The Post Man

Twice now we have received an item of mail delivered to our house by the Bangladeshi post. The same post man has made the delivery both times. The first time he showed up there was a knock at the door. After the obligatory scramble for an orna for Jen, we opened the door a crack and peered out. It took a few seconds to process the new face and understand the words, but the stack of letters in his hand helped. Realizing he was a post man, we opened the door and invited him in. He handed us the letter, we signed for it, and business complete right? Nope. The post man continues to stand there showing no signs of leaving. Jen and I are confused. Finally he asks for a glass of water. Oh sorry! Sorry! Jen scrambles for a glass of water, asks the man to have a seat, brings him the water. He drinks it at a stately pace. When he’s finished Jen offers more, or would you prefer a Cold Drink (meaning soda). He would prefer the Cold Drink. So Jen gets him a glass of Coke with ice in it. He finishes the Coke and then leaves.

Today he showed up a second time. This time, to Jen’s embarrassment, I opened the door before the orna had been located. Oops! Dada, the doorman from down stairs is there with another fellow that I now recognize as the post man. I invite them in. Before I can get the words out to offer, the post man asks if he can have a seat at the table. Yes. Yes. Have a seat, I say. He sits.

Then Jen shows up, modestly blanketed by the orna and offers him something to drink. No, no he won’t drink anything, he says, he has a car waiting. Then he struggles with the knot on his cloth bag for about a minute and a half, finally gets it open and removes a thoroughly battered white Priority Mail box. (Dada, meanwhile, is also sitting at the table, examining Jen’s computer, and trying to ask me questions about Tuni-didi, the much beloved former resident of our apartment. Even on a good day, I understand practically nothing Dada says and now I’m distracted. So it’s doubly hopeless.) The post man asks for our names. We give them. Jen’s name is on the box so he presents the papers for her to sign (three signatures are required), and you will give seven-hundred-forty Taka, he says, plus boksheesh (tip) for me. Oh really! We’re supposed to pay for the package that has already been handsomely paid for by the sender and then tip the mail man!? What can you do…?

I went for some money. We didn’t have the correct change. So Jen presented him with 1000 Taka and asked for 200 back. I’m thinking 60 Taka tip is more than generous. The man claims not to have change. He’ll just take the whole amount, he says. No, Jen says, if you can’t make change then give me the money back. Oh wait, actually, I have change, here take 100, he says. Now I’m pissed. I point to the package and say this is your job, is it not? The man appears offended and says something about his work that I don’t understand. (Dada laughs and says something unintelligible. I can’t tell who’s side he’s on – probably he’s just heckling both of us.) My look continues to tell the post man, I don’t give a shit, you’ve overstepped your bounds. (What’s in the box? Dada wants to know. I don’t know, I say.) The post man hands over another hundred and says well if you won’t give me a decent tip will you at least give me a Fanta, then?

Oh really, Jen says, a Fanta? You said you wouldn’t drink anything. She’s slightly offended, but mostly just amused. We don’t have Fanta, she says, you can have ice tea.

Jen fixes him a tea and the post man sits and drinks it. (Dada is now examining the Leatherman that was on the table, he takes it out of its pouch, tries to fit it back in, has difficulty, finally succeeds.) Jen begins to open the package. Don’t do that now, I say in English, it’ll cause a distraction.

I’m curious about the contents of the package too, but mostly I just want these people to leave and stop messing with our stuff. I still can’t get used to the way people just come into our house, make demands, riffle through our things, and expect that we’ll cheerfully serve them tea for their trouble. It makes me angry…

Nepal Trip Report

Bideshi 1 and I recently took a much needed vacation from her work here and went to Nepal. It had long been a desire of mine to see Mount Everest. So we did the trek to Everest Base Camp and climbed Kala Pattar - which is a little "hill" that tops out at just over 18000 feet (thin air up there) and gives one of the best views of Everest you can get from anywhere in the world - or so they say. It was spectacular to be sure. The scale of those mountains is unbelievable. The hike to Everest comes up from the south and for most of the trip you have a good view of the Lhotse ridge, most of which is at an elevation of around 27000 ft. Down at the base of the mountain, there are some other peaks that top out at about 15000 ft, which is taller than any mountain in Colorado. From the valley these 15000 ft peaks look tiny, like you wouldn't even call them mountains, they're just little rock piles at the base of a mountain! And Kala Pattar, which is 4000 ft taller than any mountain I've ever climbed, was just this little hill, the pinky toe of Pumo Ri. Mind blowing stuff.

It was also cool to get a look at the ice fall where people start the route up Everest. I hear the route is really well marked because so many people go up and down it each season, but looking at it from a distance, I couldn't even imagine trying to find a line through the mess. I guess some of the crevasses are so big you just rappel down and then climb out the other side with ice tools. That's how it was with all the big mountains. I'd look at them and have no idea what the climbable line would be. I definitely won't be going up any of them any time soon.

The walking part was mostly easy, though there were a couple of prolonged uphill sections that had Bideshi 1 looking dour-faced and cranky. But she managed to suck it up and proceed without complaint. The biggest challenge for anyone attempting the trek is adjusting to the altitude. From my experience climbing and reading about climbing, I was aware that there would be some risk of AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) or even HAPE or HACE (High Altitude Pulmonary/Cerebral Edema), but in my mind these were pretty unlikely – and, if fact, the worst symptom either of us experienced was a fairly mild headache that went away over night. However, on the way up we heard some stories that certainly gave us pause.

