The Sundarbans

AAhhhhh Sunrise in the Sundarbans OWWW MY EYES!!!


My school had a week off at the end of October, so Beckley, Sara and I took a trip down to the Sundarbans, and then explored the south-eastern part of Bangladesh. The Sundarbans is "the largest single block of tidal halophytic mangrove forest in the world" (thanks wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundarbans). I don't know what halophytic means, but I saw the Sundarbans and they were beautiful! Actually, now I know what halophytic means, also thanks to wikipedia! The beauty extended beyond the visual and enveloped my eardrums. There are no cars! No rickshaws! no Buses! No people!

Our sundar-boat. I would apologize, but I'm not done yet.

We flew from Dhaka to Jessore, then took a bus to Khulna, where we got on our boat. It took about 12 hours on the boat from Khulna to reach the Sundarbans.

Living in Dhaka has made me appreciate things that I probably wouldn't not consider particularly worthy of appreciating. The peace and quiet was more than worth traveling by plane, bus and boat to find. I am also now appreciating how creative I would have to be to keep myself occupied on long car rides, since I get nauseous if I read. We would have to play games like 20 questions and License-Plate Alphabet to keep ourselves sane. Some of you may have been lucky enough to be in the car with Colin on a trip from Michigan to Providence, in which he enacted all of human history in a coffee-fueled 20 minutes at 2am after twelve hours on the road. I've found that simply staring out the window is more than enough to keep me occupied on the roads even in the middle-of-nowhere (if there is such a place) in Bangladesh. However, I have developed some games for the road, just in case you don't want to go cold turkey on long drives in Bangladesh:

1) Count the number of seconds in which you cannot see one person. I don't think I have accumulated more than 120 seconds during my 4 months so far in Bangladesh (excluding the Sundarbans).

2) Score one point every time you see a full family (man, woman and child) on a motorcycle. One bonus point for each extra child and two extra points for adult relatives. I actually wish there were more motorcycles on the road because the traffic in Dhaka is so bad that this sentence has already become a cliche. Actually, I'll request a subway system while I'm at it, since the powers that be are probably reading this and are interested in enacting positive change for the citizens of their country.

Apparently Bangladeshis sometimes have psychological issues when they move West because there aren't enough people. Now that I think about it, Manhattan and it doesn't seem so crowded to me anymore. If I ever start compulsively getting on the F train to go to Jackson Heights at rush hour, then you'll know why.

Oh, back to the Sundarbans! They were beautiful! I saw some pretty birds and deer, I walked through the mud, and I swam in the Indian Ocean. Here are some pictures:

The mud-erbans, as I called the Sundarbans for about 24 hours before the joke got old. Okay, who am I kidding, that joke bombed big time.

Nothing like a nice walk in the mud.

The Indian Ocean! Cyclone Sidr did some serious damage to the Sundarbans, especially on the coastline.

Just cruisin' through some halophytic mangroves.

Near Khulna, we passed by this passenger boat. If you look carefully, the woman in the white Salwar Kameez is taking a picture of us. I wonder how long it will be before seeing foreigners in Bangladesh is not considered a picture-worthy event. In the meantime, I'm famous! The only appropriate way to respond to being photographed is to photograph right back, and that is how this picture was born.

My adventures in Chittagong, Bandarban, and Rangmati coming soon....

Since Forever

Oh my gosh it has been forever since I have updated this blog. I suspect that the length of my average post was completely unsustainable. Let's try something new: short posts!

Welcome to Dhaka! My travels on an October weekend:

Near Dhaka University. The greenest part of the city by far.

There are people EVERYWHERE, even in the middle of fields. These ice cream stands actually had customers every ten minutes.

We met 10 people. 15 Million to go.

Down the Meghna

A few weeks ago I chaperoned the IB Group 4 project for my school. I'm slowly picking up the IB jargon, so in July I would have thought "oh no, chaperoning..." but it's September so I know better, and Group 4 project means another boat trip! All Seniors taking a science class have to participate in this project analyzing water quality on Dhaka's rivers. Four teachers, twenty-five students, and boat! We traveled East of Dhaka, and met a boat on the Meghna river. Here we are, taxiing out to the boat (at dusk, so sorry for the blurry picture).


