Traffic, Vaginas, and Tea, Oh My!

06/30/13

I have been here a little over a week, and I can now say with certainty that the traffic really is as bad as they say, that Dhaka is both like and so unlike my experiences of Delhi and Jaipur and I cannot wait to get to know it better, and that being a vegetarian here really is a pain since many restaurants and locals cannot even comprehend why you would not want to treat yourself to some meat (meat from that cute goat, anyone?). Settling into a new place is always a bit of a process, complete with bouts of elation and of homesickness. Here, it is helped by my very sweet and adventurous classmates and hurt by my ridiculously pathetic stomach. The people here are studying Bangla for all kinds of reasons, from those who want to work in international health policy to comparative literature, from journalism to law, from psychology to medical school. It is an interesting bunch of people to share a life with.

We made pancakes!

Our program set us up with three floors of an apartment building. Each floor has five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a tiny kitchen. I feel a bit like I am living in a dorm all over again, with groups of people going on spontaneous adventures or working on homework together or playing cards every time I turn around. If the people I were living with were jerks, being on top of each other all the time would be awful. I spend six hours a day five days a week with the one other student in the advanced beginning Bangla class, an adorable individual newly out of undergrad with a degree in Comparative Literature and the same desire I have to find the queer and feminist communities in Dhaka (and we had our first lead when I found out that my language partner’s older sister started a V-day Vagina Monologues tradition in Dhaka four years ago!!!). To be fair, we are just barely starting week two and there is still plenty of time to hate each other’s guts, but so far, I am hopeful that we will be the foundations of a support system for one another and a diverse learning community. Who says I will never live in some sort of (almost) cooperative housing project?

This is what monsoon looks like.

 We have our own cooks, who live on the first floor and somehow produce miraculous amounts of delicious food in their tiny kitchen (daal, rice, fish, goat, eggplant, greens, salad, fresh fruit, and more). They make breakfast and lunch for us five days a week, and for dinner we tend to go around the corner to a restaurant that serves our favorite street food, fuchka, in a (hopefully) slightly cleaner setting. Fuchka is the Bangladeshi version of the Indian pani puri. For those of you who have not managed to try either, it is a bit like a tiny, hollow ball of crispy bread with a hole in the top. Into the bread go mashed chickpeas; onions; potato; crispy, spicy cracker bits; and finally, tamarind water or yogurt. You put the whole little concoction in your mouth, and as you bite down, the spiced water/yogurt explodes on your tongue. It is one of the best foods on earth. Sweet and salty and spicy and crunchy and refreshing all at the same time. I have not tried to cook much in our kitchen, with its two gas burners (light at your own risk), one functioning pan, and peeling spatula. There is so much interesting food to eat here, even if it is not the most vegetarian-friendly country.

An Armenian Church full of friendly (but mangy) dogs I wanted to pet.

One of the best parts of our language program is that we are each matched up with a local Bangladeshi student of our same gender who is paid to spend ten (or more) hours a week with us. We are supposed to split this time between experiencing the culture and working on our language skills. It is a mildly awkward way to build a relationship, knowing that your new “friend” is being paid to spend time with you, but many of the students have already developed close relationships with one another. My language partner is more reserved and difficult to read, but I am hopeful that I will get to know her over the course of the summer. The stereotype of Bangladeshis is that they are the warmest and friendliest people you could ever want to meet, but my experience so far of Dhaka is like any other city: people are careful about making new friends, having already built the communities they plan to spend time with over years of living in the area. I remember having this frustration in Paris and again in New York City. Perhaps cities are cities, regardless of where they are in the world, and they encourage a certain degree of cliquing up as a way of surviving the crazy amount of people living in, moving to, and leaving from them.

My first cha stand!

My language partner’s (LP’s) name is Tahsin. Tahsin lives with her mom and an older sister and brother (her dad commutes on weekends from Chittagong, a city on the coast of Bangladesh) in a family apartment building with aunts, uncles, and cousins populating the other floors. She studies environmental science, hates shopping, has a boyfriend she is quite fond of, and seems to have very few restrictions on her freedom to do and be what she wants. I was not sure what to expect from gender dynamics in Bangladesh. Having lived in India and dealt with almost daily (though usually minor) sexual harassments, I was prepared for anything. After all, we were warned in advance not to talk openly about sex or sexuality, not to touch members of the opposite sex in public (we were even discouraged from starting conversations with Bangladeshi men we did not already know), not to be surprised if our language partners had to be back before dark, not to travel alone after dark if we were female and could help it. And certainly, some of the LPs must keep any dating they do a secret, meeting their partners in public places and sneaking smoldering glances and gentle arm grazes where they can because their parents do not allow them to actually date.

Traffic?! What traffic?

The funniest moment such different gendered-interaction expectations have produced so far happened today when I was feeling homesick and asked a (male) fellow student for a hug. We knew touch was not appropriate in public, so we waited to get our cuddle on until we were back in our dorm, at which point he gave me a big hug. At exactly that moment our cleaning lady opened the front door, took one look at us as we broke apart, and slammed the door again as quickly as she could. This friend of mine is gay, and the fact that this would have shocked her even more had us giggling hysterically for the next few minutes. Later on that day, this same cleaning lady stumbled upon this same friend cuddling with another female friend of ours (platonically). She must think he is such a ladies’ man, and none of us can correct her misconception without making the situation more awkward.

Why, yes, that is part of a beautiful old fort with a weird staircase to nowhere being built behind it.