We met a young woman one evening in Phiriche, a small village at about 14000 ft, who was recovering from a very near brush with death. She was from Oregon and fit and had plenty of experience backpacking in the mountains. She was traveling alone and had made it up to Everest Base Camp and then spent a night at Gorak Shep, the final town on the route (elevation 16864 ft), and then climbed Kala Pattar the next day. She made it to the top of the hill in an hour-and-a-half (which is pretty fast), and felt like the hike was easy. She had no adverse symptoms – not even a headache, no dizziness, nothing. Then she spent another night in Gorak Shep and woke up at about five in the morning and felt like she was drowning. Her lungs were filling with fluid. She was coughing up pink stuff. She felt dizzy and stupid. She new enough to know that she had to get down to lower elevation, but her brain was too addled to know that she should ask for help. So she just jammed her stuff into her pack and started hiking down. But she said she felt drunk and kept stumbling and falling and her legs were totally banged up. Apparently she passed several people on the trail and just told them that she was feeling bad and headed down. What she should have said was, “I have HACE and HAPE both, please help me get to the clinic in Phiriche before I die!” but, of course, when you have HACE you can’t think clearly. So she just waived and stumbled on.

About 10 hours later (the same trip took us five) she stumbled into Phiriche, and went into the first building she came to. She told us that she thought she was walking into a hospital. In fact she had walked into a common treker’s lodge and passed out unnoticed on a random bed. Apparently there was a party going on at the time on, and it wasn’t until the following morning that someone heard her coughing, woke her up, and dragged her into the clinic.

At the clinic she said she kept passing out until the doctor slapped her and said, “listen, you have a fatal condition. You need to concentrate and talk to me so that I can help you live.” I guess she got it together well enough to answer some questions. Then the doctor gave her some Diamox and Viagra (which was apparently first developed to treat problems with the lungs before men noticed a particularly desirable side effect…) and told her she had to get down the following day.

When we met her later that day she was feeling significantly better and pondering her options for decent. The doctor had said that she could either take a helicopter for $5,000 or a horse for $200. But our hero was cheapskate and felt like even the horse was too expensive. She was feeling so much better she thought she could probably just walk down. Take the horse! For cryin’ out loud we said. Get a receipt, heck you’re insurance might even cover it! When we parted company that’s what she had decided to do. Here’s hoping she made it down okay…

We also heard some other stories without such happy endings. A British guy told us a story about a German who’d gotten sick a Gorak Shep just the day before he arrived there. Apparently the German had come down with HAPE in the evening and been told that he needed to take a helicopter down first thing in the morning. Unfortunately he didn’t make it that long. In the middle of the night he went to the bathroom, and that’s where the lodge staff found him, stark naked and dead, the next morning.

Then some Swiss told us about a Japanese group they’d met in which a woman had died, and while they were talking to them another woman from the Japanese group keeled over and fainted. They didn’t know how she’d fared.

So in just the time we were there at least two people had died – not climbing mountains or anything - just doing the very same thing that we were doing. It kind of made us wonder, “are the views really worth it?” And yet we really felt fine the whole time. We took it real slow. Bideshi 1 set the pace. I followed along in tow, and we both acclimatized just fine. I think the people who had problems were fit people who had just gone up too fast – because they could, because it felt easy – and their bodies just hadn’t had time to adjust.

We met another British couple, Carl and Alice (who’s pictures you’re looking at, actually. More on that later..) who were also very fit and had done lots of trekking before. Alice said she’d been feeling horrible the whole time. Every time they got up to a new elevation she felt nauseous and sick and had a splitting headache. We were basically following the same itinerary, but come to find out that Carl and Alice had been walking really fast. What might take us four hours to do, they’d do in two. So we said hey I bet that’s your problem. Slow down. Look at the view. You’ll probably feel better.

We met up with them later in Kathmandu and it sounds like they did feel a little better when they went slower. So the moral is, when walking at high altitude, enjoy the view, meditate on the turtle, and … walk…very…slowly.

In addition to amazing views, Nepal was a nice cultural change from Bangladesh. The Nepali people in general were very friendly and helpful and seemed genuinely glad that we were there. I suppose the same could be said of Bangladeshis, but in contrast to Bangladeshis, they did not pry into our personal lives or persist in interactions that we had politely closed. Nepalis were just far less pushy. Getting into the country was also remarkably painless. The officials were efficient and courteous - without any of what we have come to refer to as "the South-Asian Male Ego." The food was also amazing. In Kathmandu you can get food from pretty much anywhere in the world, and it's all reasonably good and some of it is excellent. I'm sure this is a result of the booming tourist industry. I suppose some people would complain that the experience of traveling in Nepal lacks "authenticity" because there is so much catering to foreign tastes, but coming from Bangladesh that was part of what made it so great. People there are used to dealing with foreigners. It makes things easy.

The not so great thing about the trip was that we lost our camera. On the first day of the trek we set our packs down on a stone wall in order to fill up some water bottles. Jen had been carrying the camera and would have had to take it off in order to take her pack off. The best we can figure, we just left the camera sitting there on the wall. We didn't realize what had happened until the following morning. Some porter, no doubt, was very psyched about his find. Luckily we met several other people on the trip and some of them gave us their photos so we’d have something to share with our readers.

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.