Adventures and Birthday fun

Its been an eventful week this past week. I’ve been sick (although that’s just an ongoing theme!) I’ve been across the city and back and out for dinner three times (a great achievement in this country), I’ve been filmed in class, I got a 150 Taka (that's about $2 NZ) haircut from a beauty parlour down the street, I’ve been serenaded in Pizza Hutt and I’ve eaten an enormous amount of cake and watermelon!

On Tuesday we went to Gulshan (about 10km away) for a friends birthday dinner. It seemed like an easy enough task to manage-catch a cng, find the restaurant and eat dinner, simple right? Ha! Catching the cng was our first challenge, even though we had a native Bangla speaker with us, every cng was full and whizzed past us. However, after standing there for about ten minutes with no luck, a couple of traffic cops came up and asked where we were going and then they started helping us! It was absolutely hilarious as these three men were pulling every cng over, regardless of whether or not they had passengers and asking them if they would take us, I think in some cases they were saying ‘you have to take these girls!’. After about 15 mins of this, and multiple mosquito bites later, we finally got an empty cng willing to take us and we squashed in, thinking that we still might manage to make it to dinner on time! 1 ½ hours later, after sitting in horrendous traffic and stopping and asking directions multiple times we arrived at dinner, only an hour later than we said we would be there! And the funny thing is, no one was surprised or at all upset that we were so late-it’s just expected! Amazingly, the trip home a couple of hours later, took us only 20 mins as the distance isn’t really that far.

The lovely cng driver that drove for a very long time to get us to dinner! 

The other really notable thing that happened was Saturday which is of course the best day of the year, being my birthday! J I was made pancakes by the lovely Carolynne, got given a beautiful sari and an enormous watermelon and was taken out to lunch at Pizza Hutt by a group of fantastic people. Pizza Hutt was great, twas nice to eat something distinctly western and the funniest thing was that the staff sang me a crazy birthday song (not the old standard Happy Birthday, I think it was one written for Pizza Hutt!) and made me stand up in the middle of the restaurant! It was hilarious, and they even gave me a birthday card from Pizza Hutt, made me feel very special! I was also sung happy birthday in Korean by one of the families with us at lunch-lovely! The day was made great by the awesome people that have surrounded me in this country as well as the people from home who sent me messages and those few who I got to talk to. I thought I would be more homesick yesterday but it only hit me a little bit…

Then today one of my classes sang me happy birthday (the proper version!) and made me feel very much like I belonged at school, infecting me with their joy and cheekiness! All in all, it was a great week, despite being sick, filled with many experiences that I will remember in years to come. 

My lovely birthday cake!

My birthday watermelon and the $2 haircut!

Some of the beautiful GEMS school students celebrating Falgun, the start of spring. 

Down river

I just got back from a trip down the river (actually about 3 rivers, but more on that later) to another school about 4 hours down river from Dhaka that I will be working in a bit this year.

It was an incredibly interesting trip, travelling by boat is great as you can see what happens on the great waterways that are the lifeblood of this country in relative comfort. Driving is almost always semi-uncomfortable and can take an exceptionally long time!

The river teems with life, there are a bazillion boats of all shapes and sizes and in varying degrees of disrepair and factories spewing out crap into the air and into the river. It seems like such a travesty, that this country, which was once so beautiful, has been turned into a filthy wasteland. The brick kilns are horrendous, they burn everything to keep them going and in a ever growing ring around Dhaka there are masses of brick kiln chimneys spewing out foul smelling black smoke (their only benefit is that the smog makes for beautiful sunsets!). And the rubbish is also disgusting; everything is simply thrown off the boat to sit in the river, such a shame that this massive waterway that in some ways sustains this country has been defiled so badly.

Apart from that, the trip was fascinating, Bangladesh is basically a river delta and the rivers are absolutely ENOURMOUS! We took the boat down a ‘small’ river (about the size of the Waikato or bigger), which met another bigger river, and then turned into the biggest river I have ever seen. I honestly thought we were going out to sea; such was the expanse of water. It doesn’t seem right that you can be on a river and not be able to see the other side!

The further you get down the river, the cleaner and greener everything gets as well which just lifted my spirits greatly. You can actually smell the river when you get about an hour away from Dhaka and it’s foul, so to get away from that for a few days was awesome. I was very excited to see trees and flowers, and to be able to walk to school was awesome. I also made friends with a couple of puppies which was lovely-I miss having a pet to fuss over!

I’m looking forward to spending more time down there, to get my fix of trees and flowers and puppies and also to build some good relationships with the new teachers in the school down there. It’s a great break from the madness of Dhaka…

Coming out of Dhaka...

The beautiful clean air! There are millions of these chimneys spewing out smoke. 

Brick, bricks, bricks

Pollution makes beautiful sunsets! And this is a river that you can't see the other side of!

Coming into Chandpur, just a little river.

Unloading boats

Sunset and the boat

Beautiful flowers and trees :)