Traveling: Views and Destinations

The one glorious aspect of the countless hot, sticky, cramped hours I've spent traveling between cities in Bangladesh is hands-down the view of the countryside that passes beyond my window. I love it, and haven't yet tired of it.

The biggest difference between my twenty-hour roadtrips from Chicago to Maine and the ones to and from Chittagong is summed up in one term that my students just learned in our Econ unit: population density.

While one can travel 50 miles in the U.S. without seeing a sole person, that just wouldn't happen here in a country of more than 162 million inhabiting an area the size of Wisconsin. The majority of the population is still rural (although Dhaka is now receiving a thousand immigrants a day since food prices have risen and rural jobs are scarce.)
Through the windows, along the railway and roads, you'll see the two toned grounds of brick factories. The unbaked-grey and warm-red bricks interrupt the green landscape all throughout the country.
For the last few months, the greens have faded into dusty winter hues. But the rains will come soon!

Most of my train journeys so far have been the Chittagong-Dhaka express. Almost everything goes through Dhaka, be it imports from abroad or passengers in transit. Except for the ridiculous traffic, I do enjoy the eventful weekends I get in this nation's capitol.

The number of food options are at least double those of Chittagong. Despite all the choices, my friends and I chose a favorite chicken place last December called the Kosturi Kitchen, and we make sure to hit it up at least once every visit.
Something else Dhaka has, that Chittagong hasn't caught onto quite yet, are coffee shops... with coffee... and WiFi. It's so luxurious. At least to us country bumpkins from Bangladesh's smaller cities. Maybe coming straight from the States, this little cafe called Cup o' Coffee Club in the upscale district of Ghulshan wouldn't be so glamorous. For example, this little mouse that joined us on the counter while we sipped lattes probably wouldn't be nearly as welcome in the Wheaton, IL Starbucks. But when I alerted the waiter about this furry critter below, he smiled and said "It's okay."
Alyssa and I decided he was right, it was ok, or at least that a little mouse oughtn't interrupt our caffinated conversations over Skype with friends back home....

John & Jan back in Bangladesh!

John and Jan Thorpe have left the piles of beautiful snow on the coast of Maine to move back to Bangladesh -- long-term, indefinitely, committed. I'm amazed.

I had the exciting opportunity to surprise them at the Dhaka airport when they arrived. I hadn't counted on meeting up with them until my spring break, a few weeks after their arrival. But when I realized they were arriving Thursday, I figured I could easily miss and make up one day of class for this chance to be with them in their first 24 hours back in the country.

We'll be spending my spring break together, in the tea gardens of Srimongol with some of my teaching colleagues.

One of the many benefits of their arrival is that I was able to retrieve the camera chord that I'd left in Maine, which is part of the reason I've been so delinquent and unmotivated about posting blog entries. They're just not as fun without recent photos. I'll have to play some catch up too, since I've finally gotten my photos from Christmas break in the States. Admittedly, the other reason for my blog neglect is that I'm teaching overtime, and it's midterms week.... and I need to write 3 midterm exams.... so I'd better sign off for now!

shouts of joy in chittagong

Live from Chittagong: BANGLADESH JUST BEAT ENGLAND IN A CRICKET WORLD CUP GAME!

I'll take this brief writing break from weeks of non-stop teaching, grading, working, travelling to fill you in on the current joyous happenings in Chittagong....

Midnight now, I'm at my desk in my room on the 9th floor of an apartment building on the Dhaka-Chittagong highway, and the shouts, honks, chants, drums below me are those of utter jubilation. It's reminding me of being in Paris in 2000 when the city hosted the final match of the Euro Cup and France beat Italy. Tonight's game (not a final) took place here in Chittagong and lasted about 7 hours.

Apparently these games can last for days. When I went out with some friends for afternoon coffee, the little restaurant had a huge screen set up with a projector and all customers and workers alike were a rapt audience of the game that I admittedly don't understand at all.

Although the festive screaming outside my window is in part a rather disheartening promise that shouldn't expect a solid night's sleep (on this weekend when I desperately need it), the excitement is still catching. It's nice to see this city full of energy. Chittagong sometimes feels to me like the bland and ugly little stepsister of Dhaka. Even with the ridiculous traffic and congestion of Dhaka, most Chittagonians would prefer to get their entertainment, shopping, and haircuts up there.

So having a couple of the ICC World Cup games here has been a source of great pride for Chittagong, not to mention for Bangladesh as a whole. The streets are cleaner, there are new fountains at every traffic circle, the telephone poles are all painted brightly in the national colors of red and green, and blinking lights adorn every tree and traffic median. It looks like Christmas actually.

