The Movies

Earlier this evening Bideshi 1 and I went with some friends to our first movie-at-the-theater movie in Bangladesh. The experience was much the same as going to the movies in the States, with a couple of notable differences. Like many theaters in the States, this one is located in a big mall. Bashundara City is the closest thing Bangladesh has to an American mall – it’s quite similar actually – with lots of small shops, a couple bigger ones, escalators, glass walled elevators, a food court, and a central atrium with eight stories of open air up to a glass ceiling. The theater set-up was also like most American theaters. Buy your tickets at the ticket counter, enter the main lobby and purchase snacks, then find your theater. But at the ticket window we had the choice of premium or normal tickets. The premium tickets cost a little more and seat you further from the screen so you don’t have to crane your head up to see the picture. As far as I could tell, all tickets were for assigned seats. We got premium tickets – just under ten dollars for four - pricey by Deshi standards, but a good deal coming from D.C. We were early for our movie so we bought some popcorn and hung out in the lobby for a little while. When the time came an usher came through the lobby telling everyone that Transformers would be starting soon in Theater 2.

Inside Theater 2 another usher pointed us to our seats. Shortly after, the screen lit up displaying the Bangladeshi flag. Most of the crowd stood respectfully (Diba and Srabone did not, so we didn’t either) and listened to a few stanzas of the national anthem. Then with no previews or anything the movie started and we were all transported to a world of explosions and cars that turn into talking robots and genius kids whose computers can do amazing things and there were fights and car chases and more explosions and all of a sudden the lights came on and the movie stopped…

People stood up and started walking out of the theater. Intermission? Yep, Diba confirmed that in Bangladeshi movies, there’s always an intermission, happens anywhere near the middle of the movie. Don’t need a break in the action. Nope, just flip the switch. Cut it off. Take a break…Well I did kind of have to pee anyway. So I joined the crowd of fifty or so other men who apparently felt likewise, and headed for the restroom.

Once again I was confronted with cultural differences concerning personal space. In a typical men’s room in the U.S. you have a row of urinals and a row of stalls. Often the two are directly opposite along a fairly narrow corridor – as was the case in this particular restroom. However, in my experience in the States when there’s a massive crowd and men are waiting for their turn, they mostly stand behind the invisible line that separates said corridor from the rest of the bathroom. Then, when a stall or urinal becomes available the next man in line steps forward and takes his turn. Well, not knowing any better, I managed to hold the crowd behind the invisible line for about twenty seconds, but when a urinal opened up some guy behind me just pushed right on past and went for it. Rude I thought, but then more guys walked around me and started queuing up behind each urinal. Okay, different rules. I can play that way. So I stepped up and took my spot behind some dude. Man must have had a bladder the size of a horse’s because about four people who had been behind me for the first twenty seconds got to go to their spots ahead of me. Eventually, the dude finished and stepped away. Immediately some other dude stepped up to take his place. What!? Am I invisible? He stepped right in front of me. I tapped him on the shoulder and gave him the look that says what the heyal do you think you’re a doin’. Oh, sorry he said and stepped back.

I’m still a little puzzled over the incident. Was I just receiving the minority treatment? I look different. I’m clearly a foreigner. And there have been other occasions – in the supper market for example – where I seem to be pretty much invisible when it comes to waiting in lines. Or was I – at a full arm’s length away – merely standing too far back from the dude in front. Clearly at that distance I was waiting for the john behind my back??? Heck if I know…

Anyway, I finally got to do my business, and made it back to the theater to find that the movie had started again. Bideshi 1 tells me there was no warning for that either. It came on as suddenly as it had stopped. Good thing I’d seen it before or I would have certainly missed important plot details and been intellectually fuddled and confused for the rest of the movie. Luckily my memory’s like a steel trap. So I was able to rejoin the action with minimal duress.

