Masala Cha - Try it at home!

Tea is one of my favorite things about this place. Tea is everywhere. Everyone drinks it. You are not strange and eccentric if you like tea here; it is something that a normal human being is supposed to like. It is the default beverage at all gatherings and social functions. When you go to someone’s house, the first thing they do is offer you tea, which you are obliged to drink, regardless of your actual preferences. (Coffee, on the other hand, is regarded as something strange and eccentric – which is not surprising, given that “coffee” in this country means Instant Nescafe.)

I am something of a tea snob at home. I like loose tea – my favorite is single-estate Assam tea, TGFOP, which I take strong, with milk. (Shameless plug: if you’re curious, check out Hajua Assam Tea at www.SpecialTeas.com, along with the rest of their fabulous inventory. You name it, they’ve got it. And they ship quickly, too!) I haven’t found any Assam tea here, but Bangladesh is home to several large tea gardens of its own, and although they export their best stuff, the tea they sell in bags (the Bangladeshi version of Lipton’s) is excellent. When you buy it on the street at one of the myriad tea stalls, it’s fixed with a healthy dose of sweetened condensed milk and a couple spoonfuls of sugar for good measure. (All this in a demitasse the size of an espresso cup.) Generally sweetened tea makes my teeth hurt and my head ache, so I avoid the sugar if I can.

But there’s one exception: masala cha, or what we know as chai in the US – served sweet, with plenty of milk. The “masala” (pronounced here kind of like “moshla”) means “spiced”, and despite what Starbucks has led us to believe, chai does not really come out of a box. In fact, it’s much better if you make it at home, the ‘real’ way – which is what Ben and I decided to do recently. We thought we’d share our recipe and let you figure out how to improve upon it.

We took a trip into the bazaar at Gulshan to purchase our spices – we visited one of the dry goods vendors who’s come to recognize me. The place is called Iqbal’s Store, and the guy who runs it has been working in the same place for 24 years. I’m getting to know the vendors pretty well – did some recording there the other day, as a matter of fact, and got to watch them in action. Their store is the most popular one around, if traffic is any indicator. But anyway. We bought all our spices from them; they helped us sort out what we needed and gave us little vocab lessons along the way. We picked up a bunch of cloves, whole black peppercorns, stick cinnamon, ginger, bay leaves and cardamom pods (the total cost came to 76 taka – just over a buck, for spices of much better quality than you’d usually get in the US, and in much larger quantities... and all cleverly wrapped in recycled paper and magazine pages!), took them home to our little 2-burner propane stove and brewed up a very overspiced pot of tea. We toned down the cloves and peppercorns quite a bit and tried some different proportions. The magic numbers for an acceptable 3-4 person pot of tea turned out to be in the 4 or 5 range. But try them out and mess with them, and once you’ve got it mastered, let us know…

Boil together in a pot with plenty of (potable) water:

4-5 whole cloves
4-5 whole black peppercorns
4-5 whole cardamom pods
1 bay leaf
thinly sliced fresh ginger (start with – you guessed it - 4 or 5 paper-thin slices; more to your liking)
lots of stick cinnamon (at least one whole stick; more to your liking)

After a few minutes of moderate boiling, you can go ahead and add tea – loose (e.g. English breakfast) or bag tea (yes, even Lipton’s!) both work; you’ll have to strain the tea either way. I'd recommend using at least 3 bags or three healthy teaspoons of loose tea for a 3-4 person pot – the milk will weaken the brew. Once it’s brewed strong enough for your liking, lower the heat and add milk (not skim!) – about ½ the quantity of water seems to work well. Get the whole mixture nice and hot, strain it, and serve immediately. You can either pre-sweeten while it’s still over the heat, or serve unsweetened and pass around the sugar bowl. Yumminess!

More Bazaar Pics

Cow Brains and Salty Fish Paste

Last night I ate cow brains. Or rather, last night I had a small (teaspoon size maybe) taste of cow brains.