Again, I can't say the heightened volume and quantity of car horns on the street right now is my cup of tea... but do appreciate how this game is unifying Bangladeshis across the world. A recent BBC article stated that,

"Co-hosting the Cricket World Cup is being seen here as one of the biggest events in the country's history since independence in 1971... 'In Bangladesh cricket is not simply a game, it is a symbol of national unity.' "

Comparing a few cricket games to a bloody liberation war seems pretty overstated to me, but like I said, I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to cricket. So I'm sure I'm missing something. Not the victory shouts out my window though. Those are unmissable.

By the way, Bangladesh won by 2 wickets with 6 balls remaining.....?

heritage

Dusty Images Revisted

As many of you know, my parents are in the final stages of preparation to move back to Bangladesh. Sixteen years in Maine was plenty of time to see our family photos and keepsakes gather dust in attic boxes. So as part of the packing process, they've been diligently (and probably with both tears and laughter) sifting through the pictures in order to scan and digitize them - both for easier packing and preservation. Every week or so, my brothers and I are delighted to find an old forgotten childhood memory in our email inboxes. We comment on them and try to interpret our facial expressions or personality traits from the candidly captured moments.

We've all agreed that in those early years, an apt description for the "little Christa Marie" of the photos would be "sad and itchy." We have very few smiling photos of me as a toddler/preschooler. Benjamin, on the other hand, was often caught with animated expressions in which he seemed to question the world around him with a primal curiosity. I've decided from the photos that David was the wisest of us. Focused, calm, and collected, he always seemed to know something the rest of us didn't... David now claims that most of the time he was probably just deliberating where to get his "next sugar fix." I suppose we'll never know.

Here are some of the highlights. Enjoy!

Atop the elmira in Ishurdi. We're thankful that our not-so-overprotective mother allowed us those early climbs that would inspire us to later ascents to mountain summits.
My energetic parents must have had killer biceps during those years that all three of us were carryable ages... and always wanted to be carried.
I often wonder whether we were aware in our young childhood that we looked quite different from our friends in Ishurdi.
We were blessed to receive these three-wheelers for romping around the village, practicing for the day we'd mount the real rickshaws...

Fuljan was our helper/nanny in Ishurdi, and I remember the joy of getting to visit her when I was a little older. Even though I could no longer speak Bangla with her, I remembered sensing an indebtedness for the love she'd shown us in our infancy, and the help she was to Mom.
We had some unforgettable years of adventures with the Adkins. Above, we are in Sylet on a vacation from Dhaka. If you look back at my August "Surprise Reunions" post, you'll see a recent photo of Susie and I in the same pose... and you'll notice that besides having grown a couple feet, we look basically the same.
I just can't figure out why in this photo we look (as David apty described it) as if we're at a funeral... Thankfully, I think Yegor Lankin (above right) always had enough silliness to account for the rest of us.

Our Mothers

"Ma'am, we worry about our mothers so much in the winter! They're working so hard, washing clothes by hand outside, even in the cold of winter..."

Razi's voice was suddenly filled with urgency and deep concern, and her fellow Afghani students nodded and chimed in with unified agreement. We had just read an excerpt from a psychology textbook that presented a statistic on how women are twice as likely as men to suffer from depression. Why is this? we had asked. After one or two rather shallow answers were given -- including the myth that "women are emotionally weak" -- Razi had boldy asserted her sense that women in her culture bear heavier burdens, both physical and mental. In a society that had denied her an education, Razi's mother's fate was to marry young and begin the rough chores of wife and mother in a village household. After the example of her own mother, a light seemed to flicker on in every student, and a chorus of stories of our mothers' devotion poured out of girls from every culture. "Sacrifice" is one English word that my students have very little difficulty comprehending, as images of their mothers reaching into cold buckets of soapy school uniforms provide a definition more apt than any dictionary's.

So here is a tribute to our mothers, and to their sacrifices.

Across borders, cultures, and languages, they are called "blessed."

To my mother, I love you and admire you more than these words can speak. Thank you for your strength and unwavering devotion. I miss you every time I wrap my sari and remember your graceful arms extended to Benjamin, David, and I, in the sugar cane fields of Ishurdi.

Traveling

10 January. In the back of a rusty bus, on the way to a run-down hotel, at the expense of Air India, I squinted through the smeared windows to see the moving shadows of Delhi at midnight. Thankful for the warmth of the fat lady seated next to me in the bus crowded with delayed passengers, I began to realize that this was all a great adventure...