After many explosions and climactic fight sequences with much broken glass an digitized robot zheezowwchhzz zchunkk sounds the movie ended, credits rol…no actually the credits didn’t roll. After the final scene, where our heroes smooch on the hood of their car/robot friend in the orange glow of the late afternoon sun, the picture went off, the lights came on– no pretence here that people might actually want to see the credits - and we left the theater. Things to do. Places to be. People to see. Certainly no time to sit and read a big list of foreigner’s names - never mind that those people have just entertained us for the last two hours…

Odds and Ends

Even now after four-and-a-half months of living here, nearly every time we leave the house we see something that makes us raise an eyebrow in amazement, amusement, puzzlement, or dismay. Some examples:

If you read the “Daily Star and Other Funny English” you might have gathered from the orange juice container quote that product labeling standards here are somewhat relaxed compared to what we’re used to. On our most recent outing to New Market we ran across these cherries? tomatoes? cranberries? – clearly food of some sort, yet the label claims they are men’s briefs. Well they won’t trick me!














A couple weeks ago Jen and I were walking through Farmgate to catch a bus. Farmgate is one of the busiest transportation hubs in Dhaka as well as a big market area. On a typical day the side-walk is so jammed with people that you are literally bumping shoulders with someone on every-other step. Imagine leaving a large stadium after a major-league sporting event as everyone tries to press through the row of double doors to reach the outside – only in Farmgate you are already outside. There are just that many people... So there we were walking through the crowed, when I noticed that the sea of heads (I’m taller than most people here, so that’s my view) was parting up ahead, much like water flows around a rock in the river. When we got closer we could see that the cause of the disturbance was a man – probably the father - with a child - his son? - stopped in the sidewalk. The man was holding the kid’s pants around his knees, and the kid was taking a wiz! Right there in the middle of the sidewalk! (Alas, my camera was at home.) What was most shocking to me was not that a kid was taking a wiz on the street – after all there are practically no public restrooms in Dhaka, and if you’ve gotta go you’ve gotta go – but here was a clearly upper middle class adult teaching a child that it was okay to just piss wherever you please. There was no attempt to aim for the gutter or a trash pile – to my eyes it constituted a total disregard for public space. And people just walked on by…

To be fair I should point out that this is the only time I’ve seen such a blatant display of public urination in Dhaka. On any walk around the city you will see men crouching by walls or ditches or in the corners of shady alleys and you know that they are peeing and that that is one of the reasons this city smells so bad, but somehow it’s not quite the same as the kid parting traffic with his stream.

There is not much grass in Dhaka, but the other day as I was sitting on a wooden box squished between a smelly man and a couple sets of women’s knees at the front of a bus to Gulshan, I looked out the window and saw a lone woman crouched on the ground using shears to trim the swath of grass between the air force base fence and the sidewalk. Behind her the grass was uniformly short, with piles of raked clippings forming a grid on evenly spaced six foot centers. Ahead the grass was still tall. I always know that Bangladesh is a poor country, but scenes like this really drive it home. Apparently, it is cheaper to hire a woman to spend all day, day after day, cutting the grass painstakingly snip by snip than to buy a mower and run it for the half-hour a day it would take to do the same job. At around 50 Taka a day, you can hire that woman for a long time for the cost of a lawn mower. With her there are no maintenance costs. If she breaks down, just get another. And there’s no startup cost for that either.

This next observation doesn’t raise my eyebrows anymore, but I haven’t mentioned it in the Chronicles yet, so I will now. Nearly all the multi-story buildings in Dhaka have concrete pillars on the roof with scraggly stalks of re-bar sticking out. The fact that the rest of the building is finished, makes the roof look like a demolition site. Like rubble. Communicates a sense of run-downess or decay. For a while I was puzzled by this. After all, how hard would it be to cut off the re-bar once the building is finished. In fact, buildings are left this way for a good reason. It makes it easy to add another story in the future. Given that Dhaka is tied for the fastest growing city in the world that is probably smart planning.











You know you’re in the third world when this message appears on your TV. It reads “This cable network has payment due and is requested to clear same immediately.” It interrupted our viewing of American Idol.Ohhh, the hardships we face…

Clever Deshi Inventions

For a while now I’ve been keeping my eyes out looking for cool Bangladeshi inventions/better ways of doing things that we could learn from or implement at home. Alas, after four months of observation the list is pretty short. So far it contains two items:

1. The wood block doorstop




















2. The dishwashing liquid refill pouch


(Lest I be accused of wandering around with my eyes shut, I should point out that I have noticed an immense collection of different tools/practices/ways-of-doing-things here that I had never seen before and to my eyes constitute Deshi inventions - the bodi knife, cooking on the floor, tandori ovens, rickshaws, ruti rolling sets, etc. However, none of these seems to me an improvement over the old stand-byes that we use at home. So I've left them off the list.)

