Friday, May 21, 2010



Touring around Lalbagh Fort and mosque in Old Dhaka.


Lalbagh Fort in Old Dhaka-built in the Mogul empire. There were separate lines for men and women to buy tickets and foreigners had to pay 100 Taka versus 10 Taka for Bangladeshis.


Star Mosque in Old Dhaka-women have to wait to be invited in by a man to enter a mosque. The yellowish tiles on the left date back to the Mogul empire. The white tiles on the right are newer.


Shoe maker in Old Dhaka down by the Ganges river.


Sculpture garden-old man and his sitar.



A wall with Bangla writing outside Dhaka University.
Last Friday Donna, Mozib, and I decided to explore old Dhaka for the day even though it was insanely hot and humid. You were drenched the second you stood outside. Mozib took us over a new road that was just built in Dhaka. This road looks new and legit and goes over the train tracks. It had a median divider and everything. Old Dhaka is nice on a Friday with little traffic and took us no more than 25 minutes to get down there.
We drove around Dhaka University, which is a big area with lots of grassy spots in front of the dorms. The dorms are big old buildings-some of them are very old in the red brick style. We found a funny monument garden commemorating some famous politicians. Some of the statues were hilarious though. We toured around a Hindu temple, the star mosque, Lalbagh fort, and went down to the embankment road by the Ganges river. There is a lot to see in old Dhaka and it was a nice change from Gulshan-Bannani-Baridhara area. Lalbagh fort was my favorite-a Mughal king had built the extravagant house and mosque for him and his family while much of the country was starving and didn't have enough to eat. Two of his daughter are thought to be buried in tombs there. There was a gate to enter the place and men and women had seperate ques. Us whities also had to pay 100 Taka versus the 10 Taka that the Bangladeshis had to pay. 100 Taka is just over a dollar so still not so bad but come on! Old Dhaka has tons of amazing textiles for wholesale prices. We ended the day looking at rolls and rolls of amazing, brightly colored cotton fabrics and Mozib got some material for his wife. We were all dripping with sweat-thank god for air conditioned cars!

Saturday, May 15, 2010



the brains!


serious MEAT


Huge plates of chicken tikka at Barbecue Tonight in Dhamondi

Barbecue in Dhaka

Last weekend our newly married friends organized a dinner for us at a restaurant in Dhamondi called Barbecue Tonight. The place was filled with locals and it was nice to get out of the diplomatic zone of Baridhara, Gulshan, and Banani. It took about 45 minutes to get out there even with light traffic on a Friday night. It is a popular spot with Bangladeshis and hard to get spots on some days but it would easily be passed by foreigners or people who didn't know about it for the much more flashier restaurants in the area. The place was a relaxed little hole in the wall with a lot of plastic tables and chairs outside. We sat in the small room inside and we were glad we did because the monsoon rains ruined a lot of delicious barbecue that night.
Our friends had ordered one of everything on the menu. First they brought out huge platters of chicken tikka and bread baskets with both nan and pataha. The nan was perfect and the pataha was a thinner, flatter bread, that is fried. It was also delicious. The chicken tikka was so tasty and very messy as you ripped if off the bone with your hands. After pulling the chicken off the bone I would wrap it in a piece of bread and add some of the delicious green yogurt sauce they had to it. The chicken was perfectly spiced, very tasty and not too hot. They also brought huge platters of legs of lamb and bowls of what I found out later to be brains mixed with other parts! A little jolting but actually very delicious. It was basically a thick, chunky gravy that was a bit oily but was good in the little wraps I would make with chicken and bread. The lamb was a bit dry and the chicken was by far my favorite. We brought wine to drink because of course they didn't serve alcohol. The wine made eating brains and huge hunks of meat a lot easier. For dessert there was faluda, a drink with hot pink and orange colored ice cream and sweet noodles in the bottom. It was yummy and sugary but I'm not sure I liked the texture of noodles in my ice cream. Overall, delicious dinner, although I always walk away from dinners at local restaurants wondering if I am going to regret it the next day. My tummy was fine with it though :)

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

This is the about the 5th time I've sat down to write this and the power has gone out. It goes out at the most inconvenient times it seems like. The power cuts in Dhaka have been so bad this year because we are having a gas crisis-there is not enough to go around, especially when people are running air-cons at full blast this time of year when it is hot and humid as hell. And it is only May....
School used to be a safe haven where I knew there would almost always be internet and air conditioning. When the power went out the generators would kick in a couple of seconds later providing us with the air conditioning us Americans have become so dependent on. Since the power cuts this Spring we have been overusing our generators, which have been breaking under all the added use. Now when the power goes out at school we don't have air con for up to several hours and/or lights and electric.
We pride ourselves on being a tech-savvy school and we have MAC lap tops and an outstanding tech department. However, we can't always rely on this technology with constant and extended power outages. Both in our classrooms and at homes-I can make a visually stimulating Keynote presentation or a Prezi but if the power goes out and the projector can't do its job it's no use. We can't exactly ask our kids to do a tech stuff at home either. A lot of the websites we use at school are inaccessible from home-we get special permissions and shields that allow us to access more web sites but a lot of them basically don't like that we're in Bangladesh or their networks don't extend that far. Therefore we can't ask students to go on these sites at home. If you assign homework that requires the internet you will undoubtedly get multiple excuses about internet not working, which more often than not are completely legitimate.
Back in the fall we didn't have internet for a few days because there was some problem with the cable that gave us internet. It ran under the Indian Ocean from India to Bangladesh. It took several days to repair it.
It is amazing the things that you get used to-if the power went out in a restaurant or school at home it would be a huge deal and would cause a big disturbance. Here, people don't even respond, they just keep right on doing whatever they were doing, just in the dark. If the internet was out for several days or even hours at home, people would act like the world had ended.
Think I'm headed for a heavy dose of reverse culture shock in about a month...