Dhaka by Car

At the airport I already saw the craziness that Dhaka had to show us. The baggage collection belt was bringing out heaps of cardboard boxes and rope-tied sacks, along with the mixture of suitcases secured by being wrapped in plastic foil or rope. My friend had waited for me while I get through this and took me to the car park building. It was full. On top of being full in the familiar way, there were lots of randomly parked cars and groups of people running, shouting or simply standing around and having a chat.

All this was a mild preparation for what was happening on the road. It is hard to describe to anyone who hasn't experienced traffic in Asian big cities. Even if there was road paint, it was invisible to all the drivers. There were no road lanes or some courtesy which side to take over other vehicles. Even if the bigger crossroads had working traffic lights, they also had several traffic marshals which also found it difficult to impose order even though they did it through jumping in the way of cars or hitting them with their (literally) sticks. The most powerful way to get ahead was by honking, but it didn't make much difference, as everyone was overusing it.



Traffic was comprised of cars, buses, motorbikes, CNGs (a three-wheel drive, named after condensed natural gas and similar to what I've known as tuk-tuks, but covered with metal bars allegedly for better safety) and rikshaws.

The road madness I witnessed was apparently light traffic during holidays (I arrived on Friday which is the day for prayer to muslims). I was to experience the real congestion on Sunday when it took us more than two hours to get to the venue for holud (the pre-wedding celebration hosted by the bride's family for the groom's family). All this unpredictability of traffic made timing and planning in Bangladesh very relative.

The Other Globalization

From the moment I got on the plane at Heathrow I already saw how this is going to be an experience, very different from what I previously knew. Outside of Europe previously I have been to Thailand, Egypt and USA (in fact only Boston). I hadn't had even airline transfers at other locations.

Now the plane to my transfer - Doha - was full of little kids of families from the Subcontinent. Sitting on the third row, I was surrounded with crying kids and young inexperienced parents. Out of the dozen kids around me, there were three who at an age of 4-5 were acting as selfless older sisters, doing their best to help their parents appease those toddlers that were tearing themselves apart with crying for no perceivable reason. Unfortunately one girl was left without an older sister, or an available flight attendant, so that first flight was loud and lively. This left me with some nice sense of being in a kindergarten.

The airport in Doha was pretty much as I imagined all rich oil exporting khalifate countries to be. My first impression of everything I saw: cleaning service, duty free shops had a sense of luxury. Not long after that I got to see the people behind it all - foreigners that got to care to ensure the luxury, but never had a chance to experience it themselves.

While approaching the gate for my flight I sensed the smell of the Chinese tiger fat or some of its related remedies. There was a long queue at the gate, so I decided to enjoy the rare occasion of having a pre-booked seat by waiting seated, rather than queueing. There weren't many white people on the queue, so it was easy for me to notice that they didn't really move forward much. Slowly I started noticing a lady from the airline staff that was helplessly trying to put order in the beginning of the queue. I kept wondering why despite her efforts it seems that she wasn't too successful. When the crowd started dissolving I got a chance to observe a case of queue-jumping in action. A man, dressed in a suit and his family tried to enter in front of the queue. Another family, not Bangladeshi by appearance, objected. a longer argument developed and made me think that the man in suit wasn't used to not being allowed to queue-jump. Still, some serious looks from the surrounding people made it apparent that this time queue-jumping would not be possible. The defeated family set off to the end of the queue, just to get someone else around 10 people behind to offer them to queue in front of him. This time no one objected. The experience at Bangladeshi immigration was pretty much the same.

On the second plane there was something else that seemed strange to me. Instead of getting straight to their seats, people were wandering around. While I was putting my luggage above my head I saw someone looking at his boarding pass. He looked for so long that I could see that he was on the same row as me. After a while he continued wrongly searching further in the plane. Someone else around had sat himself on the right row, but wrong seat. All that made me realize that these people were unable to read. The first one couldn't recognize westernised numerals, the second one - Latin letters. At the end a woman found that her seat is next to mine. Whenever she left during the 4-hour flight, she couldn't find her seat until she spotted me.

As for me, I also played my role in this little international chaos. I really wanted to have a beer, but didn't dare to ask for alcohol in an Islamic airline. It was just in the second flight that I overheard someone else order wine, so that I dared to ask for a beer. They gave me a Heineken.

Off to a Very Special Wedding

Back in 2005 I wrote my first blog. It wasn't anything that I had planned. It was just that I went on a trip to Thailand - a very lucky opportunity in the early 2000s for someone Bulgarian - and found that blogging is much more practical than writing e-mails to a dozen of people.

A couple of months ago one of my closest non-Bulgarian friends invited me to his wedding. Of course I loved the idea. Not only do I love weddings and appreciate the opportunity to get to know my friend's family, this was also a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit Bangladesh and experience some of its traditions.

Once again being in a very busy period I didn't really prepare for this trip. I did the necessary to get visa and vaccination, but could have done much better in getting to know the culture of the place I am going to. All I know now is what I've seen from Bangladeshi in Tower Hamlets and having skim-read the Wikipedia page about the end of colonialism in Bengal. My friends' stories about his childhood were only enough to know that he hadn't had the life of a common Bangladeshi.

This time at least the idea of writing a blog was familiar to me. I decided to write it in English both to share the experience with my non-Bulgarian friends, but also to exercise my writing skills. I would like to ask all readers of this blog to excuse my English and share my complements to my research supervisors for all the effort they are going through to make my scientific writing cover some sort of minimal quality standard. Also here I will try to avoid publishing my friend's real name, although for anyone that knows me it would be easy to guess who it is.

PS: We had limited access to internet in Bangladesh. That's why I am posting my notes after the end of the actual trip.