Surely there exist many more useful innovations from this part of the world (local readers please offer your own observations in comments on this post), but perhaps many of them have already circled the globe, and so go unnoticed by me by virtue of already being familiar. (Actually, I have no idea were the two items on this list were actually invented. I first saw them here. So, as far as I’m concerned, here’s where they were invented.)

That said, I am impressed by the two that made the list. The wood block doorstop caught my eye when we first moved into our apartment here. Nearly every room has a door to a little balcony outside. During the day we usually leave a few of these doors open for better airflow. The doors themselves are solid wood and fairly heavy. When the wind gusts and blows them shut they make a bang that shakes the house. That’s where the wood block doorstop comes in. On each doorjamb there is a little wedge of wood attached to a hinge. When you open the door, you can swing the wedge between the door and the jamb and it will hold the door open and keep it from slamming shut. The real genius of the tool is its simplicity. At home we have those fancy hydraulic-arm things on our screen doors, but they’re almost always broken or at best semi-functional. But the little wood block is sturdy, simple to use, and does the job. The catch is, you need a sturdy door. When the wind blows there’s a lot of leverage on the little block and it can generate quite a bit of force on the door. I imagine if we tried the block method with our flimsy aluminum screen doors they’d buckle where the block meets the door in a moderate wind.

The other item on the list, the dishwashing liquid refill pouch, is also straightforward and perhaps already exists in the states though I’ve yet to see it. It’s just a good way to reduce packaging. Instead of buying a whole new sturdy plastic bottle with the spout at the top, you just buy a little plastic pouch of dishwashing liquid and reuse your perfectly serviceable old plastic bottle. You are still creating some waste in the form of the plastic pouch, but it’s less than the amount of plastic in the dispensing bottle.

Monkeys

We saw these monkeys in Darjeeling. They're just common pests like stray dogs, I guess. But I got a big kick out of them. So here's a short clip for the fans.

The Daily Star and Other Funny English

The Daily Star is the local English language newspaper. We have it delivered to our door every morning, and it serves as our primary source of information about the goings-on of the country and the world. The Daily Star is a fine publication which blends thoroughly researched and unbiased reporting with artfully crafted prose. It is such a pleasure to read that I’ve decided to post a few excerpts here on the Bideshi Chronicles. For best results switch your internal narrator to the voice of Abbu from The Simpsons and read on.

Headline: Even 2yr olds got plot in huge housing graft Taskforce probe unearths mind-boggling irregularities in NHA affairs

Excerpt: A taskforce of the National Coordination Committee (NCC) to Combat Corruption and Serious Crimes designated to investigate National Housing Authority (NHA) yesterday revealed corruption of the authority officials and employees as cavalier as allotting housing plots to even two-year old children…Besides, the taskforce found out that many unscrupulous allottees ended up encroaching on more land than they had been allotted, maintaining an unholy nexus with the corrupt NHA officials and employees…

Headline: Special bus service shatters hope of commuters

Photo Caption: Buses of city special service stop at the middle of the road to take or drop passengers violating the traffic rules and ignoring the safety

Excerpt: The city bus service launched about two months ago to provide special services has shattered hope of the commuters as it failed to keep its promises. The commuters are being cheated in the name of Metro Special City Service inaugurated on November 21 last year. Defiance of rules set for the vehicles under the service, harassment of commuters and realization of excess fare have become a routine picture due to the indifference of the authorities concerned…

Headline: CTG Ammo Haul Fresh Probe ordered to find real culprits court also asks CMP to appoint honest IO

Excerpt: A Chittagong court for the second time ordered further investigation into the cases filed in connection with the haul of 10 truckloads of deadly weapons and huge quantity of ammunition at Chittagong Urea Fertiliser Ltd jetty on April 2, 2004 to find out the real culprits. Mystery shrouds over the identity of the smugglers…The Court…ordered the Chittagong metropolitan Police commissioner yesterday to appoint an efficient and honest investigation officer (IO) to conduct further investigation of the case…In the order the court said further investigation is required as the time demands for it and to find out the real culprits.

