back of a flatbed rickshaw in Dinajpur

Or catching regular rickshaws, CNGs, local buses, boats, and first class coaches - we've done it all. Catching sleep whenever we could became the name of the game, which is a lot harder than it looks when you throw in 14 hours of Bollywood music and movies over loudspeakers. Noise canceling headphones, how I lust after you!



Sal displaying her amazing ability to sleep on demand

In the ten days that were, we managed to pack in:



Rangpur and Dinajpur



Mini Bangladesh in Chittagong

The shipwrecking yards



I still don't want a job there, no matter how many times I go

with a side visit to a small village which gave Penny the opportunity to clean off some of the 'goo' she'd souvenired on her feet:



Pumping water from the tube well so Penny could cleanse before the crowd

and time in Sitakundo, a town just north of Chittagong with heavy Hindu influences



A local Hindu temple

where we got invited underneath a tree by a local guru, as you do.



Underground with a Guru

Having the gals here has been simply amazing. I love sharing my life here, and watching their faces light up (albeit sometimes with terror at the oncoming truck...) at the sights and delights has been really rewarding, at least for me.

While Pen has already departed, I've still got Sal for another three weeks, and have even found her a job as official photographer for my next work field trip.

There's plenty of work to go round, so if anyone else wants to come and join us, you know how to reach me!

*Apologies for my readers unfamiliar with Sydney, but it's my blog and I'll...

Where did you sleep last night?

Another month in the 'desh has come and gone and I've been a busy little bee, albeit one who feels like it's been blown about in one of the almost daily monsoonal lightening storms here.

This part of the world being as full on as it is means I've had barely any time to really contemplate 'the big questions', like where my next paycheck is going to come from (given I'm at the 8 month mark); I've been far too busy gallivanting around the place. In the past month I've been from the bottom left of Bangladesh (Cox's Bazaar), to Chittagong, Dhaka, up to Kishoregonj and Netrakona (which has the best food in the 'desh I've had so far), back to Dhaka, across to Kolkata in India for a long weekend, back to Dhaka and back to Chittagong. Don't ask me what day it is. Actually, don't ask me anything important for the next five days, which I am planning to spend catching up on sleep and generally enjoying my own bed, coconut husks and all.

The advantage of running around the place as if I was conducting my own personal Amazing Race, er, without a partner and the tv crews and glamorous locales (jeez, quite a stretch I'm making there...) is that I've done some pretty cool things like:




Given a poetry reading




Watched storm clouds roll in from a boat in Kewajore

Kewajore, a remote part of the Kishoregonj region, is flooded for six months of the year. It took 3 hours to travel less than 30 kilometres to get from Kewajore out to one village in the area. Crazy. When we finally got there, I spent the day trying not to appeal to every villager in sight to jump on our boat and head on out of there (ok, not really, it was a small boat and I had one of only two life jackets) because it is simply insane living that close to flood waters, which as far as I can tell is only going to end badly in a country wracked with natural disasters. It was a big lesson in understanding just how little land there is available in this country, forcing people to live on the equivalent of a sandbar at the beach.




Visited the Opera House of Kishoregonj

While I was wandering the streets of Kishoregonj, a local lad latched on to me, and offered to give me a walking tour of the city including the "city highlight": the oldest water tree in Kishoregonj. Tourism Australia, eat your heart out.

My trip to Kishoregonj was followed directly by hightailing it out of the country to:




Drink champagne




and cocktails




with the girls - Natalie and Casey




in Kolkata

Which while it wasn't quite the oasis I was hoping for (perhaps I should have twigged that a half hour flight to another part of Bengal, even if it is in a different country, may not result in a drastic change in culture), Kolkata still offered enough of the good stuff to keep us entertained.

To prove that it wasn't all about the booze, we took in a few cultural sites, the highlight for me being:




Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and Dying

I've never seen such high quality care being given to older (dying) people before, en masse. Clearly they have no staffing issues since there were plenty of volunteers, and I imagine the funding streams are fairly consistent for a charity (though this place is a strictly 'bare-bones' affair), but still. I was impressed, and even left a bit speechless at the good work being done.

As for how the weekend ended? Only with the worst flight I've ever been on, and I've flown Aeroflot.

It involved:
- a dead body: the man who died as we were boarding our plane in Kolkata,
- a five hour delay,
- a mini-revolt: staged by (male) passengers desperate to get off the plane to perform their prayers even though we had boarded the plane and were about to take off, complete with trying to get into the cockpit and banging fists against the plane doors,
- flying through a lightening storm: because turbulence was what the already agitated passengers on this flight needed, and
- men behaving badly (again): by refusing to stay seated with the plane was taxiing, and instead pulling luggage from overhead lockers and crowding the aisles before the plane had even stopped.