We ate dinner and went to bed so we could do experiments early the next day. You know you have good students when you tell them to wake up at 5:30am and no one complains. Since it's Ramadan, the muslim students had to wake up at 4:30am for Suhoor (the pre-dawn meal) anyway, so I think that put things in perspective for everyone. The hundreds of ants in my bunk-bed respectfully stayed below my knees, which I greatly appreciated.

We got up bright and early and the kids started experimenting. We made six stops along the trip, traveling down the Meghna river, and then up the Buriganga.


And the teachers posed for pictures.


We also had a little boat for experiments near the shore at each stop.


For a few of the stops I was feeling adventurous and got on the little boat. There are some beautiful bugs here! This dragonfly visited us while we did experiments at the shore.


Also, every time the little boat approached the shore we had an audience. It's hard to explain, because it's not like they see us coming and yell "hey everyone look at these people doing experiments in a boat!!" They just stop what they're doing and and watch, even if we stay for twenty minutes. This is after a good fifteen minutes anchored near the shore of the Meghna.


I also got to spend some quality time with two guys from the boat crew, Juyal and Kaosar during the two days on the boat.


They seemed almost unable to comprehend the fact that I could speak Bangla and Hindi. They both spoke Bangla, and Kaosar could speak Hindi too, so they kept testing me to see if I could understand what they were saying to me. For them, it was just chillin' during downtime on the boat, but it was great practice for me. At some point they found out that I could read and write Bangla and Hindi too, and after writing their names in both languages, they went nuts. In the afternoon, while the students were doing work, we sat at the front of the boat reading the billboards and signs along the shore.

It was great to get out of the city, because even though the rivers are busy, traffic on a river doesn't have the same sensory overload that traffic on a street does. Other than the boat engines, the only noise that I heard were the sound of garment factories along the shore running their looms, which went late into the evening. I leave you with some pictures of the boats and people that we passed along the way.

I'm Teaching!

I realized that I haven't been talking about my job at all. I'm teaching at an international school, which means that it caters mostly to children who are from out of town. The school is way expensive, but when employees get sent overseas to work, they usually get an extensive benefits package, which includes education for their children at these private schools. There are some Bangladeshis, but their parents are probably loaded up the wazoo.

My job is going really well. The school hasn't had intern teachers before, so intially they were puzzled about what Sara, Beckley and I were supposed to do. In less than a week, teachers had figured out how helpful we could be, and were scrambling to get us in their classrooms. Right now I'm working with the High School Biology teacher, and I sometimes teach lessons in her IB Biology classes. I also run a half-hour seminar on modern Indian history in an IB History class. Basically, since we're not lazy, we're allowed to do whatever kind of work we want. Not a bad deal.

(photo credit: Asavari)

As you can see from the picture above, I'm the kind of teacher you probably thought I'd be. I puzzled for a couple of days how I could look more like a teacher, since I had gotten carded within the last 6 months at a rated R movie (i.e. there were doubts that I was 17 and capable of seeing Harold and Kumar without parental guidance). Moreover, I needed to look like a science teacher. Take note of my solution: tucked-in-plaid-shirts. Problem solved.

This Place is Beautiful

The new teachers took a boat trip out of Dhaka. The boat ride was about 2 hours each way, and most if not all of the water we were on will be gone in a few months. If we wanted to take a boat trip, we'd have to drive about an hour farther than we did today just to reach water. We saw billboards poking out, waiting for the water to recede to resume advertising. This tree is probably not even close to submerged during other parts of the year:

You see these boats go by every once in a while that are so full of sand that they look like they should be sinking.

They are digging up sand and sending it to Dhaka to reclaim land for the river, i.e. to make more room for those 15 million people who somehow manage to squeeze into the city.

The boat trip was a welcome change from the city, especially since it's so hot and humid these days. It was breezy and Bangladesh is beautiful.



