Arrival Day in Dhaka
I arrived in Dhaka at about 7:30 the morning of Wednesday the 29th after a 13 straight flight from Washington D.C. to Doha airport in Qatar and then a 4 and 1/2 hour lay over and then another 5 and 1/2 hour flight from Doha, across India, to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Bangladesh just decided to instate daylight savings time a few weeks ago where they didn't have it before in an attempt to save energy so we are actually 11 hours behind the US instead of 10 right now. Saying goodbye to my family and MK and Ali, who also dropped me at the airport was incredibly tough. How do you say goodbye to the people who are closest to you for a year? Getting on the plane was almost a relief, though, because the build up and mental stress of that week was so intense that I passed out pretty soon into the flight. I flew Qatar Air, which was extremely nice. Little T.V.s in the back of each seat and nice big, comfy seats. They had a tracking map so I would wake up periodically and track us go north across the Atlantic, over England, down over Italy and Turkey and down to Qatar.
Coming into Doha was interesting; it was as flat as a sheet of paper and sand everywhere with these big strip malls and warehouses coming out of the sand. The airport was all white and was small and had Arab architecture. The security checkin "line" was really just a mass of people all shouting over each other in languages that I could not understand and waving their papers at one small girl behind the desk, hoping to get helped. It was insane. Needless to say, I didn't get helped for quite a while. Picked up some bottles at the Duty Free shop. My roomies will probably think I'm an alchi but it is much more expensive in Bangladesh because it is a Muslim country, so they look down upon drinking.
Looking around the airport, there were definitely some western looking people interspersed, although for one of the first times in my life, I was a true minority. I thought that these people were probably going to the same place or same type of place that I was but I was too scared and out of it from my flight to ask. This plane flight was very, very interesting. Whereas my first one was very quiet and people were nice and polite this flight was the complete opposite. They cram you on to a shuttle bus with no air conditioning that takes you to the plane. We had to sit on it for a while before boarding. Boarding was chaotic; they let people on the front and back entrances so people were practically climbing on top of each other to get to their seats. People were pretty rude and very pushy. I think I got side swiped by a 90 Indian woman wearing a sari at least once. This flight was loud and people were super chatty. One guy blatantly got caught smoking in the bathroom and totally denied it even when they found his cigarettes and lighter. He was about 35. People deliberately seemed to pick fights with the studardesses. One man got angry because they asked his relative, who had to be wheelchaired onto the plane to relocate because she was sitting in an exit row. This guy took it as a personal insult against her and refused to move even though in an emergency this woman would have been no help. The second the plane landed, almost the entire plane was up out of their seats, getting their bags from up top, and heading for the door. The attendants had to do serious crowd control and still people wouldn't listen.
I had ended up sitting next to a veteran teacher at the American School who had taught there since 2001 and was very nice and helpful. I followed her to the meeting point when we got off the plane and it ended up that there were about 30 of us on the flight from Doha. We all had to hand over our passports so that the embassy could obtain visas for us, which is a little disconcerting, considering I had been checking every so often just to make sure I still had it. I felt weird without it.
We got taken to our apartment by bus. Driving in Dhaka is always an adventure. The traffic basically goes at the pace of the slowest vehicle on the road, which is the rickshaw, so you're not going anywhere fast. People are constantly beeping for absolutely no reason and there are basically no driving laws, or if there are, people don't pay attention to them. "Red lights are an invitation to go faster," said our Superintendent. People drive down the wrong side of the road all the time. What's crazier is that people walk through the streets all the time and just basically dodge traffic and hope they don't get hit. I almost saw about 5 people get run over today. At night, people have these crazy flashing neon lights on their cars; as if driving wasn't tough enough, you have these flashing lights in your eyes constantly.
Bangladesh is in a delta, so it's very low-lying and flooding is prevalent. A few days before we arrived, the city saw the worst rains in 60 years. The water had receded in the past few days but it was still quite high. It's currently the rainy season right now, which lasts from June to October. It's very wet everywhere and in the evening it stormed like crazy for a solid 2 hours or so.
I am sharing an apartment with two other girls; Danna, who is actually originally from close to D.C., too, and Kasey, who has lived in Bangladesh for almost 2 years now. Danna and I were both on the flight from Doha. Our apartment is huge! There is this gigantic hall type thing when you walk in. You could easily put in a pong table here and have tons of room to spare. Big living room, dining room, extra room, lots of balconies, kitchen, and 3 big bedrooms with their own bathrooms. Everything comes furnished, you just supply the stuff you need to live; clothes, shoes, books, movies, etc.
We had a few hours to settle in and we met our cook bara, who is very sweet. They do everything from cooking meals, serving them, cleaning up, doing the washing, drying, ironing, depending on what you want them to do. It will be strange having someone do these things for me because I'm so programmed to do them for myself. I'm sure I could get used to it though.
The area that we live in is called Baridara; it is probably one of the nicest parts of Dhaka. You enter through gates that are guarded by people with machine guns. It all used to be private homes and then land in Dhaka and this part especially became very valuable so they started knocking down these private homes and building high-rise apartments. There are some private homes left though. A very small piece of land can go for 2 million here. The area is basically two parallel streets and then some numbered streets in between these two. We live on street 1. Our apartment is on the highest floor of our building, floor 5, and there is a couple across the hall from us who are also teachers at the school who just came from Seoul, Korea.
We met up at the school, which is 2 blocks away from our apartment with all the other "new staff" and the administrators. We had a little orientation meeting where we introduced ourselves to each other and said where we had just come from, etc. Experienced ranged from one lady who used to teach in Hawaii and this is her first overseas teaching experience to people who have taught in 3 or 4 places around the world already. Several of them had kids who would be enrolled in the school as well. Basically everyone was really jet-lagged. Some people had longer travel periods than I had and had started out in places like California that day, flew to Washington, flew to Doha, and finally to Dhaka.
The school is really nice and is kind of built in a triangle shape. Large parts of it are being renovated; they are adding a whole other wing to the elementary school. The construction that is going on is pretty amazing. The workers have constructed scaffolding out of bamboo polls and steps out of thin strips of wood. They carry cement from the mixer that is somewhere downstairs in bowls on top of their heads up flights of stairs to the construction site. It is pretty third world compared to what I'm used to. We walked by my classroom and the door already had my name tag on it.
We had a few hours in the afternoon to hang out at our places and relax. I passed out for two solid hours. For dinner we ate at the American club. Our drivers picked us up and drove us there. It's about a 20 to 25 minute walk so it's not that far away but there is plenty of traffic on the way. The American club is really nice; you enter through a secure entrance and there are pretty paths lined with flowers everywhere, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a bar and dining area, and an upstairs open air eating area where we ate dinner. Delicious meat and veggie kabobs, yellow rice, potato salad, green salad, pasta salad, and rolls. While we were arriving the sky looked like there was about to be a hurricane with black storm clouds building up and it finally just opened up and poured for 2 solid hours. I was so tired at dinner, I felt like falling asleep in my plate of food. So was everybody else though and the evening ended pretty quickly. After having been through and seen a lot in the past 40 hours or so, it was nice to be in a place that kind of reminded me of home.
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