All this was topped off by a midnight traffic jam in Dhaka, which was about the point where my frazzled nerves gave up on me, and I spent the taxi ride holding my head in my hands, eyes shut, sweat dripping down my back, pledging that I would give my left kidney to spend 24 hours in a country that worked.

But now I'm back in Chittagong and I've done the grocery shopping and spoken to the family, and had a long cool shower and (this part) of the world seems like a better place again. Life on the merry-go-round is set to continue too as I prepare the cultural program for my first visitors!

Penny and Sally, don't forget your insect repellent, sunscreen, and duty free quota of 2 litres - you'll need all of them where we're going...

Fascination Street – or how transport can remind you that these boots were indeed made for walkin'

Being South Asia, which is very close to South East Asia, which is renowned for what could be considered questionable respect for traffic rules, it comes as no surprise that getting around provides opportunities on a daily basis for the religious to say their prayers.

And because I’m the sharing kind (especially if it’s from your plate) I’ve provided some visual aids to help convey at least in part what it’s like to get around town in ‘the dish’.

1. The Rickshaw

Yep, it’s the traditional variety where a man who weighs significantly less than me (and you too, before you judge, unless by some freak occurrence Amy Winehouse is reading this blog) pedals madly on a bike with no gears while simultaneously hauling your arse all over the place for about, oh, 20 cents a ride.

Now because nothing is as simple at it seems here, this does not mean you, as the well-cushioned passenger get to just sit back and enjoy the ride – oh no. While you sit back and watch the absurdly tight buns of the rickshaw wallah working away madly in front of you, you also get to have a mini-pilates class as you engage your core with all your strength so you don’t topple out onto the bitumen/rubble/rubbish heap/dirt. Rickshaws come with the brilliant feature of being just a little off balance, and tilt forward slightly. Admittedly this makes it much easier to get out at the end, but also makes it exceptionally easy to alight from the vehicle while it is very much in motion.

For the record, being a rickshaw wallah is pretty high on the list of Positions I Never Want To Apply For. Not even being able to decorate my very own rickshaw with spectacularly coloured rickshaw art would tempt me.

2. The CNG or Baby Taxi

First things first, CNG stands for Compressed Natural Gas, which is what these little babies are powered by. Quite an exceptional effort by a third world country to combat air pollution has been made here, and this should be noted. Now, a more appropriate acronym would be PDT or ‘Potential Death Trap’, as the natural gas bottle sits in the back of the baby taxi, ready to explode upon impact. Handy!

A few things to note about CNGs. There are no doors. The driver rides in a cage. There are no seatbelts. They make Smart Cars look like Hummers. All CNG drivers are secretly hoping to become part of the next Star Wars sequel and practice their best ‘I can dodge em better than you can’ techinques with every trip. Oh, and in Dhaka they’re probably working for a local gang too, just to spice things up.

Here is a view from the back of a CNG, note the cage around the driver, and the following pic is a view out the side of a CNG. Note the buses next to me. And panel beaters, you can stop licking your lips, you’re not Bangladeshi if you repair your dings.

above: the view from the back - yes, you can see an arm hanging on for dear life

below: out the side - CNGs are so small

my eye line is almost on par with a public bus wheel.

3. Public bus

I don't always think pictures speak louder than words (if that were the case I'd be out of a job since I'm not about to challenge Annie Liebowitz for the next Rolling Stone cover shot) I do think, in this case, they help. What they don't show, however, is how you actually catch one...

Pick which bus you need, adopt a running stance, start moving to match your pace to that of the (hopefully) slowing bus, close your eyes (optional) and jump on!

Now don't worry, this is perfectly safe as there is usually a man hanging onto the outside of the bus to help haul you in. Usually.

4. Private car

Take a look – what does it remind you of? I’m trying to decide between bumper bowling and dodgem cars, though I think I’m erring a little closer to dodgem cars if I take into account the rickshaw and CNG rides I’ve had so far where the most popular game in school seems to be ‘How Many Other Things Can I Hit Before I Tip Over’. I now think it's actually a handy thing my dirver's license was stolen in my first week or who knows what crazy ideas I would have had about hiring a car with my very own metal bumper bars attached!

5. The Best Kind

And last but not least, my preferred means of getting around town. A little too traditional perhaps, and not overly safe when all of the above are thrown in, but it does come with it's own special smellofactor that helps you feel such an intimate part of the city. Especially in the morning... (I'll leave you to ponder that one over yourselves...).