Jen and I spent the morning wandering around New Market – probably the largest market/bazaar in Dhaka. Jen’s research partner, Shakil, took us down to show us around and help Jen get her bearings for the thesis project. The market is full of riveting spectacles – live catfish flopping black and slimy for a last gasp or three of water in shallow trays, all the critical organs of several goats suspended by their esophagi attached to a wire a la clothes hanging out to dry, a pile of heads from said goats lying beneath on the wooden butcher stall floor, some old dude whittling small fish into fish-chips with a two foot blade, dry salted fishies of all sizes suspended and stinking from the ceiling, a room full of chickens and chicken parts that smelled so foul we only dared the most furtive of glances in its direction…All the while as we wander about and gawk, the locals gawk back. We are followed the entire time by a small gaggle of children, “mintis” who first want us to pay them to carry our groceries, and when they realize we’re not actually buying anything, then just to be near the spectacle we continually create. At Jen’s urging, I work up the courage to take out the camera – much to everyone’s delight. All the fish dudes want me to take their picture. Then the butcher sees what’s going on and poses for me, holding open the carcass of one of his goats so I can see the fine quality of the meat he’s selling. Some men laugh and talk rapidly. Jen and I look quizzically at Shakil. Oh, they’re just saying how happy they are to have their picture taken by a good looking American, he reports. Cool…

After the market experience, Jen and I part ways with Shakil and go over to Dhanmundi to meet our new friends Tuni and Clay for lunch. We spend the rest of the afternoon running errands with them, stop briefly by their apartment for tea, meet our soon-to-be-new internet providers (twiddlebuggs they call themselves), and then head out to catch the first screening of a film that one of their friends recently made.

After the film, which was preceded by no fewer than six speeches (in Bangla) and which was low budget and loud and also in Bangla (and so not an incredibly great experience for me), we went out to dinner with Tuni and Clay and some of their friends.

The restaurant caters mostly to students. So it was nice and cheap. The meal consisted of lots of small dishes, some vegetables, meats, fishes, etc. that you mix with rice and eat with your hands. As we ate I took note of the dishes I liked and those I didn’t. On the good list: bitter gourd and spices (kind of sour), potatoes and peppers, okra (definitely slimy), mashed potatoes, green banana, green beans, spinach. On the bad list: small fishies, salty fish paste (made from the suspended and stinking fish mentioned earlier)…oh, and cow brains.

Actually the cow brains weren’t so bad. They were ordered at Clay’s request. (Clay, by the way, is a tall read headed dude from Memphis Tennessee who talks about as much as I do and at about the same rate but with a slightly more noticeable southern drawl). He referred to them simply as “a brain fry.” When they arrived I took a teaspoon size helping, mixed it with ample rice, and popped it into my mouth. The flavor was like any mystery meat (think hotdog or spam), the texture soft (what did you expect?) and vaguely chalky (that was a surprise). Well, what do you think Clay asked? Not bad, I replied, I might even eat more if I didn’t know it was brains.

Reason Number 376 Why it Sucks to be a Rickshawalla

The other day Jen and I decided to go out for dinner. This is not unusual. We’ve been sampling the local restaurants with considerable frequency. There’s an excellent Thai restaurant halfway between Gulshan 1 and Gulshan 2. Right next door is a Chinese place that makes excellent soup but lousy tofu. Some blocks away is a Korean restaurant that ranks among Jen’s favorites. For cheaper eats there is an assortment of Bengali restaurants. The unifying theme in all of these is rice - rice and oil.

The other night, partly in an effort to avoid rice and oil and partly just to satisfy our curiosity, we decided to try the local Pizza Hut. We both recalled seeing a Pizza Hut somewhere in the vicinity of Gulshan 1. In fact both of us were pretty convinced that it was somewhere near the Thai place between the two Gulshans. Donny, another Fulbrighter, claimed that it was south of Gulshan 1, which was at odds with my recollection. The point is we didn’t know exactly where we were going. Which, of course, makes it a little more difficult to get there.

Our transportation options typically consist of either a rickshaw (three wheeled human powered vehicle) or a CNG (three wheeled compressed natural gas powered vehicle). Rickshaws are cheaper, quieter, less smelly, and generally nicer. However, they are restricted from traveling on certain big roads except for at certain times. And there always seems to be some confusion about what roads and what times those are. This past Saturday there was some rickshaw traffic between on the big road between Gulshan 1 and Gulshan 2. So we decided to try our luck and hired a rickshaw to take us toward Gulshan 1.

