For my 11:30am pick-up to go to my first day of official "volunteering", I thought it would be a good time to catch up on the last 2 weeks of our travels as we now have a high speed Internet connection on our phones! (YAY for iPhones and 3G!!!). Originally I set my alarm to wake up at 9:00am, but I got woken up at 7:00am by the hotel staff telling me there was a "bus waiting for you downstairs", which I had no clue about... so I got dressed and went down wondering if I had missed something yesterday... but they were the ones confused...
Anyways...Bangladesh...was our next destination after 2 weeks in Nepal. We spent 5-days in Dhaka with our lovely hosts Aabed and Tani. We spent a night at BRAC CDM in Savar which was located on the outskirts of Dhaka. Nice place, lots of greenery, and it was the beginning of the jack fruit season so the trees were full with enormous fruit. Next door to the place that we stayed at is a BRAC college where students spend a semester learning English away from Dhaka, which Tani had done. It was dormitory style much like Hebron in a sense.
The political situation in Bangladesh is an interesting one, as Aabed told us... it primarily involves 2 parties lead by women who dislike each other... one is a surviving daughter of the "father of the nation". He was involved in fighting for independence for Bangladesh and separating from Pakistan, but him and most of his family were assassinated by the army (kind of like the Ghandi family in India and the Kennedys in the USA). We went to the BanglaBandhu museum, much like Indira Ghandi's house in Delhi but not as well maintained. The other lady is the opposition party lady and I don't remember too much, but the political power in this country yo-yos between the 2 of them and to me it seems they work to spite each other more than anything.
Dhaka was a more developed city compared to Kathmandu, in terms of larger buildings, bigger city, but traffic was almost as chaotic. We went to a stand-up comedy show one night, which was interesting, well it was 10% English so that's how much we understood. It was Russell Peter's style comedy introduced by this guy who was an architect in the USA so it's not mainstream comedy there.
Finally, Bengalis like to eat well...we were fed continuously, had delicious biryani, prawn curry, chicken curry, pooris, mangoes, lychees, and more... and left Bangladesh with a larger waist size!
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