We also stopped in the village of the boat's captain and walked around. I talked to some people in Bangla, although I don't really know enough yet to go beyond simple questions. I asked kids how old they were, and where in the village they lived. Some of the kids are very fashion-forward; this kid (in the blue pants) has already heralded the beginning of the pants-above-belly-button movement.

Hollywood, I hope you're ready.

The kids wanted to show us how they catch something (I think snakes?) in the water. No catches today, but I got a good action shot!

The kids also love getting their picture taken and looking at themselves on the digital camera screen.


There's lot to talk about, boat trip and otherwise, but in the mean time, I had to put up some of these pictures. Also, by popular request, some of the pictures on this blog will actually include me. Here I am, in Bangladesh!

Solutions

It has taken about two weeks of living in Dhaka to realize that you have to be creative to find things to do in Dhaka. Things must be pretty bad when someone like me notices a lack of nightlife. It is worth noting that we are on another level from the Hoboken-has-no-nightlife kinds of complaints. To buy alcohol at the liquor stores in Dhaka, you have to present your foreign passport. That's right, no liquor for bangladeshi citizens. There are bars in this country, but only at some of the high-end hotels and the international clubs. I've only made brief visits to the American and Australian clubs, and I haven't been to any of the bars yet but it's not lookin' good, people.

Now begins the search for things to do. Since Sara, Beckley and I are younger than the other employees at the school, I remain hopeful that we may not be out of luck yet. With few exceptions, we are also noticeably younger than all of the ex-patriates in Dhaka, who are mostly employed by Embassies, Businesses and NGO's. The international clubs seem like a welcome luxury (you can play Tennis, hire a hitting partner, and a ball boy for under $4 an hour) but if I work at an American school all day and then hop on over to the American club, why am I living in Dhaka? It's time to start exploring!

Well today Beckley and I went on a Hash run, which is this international organization of people who run and drink. Nope, not water. We met in front of the Parliament building, that Louis Khan building that people seem to know about.


Here was our meeting spot, before most of the people arrived. There are separate, simultaneous running and walking hashes, so all sorts of people show up.


I didn't bring my camera on the run, since I am as fast as a bullet and I don't like blurry pictures. We ran through Dhanmondi, which is a neighborhood close to the heart of downtown Dhaka. For Dhaka standards, it was a nice neighborhood, since it had some small lakes and walking paths. I don't ever see tourists in Bangladesh, and pretty much only foreigner sightings I have are in the Diplomatic Zone, where I live. Thirty foreigners running through downtown Dhaka was apparently an event worthy of pictures for the Bangladeshi kids with cameraphones. Not a moment went by without Bangladeshis looking over double-taking as they saw our human caravan jog leisurely on by. I'm not going to pretend that it isn't incredibly entertaining to be a spectacle literally everywhere you go. Speaking of the diplomatic zone, the US and Australian Ambassadors were along for the run, which probably means that I can't say anything else about what transpired. After running, we congregated on the roof of a five-story commercial building downtown.


There was a nice view from the building! I did all my picture taking too early, but dusk was gorgeous from the roof.



As dusk approached, everyone caught up and people were forced to drink beer for all sorts of silly reasons, which is the obvious thing to do after you run for 90 minutes. We found something to do in Dhaka!

The Stare

One of the weirdest things for foreigners in South Asia is 'The Stare.' When people are curious, they have no problems just staring at you. If I catch someone looking at me in the states (or vice versa), we'll both quickly look away. In South Asia, looking back invokes not even the slightest blink from their eyes. They just keep staring.


Thanks to Beckley for being brave enough to take my camera and point it at people who were staring at him. I still haven't completely gotten over myself yet. In India I had noticed some people staring, but in Bangladesh its everywhere. Bangladesh is probably the opposite of a tourist destination to most people, so when I walk with other teachers through markets downtown, its as if people had just spotted a celebrity. Okay, more like a rare bird sighting.


I'm not completely surprised, because I literally have not seen one non-South Asian outside of the Diplomatic Zone in Dhaka so far. Not that we're the only ones, but the rare sightings must be something of an event for the locals.