Traffic was moving along nicely until we came to an intersection where a police officer was waving the rickshaws off the main road. Unbidden by us, our rickshawalla tried to plead his case with the police officer, pointing to the white people on his rickshaw. No exceptions! We were forced to take the side road. Normally this would be fine, except this time we didn’t really know where we were going. So we didn’t know how far down the main road we needed to go before getting off.

The rickshawalla took us around the block and back to the main road. O.k. fine, we probably didn’t miss it yet. We continue down the main road. Ahead there is another cop at an intersection waving the rickshaws off the main road. This time our rickshawalla doesn’t stop in time to make the turn. The police officer yells at him. The rickshawalla pleads his case pointing to his bideshi cargo. No exceptions! But this time we have to turn around a full 180 degrees in order to get back to the side road. The rickshawalla dismounts to make the turn. But he’s not moving fast enough, apparently, because the angry police officer comes over and WHACK! WHACK! with his baton, hits him on the butt. That was totally unnecessary, but Jen and I are both speechless. Nothing comes to mind fast enough to say in the rickshawalla’s defense.

Having turned around, we continue several more blocks down side roads. At this point it seems there’s a fair chance we’ve missed our desired destination. So we take the next opportunity to get back on the main road and dismount. We give the rickshawalla 50 taka (nearly twice the normal rate) for his trouble. That amounts to about 74 cents, and he’s totally psyched.

The story is basically over at this point. We walked back the way we had come until it was obvious that we hadn’t missed the Pizza Hut yet. Then we turned around and walked the other direction until we got to Gulshan 1. Still no Pizza Hut, Donny must be right. At this point we were hungry and tired of stumbling up and down the dark and muddy streets (the power was out in lots of places on account of the storm the night before). So we decided to stick with the familiar – Thai rice and oil.

Post-Cyclone

First of all: Ben and I are fine. Safe and healthy, and as of today our power and Internet are both up – so we can finally contact all our friends and family and let them know we’re okay.

We’d heard word from the State Department that a cyclone was on its way – I have to give them credit; they really do look after their own. So we were prepared for a day or two of no electricity and minor inconveniences. The storm hit Dhaka on the 15th, after we had just finished watching a pirated copy of the movie “Ratatouille” (great fun, except it makes you crave French bread and soft cheese and mushrooms like crazy – none of which are really available here). The wind started to pick up, a sudden crescendo from a dull rumble to a terrifying scream. It beat against the windows so hard I was sure they would shatter under its pressure. Our laundry had been drying on the balcony clothesline before the storm; at about 11:00 I remembered it and got up from bed to see if it was still there. Miraculously, it was – but several socks had fallen to the floor, and the T-shirts were knotted around themselves on the line. With the wind and rain roaring around us we went outside, fiddled with the clothespins, brought in the things that looked most likely to fly away, went back to bed. I lay awake, tossing and turning for a long time – such an awful, heart-wrenching sound, that wind. Then at about 1:30, clever me, I remembered that I had brought along some earplugs. Stuffed them into my ears and slept like a baby.

We woke Friday morning to quiet grayness. Nothing looked particularly amiss – there was no power, but since we are rich and privileged bideshis, we have a generator wired to our ceiling fans and to a few switches and outlets in each room – so we didn’t even have to suffer darkness. The day was cool and drizzly, and we spent most of it inside until we got restless late in the afternoon. The world of the Diplomatic Enclave didn’t look much different – a lot of branches and sludge piled along the sides of the streets, trees with recent wounds, here and there a young one uprooted. The area around Gulshan was dark – no electricity in anyplace without a generator – but our favorite Thai place was open, and we were even able to do a little evening-time marketing. Life as usual, mostly.

It wasn’t until today – Sunday – that I was able to get information on how bad the cyclone actually was. We don’t currently get a newspaper, and all our news comes via our little electronic boxes. So today, with Internet service working at last, I went straight to NPR’s news website. And o what a terrible wrath the storm hath wrought. More than 1700 counted dead so far in the southern part of the country, and many of the small villages are inaccessible to relief workers, so there’s no telling how many more will be found. Hundreds of thousands of refugees – people whose homes were nothing more than a few corrugated tin sheets and bamboo poles, and whose worldly possessions were some baskets of rice and lentils, woven cane sleeping mats, a water jug, a few colorful saris, perhaps a radio. Outside some chickens, a boat and a fishing net. It is so little. It is so much.