3 weeks earlier. Term 1 at AUW had come to a halting finish and my grades were submitted. Not wanting to waste a moment of the 3 week break, I took a fourteen hour night bus to Rajshahi (my parents' future home) to stay with dear friends. I hadn't realized until reaching that northern province that Bangladeshi winters would indeed call for wool socks and heavy layers. After a precious few days in Rajshahi, then Bogra, baking Swedish cookies with my Auntie Karin, I then took the bus to Dhaka, ready to depart on 21 December for Christmas in the States.

I hadn't received any reply from my delinquent online travel agent as to my exact itinerary (since some changes had been made by airlines), so in Dhaka I finally tracked down my updated itinerary to discover my Kuwait Airways flight had departed the Dhaka runway on the previous day. Thus began an exhausting saga of trips to the airport, tears, trips to airline offices, and more tears; but also a merciful shower of phone calls and reassuring advice from supportive friends all over Bangladesh. Although by the end of it all, I'd come down with a good case of laryngitis, I wanted nothing more than to croak words of gratitude to friends and family. And apart from the traffic, Dhaka turned out to be a fine place to be stuck, especially with presence of good company and the rosewater footbaths of Bengali beauty parlors.

23 December. I finally boarded the flight to Kuwait City, where I spent the night in a shiny Sheraton Four Points with another Dhaka-NY passenger, named Ruby. A middle-aged, Pakistani-Bengali Muslim with short dyed hair, dark clothes, and passionate about German Gothic music and the Tampa night life, Ruby couldn't have been more my opposite. Yet together we happily passed the evening admiring this prime example of the Middle East's economic boom, and savouring the incredible menu of the hotel's restuarant - all with Kuwait Airways footing the bill. And we watched the sun rise over this desert city as we taxied back to the airport.

The next day's fourteen hour flight landed me in New York City on Christmas Eve. At JFK my first American embrace was with Eunice Lee - a sister since my Thailand days - who met me at the exact same meeting point where she'd come four and a half months ago to see me off to Bangladesh. We wondered out to the curb to wait for my brothers, driving up from DC on the way up to Maine for Christmas. While shivering and chatting with Eunice, I was suddenly lifted off the ground by my two brothers who'd made their welcoming attack from behind. Then arriving in Maine at midnight on the Eve. Invaluable time with family. Another blog post.

From Maine, onto Chicago, where I attended my college roommate's wedding and all in all had an incredible time of reunion and reminiscing.

6 January. I showed up at Chicago O'Hare to board my Air India flight direct to Delhi, then Kolkata, then to Dhaka, so that I could reach Chittagong by 9 January - the first day of Term 2. Although I'd been warned about flying through India without an Indian visa, I'd given up on trying to obtain an Indian visa during my short time home. And that fateful write-off led to the floodgate of tears being released when I was told that I could not check on to my flight without an Indian visa. Although the tears were neat little bookends to my story of travel mishaps, I have to say they didn't last as long this time, despite the steep rebooking fees being hard to swallow. However, at this point, I'd not only began to expect turbulence, but I also couldn't help rejoice over the blessing of a few more days with lovely Elise, Christy, and Meghan in the home where I'd spent my last year in Wheaton.

I stole moments with these friends in between multiple train commutes to and from the Indian visa office on State Street, Chicago. When they turned me away on Friday, before my Sunday morning flight, I begged for a way to get the visa on Saturday even though the office would be closed. "Can't I go to the Consulate directly?" I asked.

The lady behind the glass window at Travisa Outsourcing frowned, then winked at me while shaking her head and saying, "I can't advise you to go to the Consulate.... but their office will be open tomorrow."

So Elise and I took our last sunny drive into the windy city on Saturday morning, where a two hour wait resulted in a reclaimed passport set with a 10 year multiple entry tourist visa to India. We celebrated with lunch and espresso at Julius Meinl, the marvelous Austrian cafe where I purchased a final pound of whole bean coffee to add to the 6 lbs stash accompanying me to Bangladesh. (I'm not sure when I'll be back in a coffee country... better safe than sorry.)

The rest in a nutshell. Checked into Air India; flight delayed 6 hours; missed connection to Kolkata; spent 3 hours in the same Delhi hotel where British Airways put my family in 1995; missed my Kolkata to Dhaka flight; Air India's Kolkata branch manager asked me, "Why are you weeping?" .... Why indeed? Bought a new ticket with Biman airline to Dhaka; slept a solid 12 hours in Dhaka; woke up, hopped a CNG that crawled through Dhaka to the bus neighborhood; paid $4 for bumpy and scenic seven hour bus ride home to Chittagong.