 We took our first class field trip to what is known as Old Dhaka on Saturday. Old Dhaka is known for being the oldest (surprise, surprise), and most of the political protests and strikes (hartals) center on or near it. It is a chaos of winding streets, huge markets, charming hole-in-the-wall food and tea (cha) stands, and beautiful buildings (along with dilapidated construction projects and filth like you would not believe). I had my first cha stand experience (another of those things the orientation packet recommends be boys-only, ha!). The tea was delicious (and so was the moment of ignoring any male-female awkwardness I might be causing). Besides the realization that I would have to return, since I would not be able to explore Old Dhaka’s nooks and crannies on the class field trip, I also got my second taste of real traffic (my first came when my LP’s dad drove me home from a nearby neighborhood and all the stopping and starting had me violently motion sick for the next 24 hours, ugh!). Sometimes we would be moving just fine, but other times, rickshaws would clog the road in every direction and the bus would sit at a standstill for five or ten minutes. The monsoon flooding certainly did not help, as no one wanted to drive through three feet of water (though an impressive number of rickshaws tried). I have to find a way to deal with the motion sickness, because there is no way I am going to let it stop me from going places. Any suggestions beyond knocking myself out with dramamine?

More of the Red Fort!

My Introduction to Dhaka or OMG I Love Goats(!!!)

06/25/13

Walking down a street in Bashundarah (our neighborhood)

The plane touched down in Dhaka so smoothly that I almost did not realize we had landed. As we coasted along the runway, I looked out over a lush, green landscape, full of tall grass and the occasional palm tree. It was 5:30 in the morning, but I could already feel the strength of the sun. It had been two uneventful flights—I slept through almost all of both of them—though I was embarrassingly awkward sitting next to a Bangladeshi man for the second flight. I had forgotten how difficult it is to know how to behave in a public that is populated mainly by men. I had forgotten, too, the South Asian disregard for lines—a disregard the anarchist in me grudgingly respects—until I watched the shoving competition between passengers as they rushed to be the first out of their seats and to the front of the plane before we had even stopped moving. None of the flight attendants batted an eye at the fact that the fasten seat belt sign was still on and I found myself giggling quietly at this moment of delightful chaos.

My next reminder that I was in South Asia came when I stopped to use the restroom in the terminal before waiting in the passport control line; a squat toilet sans toilet paper but with a small bucket and a hose for post-urination cleaning greeted me (if you are as awkward with the hose as I am, you will just carry a packet of tissues absolutely everywhere). Plus a woman lying on the ground next to the sink (possibly spending the night in the bathroom…unclear). After making it through passport control, we stepped out into an already-humid summer morning. We passed our luggage to the bus-driver through the back windows, and boarded a bus that would take us to our apartment building. Dhaka traffic, our teachers warn us, is the worst you will ever see. It can take 2 hours to go 10 kilometers. Certainly, the drive from the airport consisted of many stops and starts, along with some clever maneuvering on the part of our driver into spaces that seemed too small to fit the entire bus. There are two kinds of public bus, the buses named by route (these are the good ones) and the numbered or “tin-can” buses (these are the ones that regularly kill people). The tin-can buses look like they have tried a few too many times to fit into narrow spaces in traffic, their sides beat up with scrapes and scratches.

A block from our apartment building

I am used to living accommodations in South Asia that are less than stellar. My first home, in Jaipur, was a steamy room over my host-mother’s garage. It had no air conditioning in the 100 degree summer heat, holes in the windows that let in—among other unpleasant creatures—a giant rat , and a shower that regularly gave me mild electric shocks. My host-mother also purposefully served us unfiltered water. Perhaps I don’t need to say that most study abroad experiences are going to be better than that one? Our apartment building is one of a multitude of brick towers coated in concrete. The rooms are spacious, clean, air conditioned (!). I have my own room and my own bathroom. We are fed two meals a day by cooks who genuinely seem to like us and want to feed us tasty things we will enjoy. We have cleaning people who come daily and a laundry person who comes twice a week to wash our clothes. We also have a “Resident Director” which seems to mean an American guy who speaks amazing Bangla and knows Dhaka well and who is there to make sure everything is going alright in school, the apartments, and daily life. I feel so ridiculously spoiled!

After 24 hours of travel time, our early morning arrival meant that we somehow had to stay awake through another entire day in order to avoid the worst of the jetlag. We were fed breakfast, given a quick housing orientation, and taken on a walking tour of the neighborhood during the hottest time of the day. I was dripping sweat the moment I stepped out the front door. We walked through disgustingly filthy streets with garbage, sewage, and huge puddles of brackish water everywhere. This may sound completely miserable, and there are moments where I find it distasteful, but for the most part, it becomes a part of the background experience of living my day-to-day life. It’s not exactly getting used to it. I always notice. It’s more like I stop caring enough about it to be noticeably bothered by the situation.

I have always struggled to describe how I experience my surroundings in South Asia because it is just so different from anything we see on a daily basis in the “west”. But I’m trying anyway. Our neighborhood is on the outskirts of the city and while there are massive amounts of construction everywhere I have been, there are extra-massive amounts in our immediate surroundings. Every other building seems to be in the midst of being built, with sticks propping up each level and workers swarming the front yards cutting pipe and laying brick. At the same time, there are small open plots of land covered in grass, (adorable) baby goats and (slightly scarier) adult goats roaming free, dogs everywhere (that most Bangladeshis see the way we see rats) and unpaved dirt roads. There are luxurious mansions that could be in any Hollywood film and tin shacks sharing the same space. And there are people EVERYWHERE. So many people. I am so excited to start roaming the city, but so exhausted even thinking about the amount of energy needed to navigate this many people and this many contrasting stimuli.

How cute is this goat?!