And here I sit, typing away on my little electronic box, in the comfort of my air-conditioned three-bedroom concrete flat, far away in the Diplomatic Enclave where all the bideshis live. And soon our dinner will be ready, and our cook will come to the door and knock softly, and we will eat until we are full and he will clean up the mess, and we will go peacefully to sleep, and all around us nothing will be different.

Brick Hauling, Deshi Style

I’ve been taking language classes at the HEED Language Center in Banani, another local neighborhood. This morning as I was waiting for my teacher to arrive, I was looking out the window watching some workers hauling bricks in the building next door. The workers were boys who looked to be in their late teens or early twenties, and they were carrying the bricks up to the 6^th or 7^th floor of the building. They do this by stacking a load of bricks onto a tray on their heads. Starting with an empty tray on a cloth pad on his head, a worker will grab a brick in each hand, reach up, and put them on the tray. He repeats this until he has 15-20 bricks on the tray. Then he stands up and carries the bricks up one flight of stairs. On the landing he’s met by another worker with an empty tray. The second worker sets down the empty tray and the two workers lean toward each other in order to pass the loaded tray from one head to the other. Then the two workers bump chests in a wave-like-motion pushing off each other to help the newly laden worker get his body under the tray. The second worker carries the loaded tray slowly up the next flight of stairs while the first goes down with the empty tray for another load. The process repeats until the bricks reach their destination. I don’t know how long their shifts last, but in the 10 minutes I was watching they must have carried 15 loads. There’s no need for them to hit the gym on the way home from work, that’s for sure.

How to draw a crowd in Dhaka in 2.5 seconds or less

Buying sweets was Ben's idea. Earlier in the day he had passed several vendors selling assorted candies by the side of the road, but he didn't have any small change at the time so his curiosity went unsatisfied. But when we found ourselves with nothing better to do on Thursday afternoon, he suggested that we go back to Bonani and do some reconnaisance.

Most of the vendors had cleared out by the time we arrived, but one tenacious seller remained, calling out to passers-by and waving off the flies that flitted and buzzed around his wares.

"Eigulo ki?" I said to him - "what are these?"

He grinned. "Sweets."

"What are their names?"

I pointed and he recited.

"Wait, I want to write these down. One minute." I fished my little notebook out of my bag. "Will you say them again?"

He dictated once more.

"Bagami." He pointed to a little pile of what looked like (and turned out to be) peanut brittle. In my notebook, with my best Bangla handwriting, I wrote "ba ga mi." The vendor regarded me with something between awe and glee.

He pointed to a mound of rock candy.

"Tal mishti."

I wrote this, too, and looked up when I'd finished to find that at least five or six men who'd been walking by had stopped to watch and were now craning their necks toward my notebook.

"And that?" I pointed to a chunk of candied fruit.

"Moroba."

I scrawled. The crowd grew.

"And this here?"

"Shondesh."

Completely self-conscious now, I closed my notebook and looked up to find no fewer than a dozen men gathered around us.

"Thanks," I said. "How much for one of each?"

"Thirty taka."

"I'll give you twenty," I said, and the bystanders chuckled. The vendor gave a sideways head-nod and a grin, and we waved and went on our way, munching, as the crowd dispersed behind us.