In addition to the Daily Star, local signs often display quality English advertising. This one reads:

Thing Care of Her Eternal Beauty

Dear Shahzadi

Unfold is your beauty
Untold is your love…
What a paragon you are
I look on over and over

Equally moving and informative is the labeling on common food products. The back of our orange juice box reads:

Orange concentrate from selected best quality orange, blended carefully with other suitable ingredients and packed aseptically to make it a natural fruity, delicious & refreshing orange juice. For better taste, chill & shake well before serving. Revitalize, Rejuvenate & Reactivate yourself with ACME orange juice.

The instructions on Crispo’s Chocolate Custard Powder read:

1. Take two Tablespoons of Crispo Custard Powder in a bowl
2. Thoroughly mix Custard Powder in some milk in from the ½ liter potion
3. Mix Sugar (four Tablesopoons or to taste) in remaining milk bring to boil.
4. Stir Continuously as you add boiling milk in custard powder. Delicious Custard is ready.

I’m still trying to figure out what the “1/2 liter potion” is…

I also like company tag-lines on TV commercials. My favorite is:

And for beautiful hair you would want to keep touching – Dove Hair Care!

Tee-shirts are also good. Here I’m wearing one that says Man Style If You Like This. You can probably read Kelsey's. It says Wonderful Bangladesh. Jen's says Me Only Babe The Power Ober Ourselbs Let Make Something Out Of It. Make Your Own Destiny.

Religious Revivals Deshi Style

Back in January in our neighborhood we noticed workers constructing a huge bamboo structure in the local park/cricket field. Over the course of a week the structure began to take on the shape of a palace, with big towers crowned with the tear-drop-shaped turrets that are common in this part of the world. Eventually they covered it with colored cloth to complete the look. Meanwhile, livestock in increasing quantities began to line the main street between our neighborhood and Farmgate. Among the animals were two camels and one of the largest bulls we've ever seen - certainly the largest we've seen in Bangladesh. One night as we were walking home from our friends’ house, we stopped to ask some people what all the preparations were for. An old man wearing a toupee and Punjabi explained that it was for Urosh. We asked what they were going to do with the animals. Kill them he said. I guess one of the camels must have heard him. Because it stuck its head through the makeshift fence and took hold of the old man's coat in its mouth. Quick as a greased lizard the old man ducked out of his coat and commenced a pulling match with the camel. More because I wanted to touch a camel than for any other reason, I stepped up and poked the camel between the eyes a couple of times. He didn't let go of the man's coat. Then someone shooed me away and whacked the camel on the head with a stick. It let go then. The old man got his coat back a little worse for the wear, I imagine.

Later we learned that Urosh was a festival in honor of a living saint. From our perspective it looked a lot like the tent revivals folks have back home. They had preaching (and even some music, I think) all day and all night for about three days. The darwan and his grandson, Shadhin, from downstairs got decked out in their Friday finest and asked us to take their picture before going out to pray.

On another walk past the camels, an old man asked us if we wanted to come in and meet the saint. We declined. I’m not sure why.

Bideshi Dam

One of the running themes of this experience (and hence this blog) is the question of what to pay for stuff. It is a well known fact that the average bideshi has more money than the average Bangladeshi, but the consequences of this vary widely from place to place, situation to situation. It is standard practice for sellers to ask anywhere from two to ten times the normal price when we inquire about a purchase price. We refer to this marked up price as Bideshi Dam (foreigner price). Depending on our mood, the amount of the mark up, the general attitude of the seller, and who-knows-what-else we either bargain hard or simply purchase the desired item. We've resigned ourselves to the fact that we will always pay more than a Bangladeshi, and that's okay. After all, even the Bideshi Dam is typically dirt cheap for us and you can't fault the seller for trying to take advantage of that fact. However, on a couple of recent outings we've run across examples of institutionalized Bideshi Dam (see the signs below). Somehow this is more offensive. For example, the entrance price to Lalbag Kella, a fort in old Dhaka, is 5 Taka for Bangladeshis and 50 Taka for forgeiners.

Even more outrageous is the difference in entrance price to the Lawa Charra, and old forest/national park in Sylette. There the standard price is 20 Taka (10 for children). Bideshis pay 350 Taka! (Actually, in the interest of honest disclosured I should mention that, despite the sign, we did not have to pay any entrance fee at all - who knows why. Must have just been a free day.)