The Problem of Space

Bangladeshis do not have the same perception of personal space that Americans do. Yesterday evening Bideshi 1 and I had some time to kill in Gulshan 2 while waiting for Tuni and Clay (the fulbrighter couple whose apartment we will be taking over in December) to meet us for dinner. Jen likes pretty fabric. So we went into a nice sari store to browse. Inside the store we were greeted with a polite nod from a salesman. No words were exchanged. Jen and I started to browse. We took a few steps down one aisle. About six feet back, the salesman took a few steps in our direction. Jen stroked some saris and exclaimed over the colors and the workmanship. I glanced nervously over my shoulder. The salesman smiled and nodded. We took a few steps further down the aisle. The salesman took a few steps behind us. Jen fondled some more pretty fabric - Oh isn’t this lovely - Look at the embroidery – Can you believe that this is all hand made, fishing for some response from me. I cast more furtive glances behind me at the salesman. Why is he following us? He hasn’t said anything. Does he speak English? Can he follow our conversation? I wish he would just go back to the counter or something. Jen turns down another aisle. I follow. The salesman follows six feet behind. This is really starting to bug me. Jen exclaims over more fabric. Grumpy now and preoccupied, I don’t respond. She says, o look this is Georgette. The salesman says that is muslin this here is Georgette. So he does speak English and he is listening to our conversation. Aaaaaa now I’m really uncomfortable. Jen notices my sour face. What’s the matter? Do you want to leave? Are you unhappy here? This is her big fear. That I will be unhappy here and that somehow I’ll blame her. This is fine, I say. Damn that damn salesman. Why won’t he leave us alone? Why does it bother me? It shouldn’t bother me. He’s there to be helpful, to answer our questions. He’s happy to have us in his shop. Arrg, I just wish he would stop following me. After a twenty minute eternity I finally admit to Jen that I’d like to leave. We exit the shop back out into the hustle and bustle and stench of the street. Let’s go to Coffee Eleven and wait there for Tuni and Clay, I suggest. Coffee Eleven is a chique little coffee shop that could be in any college town in America. The setting is familiar and comforting. I order a latté and feel the tension slip away.

Bideshi 1 checks in

I figured it was finally time for Bideshi 1 to get going on this blog thing – so here we go.
Bangladesh.
Where to begin?
This is my third trip to Dhaka, and I have spent enough time here by now that what I see is mostly what I expect to see. The haze, the lush green, the bright colors of the rickshaws and their drivers and passengers, the markets full of all sorts of produce and carcasses, the brick-breaking and hauling, the gimcracked shanties and jerry-rigged electrical wiring. It is a noisy chaos: endless blaring of horns, ringing of bells, calls of beggars and children, loud salaams as neighbors greet one another in the streets; as we walk past Bangladeshi men, we inevitably hear small choruses of “helohwaryu.” The shirtless children are a little more hip – they chirp ‘hi’ and beam thousand-watt smiles at us.
We are a spectacle. Ben with his green eyes, me with my short, rather unkempt hair and un-made-up face. The weather is cool enough that I can wear jeans fairly comfortably, but while I prefer them infinitely to the huge baggy cotton pants of salwaar kameez, I feel conspicuous wearing them in public. I’ve seen only a few of the most elite, modern, wealthy Bangladeshi women wearing jeans – so it feels like wearing a signboard that says “HEY! Check this out! I am rich, liberal, and SEXY!” But jeans will only be an option for a few months out of the year – I plan to wear them while I can. I wear the long top without too much complaint, and of course the obligatory orna – the wide scarf-shawl worn to cover a woman’s chest. So all in all, I’m probably marginally respectable (at least as far as a western woman is concerned).
We walk side by side and talk as we go. Sometimes I want to reach for his hand, because he’s my husband and because I’m happy to have him beside me – but I don’t, because men and women do not hold hands here. Not unless they are hiding in the shadowed groves of a public park, in which case the rule seems not to apply – they can hold hands and flirt and sit with their thighs touching and be generally scandalous. So I suppose if Ben and I really wanted to hold hands, we could search out a place to do it – but it just seems easier to resist the urge and go home instead.
Home right now is the same apartment where I’ve spent that last two summers: a vast echoing 3-bedroom cavern in the diplomatic enclave of northern Dhaka. Two other Fulbrighters are occupying the other two bedrooms. Ours is as comfortable as we could make it under the circumstances – over the summer I acquired a floor mat, a rug, a collection of floor pillows, a little glass-topped coffee table (which I actually had made to order – an excellent language-learning exercise, since it involved not only giving specs in Bangla, but calling to change the order once I’d submitted it. It turned out quite nicely, and I am inordinately proud of it.). My set of tabla drums is in one corner, and there’s a nice bright spread on our lumpy bed. Overall, quite homey. Our arrangement here is a temporary boarding-house sort of deal; we have a cook who keeps track of our meals and costs, and we pay him whenever it’s time for more groceries. Our food so far has been edible, but it contains so much oil that I can’t bear to eat it more than once a day – but restaurants are cheap, so as my guts adjust we can find lots of other alternatives. So far we’re making do just fine.
But we are very much looking forward to a time when we’ll have a kitchen of our very own, and a cozy living room where we can stretch out and relax. We’ve found the perfect place – a large apartment in central Dhaka, in a place called Rajabazaar. It’s currently occupied by another married couple – also Fulbrighters – who will be moving out at the beginning of December and who will be able to pass on all their appliances and furniture to boot. The place is fantastic, with a beautiful view of some coconut trees from the living room, windows in every room, balconies off each of the three bedrooms (Ben and I can each have our own Playroom!), in a pretty neighborhood that is 100% authentic Bangladeshi. (As opposed to the diplomatic enclave, that is – which I estimate to be between 0 and 5% authentic Bangladeshi.) The kitchen is small but adequate, and we’ll have a refrigerator and cookstove (no oven). Internet is already sorted out, as are other conveniences such as newspaper and fresh milk delivery. Besides that, it’s in a great situation for my research – just a short walk to several markets of various types and sizes. We’re already counting down the days till we can move in – just three weeks and some change until Dec. 1, when we can start cooking for ourselves!
Which, come to think of it, will be a bit of an adventure – I know next to nothing about the various fruits and vegetables in the bazaar, and there are scads of kinds of rice and lentils to choose from. And the spices! And the dried fish! And the live fish! So perhaps our readership can help us out. I propose that once we’re settled in the new place, B and I should initiate a weekly Market Challenge, in which we provide a photograph and a name of a particular foodstuff, and Our Dear Readers can send us suggestions for what to do with it. Results will be duly reported. (We suggest this in honor of our friends the SpokaFocas, whose Use-It-Or-Lose-It Challenge has produced some very tasty meals.) But speaking of food – I think Sujit, our kindly cook, has an oily and heavily spiced lunch ready for us. I’ll go slurp it down, followed immediately by another dose of Ranitidine - which already looks like it will be an indispensable wonder-drug over the next 3+ weeks!

What to Pay a Rickshawalla?

In the two days that we’ve been here we’ve hired six or eight rickshawallas to give us rides into Gulshan 2, the perpetual traffic jam/market area where most of the Baridhara neighborhood residents do their shopping. The ride one way takes 10-15 minutes during which some 80 lb bean pole of a Bangladeshi is pumping the pedals for all he’s worth while dodging oncoming cars and busses and rickshaws and soldiers with guns and trying not to fall into the crater sized potholes in the pavement or run over the beggar with his elephantitis afflicted legs sticking out into the street or get to close to the reeking heap of garbage with the little kid picking through it. When we reach our destination the inevitable question arises, what do we pay him? What is the ride worth? The going rate seems to be about 10 taka. That’s what Sujit our housekeeper or Shakil Jen’s language teacher/assistant would pay, which amounts to approximately 14 cents. But what if there are two people on the rickshaw? Or three? Should you pay more? How much more? What if you change your mind about where you’re going partway through the ride and cause the rickshawalla to take a slightly longer route than he would have chosen? Taking all these things into consideration we’ve paid anywhere from 10-60 taka. Every time we pay, the rickshawalla looks at us like we’ve just broken his balls. How could we give him so little? He had to take us the long way round, he got hassled by a cop on our behalf for taking an illegal shortcut, the ride was sooo long… Each time I feel his pain. He does have it hard. Harder than Jen or I will likely ever be able to relate to. Neither of us would work so hard for so little. But if the going rate is 10 taka, are we displaying our social incompetence by paying more? Shakil told us this afternoon, “never pay more than fifteen.” Fifteen is an awkward number for us. We have 10’s and 20’s but no 5’s yet. So we’ve basically settled on 20 taka per ride or 1.4 cents per minute per person.

We've Arrived

We’ve arrived. The journey here was uneventful and from my perspective not even very painful since I managed to sleep through most of both long flights. We were met at the airport by a guy named Hasan from the U.S. embassy who took us through customs. We got to use the short line for special people and made it through in record time. All of our checked luggage including the guitar arrived intact and without delay. Even the trip from the airport to the IUB apartment in Baridhara was hassle free since it was about 3:00 a.m. local time and the streets were mostly empty.