More in Old Dhaka

So… the story of our day in Old Dhaka continues. After we went through and saw all the Durga Puja stuff, we decided to walk around Old Dhaka a bit more. Old Dhaka is great because there are just endless little streets with interesting things on them and it has a totally different feel than the rest of the city- definitely different than the bourgeois Gulshan bubble. We ambled around looking at things, Jon got a guy’s hopes up that he was going to buy speakers and then left him hanging, we talked to some folks. The standard conversation is something like this: Other Person : Hello! What is your country? Us: Hello. Amader desh America. [our country is America] Other Person: Aah… Very nice. Very nice. Then a period of awkward silence. Us: OK, abar dekha hobe [ok, see you again] Other Person: Ok, thank you! Thank you! Us: Ok dhonnobad [thank you]. Repeat for everyone in the crowd, even if they were just listening to the same conversation with another person. Possible variants are What is your name? and What is your job? but the basic conversation remains the same. Jon and Atticus are also infinitely more interesting than Sam.

So, in such manner, we started chatting with a trio of kids, because they were following us and because Sam can’t really resist talking to kids. The main kid of the trio, Mohammed Shakhouri, spoke a pretty high amount of English, and he was eager to show it off. He was also surprisingly well informed for a kid of about 12- he was talking about how his president (Sheikh Hasina- actually she is the Prime Minister, but come on he’s only 12, close enough) and our President (Obama – you know this, but I include it to illustrate that he did too) had met and she had invited him to come to Bangladesh and he accepted. This is pretty impressive for a kid – it just happened and I doubt that many 12 year olds are really that up on international current affairs. I think Shakhouri has a bright future ahead…

Anyhow, we talked and walked and he suggested we go on a boat ride across the river to see his house. We weren’t sure about the seeing his house part, but boat rides are part and parcel with Old Dhaka (there is the riverfront of the Burigonga river and about 10,000 boats of all shapes and sizes, so getting into one is pretty much just a matter of bargaining). We decide to go for the boat ride because it was a hot day and Jon and Atticus hadn’t been out on boat here yet. Sam has already gone on this very river on a little boat and wasn’t particularly dying to repeat it (last time the guy was bailing water the whole ride while the boatman paid more attention to the photos he wanted to stage than the actual direction of the boat…) but, in the spirit of motherly/wifely sacrifice, she went for it. This boat was in fact, even smaller than the last boat she went on. Sigh. (Note: everyone here can swim comfortably except Sam, who can just barely manage a floating backstroke when completely relaxed, so the nervousness is well-founded!)

PHOTOS: Us and boats

We headed across the river to a much less developed area and to the yards where they are either repairing broken boats or breaking down old boats. Ship breaking is a major industry here in Bangladesh but is usually more associated with Chittagong (another city) but it wouldn’t be unheard of for it to be happening here too. We’ll never know though because of the linguistic confusion between “breaking” and “broken.” Sorry everyone. Here they are at work, whatever they’re doing.

PHOTOS: Ships either being broken or already broken being repaired.

We got off the little tiny boat and Shakhouri showed us around where the work was being done. Somewhere there definitely seems to be regular ship breaking taking place as there were rooms with ship parts (like giant propeller pieces) and some parts for sale in the little shacks around them. So most things indicate this was ship breaking taking place (although I also saw a guy painting one of the ships – why would you paint something you were dismantling? The mystery remains unsolved).

Next, we went through winding little alleys to Shakhouri’s home to meet his mother. We weren’t really keen on barging in on her, but that was just our foreign minds working- for her, it was exciting and an honor for us to visit and tell her she had such a nice son. In fact, she’s probably scrimping and saving to send her son to school (Bangladesh doesn’t have a free public school system) and seeing that he was able to use his English to talk to these Americans was probably something very satisfying. For us, it was a good chance for Jon and Atticus (well, for Sam to see too, but Jon and Atti hadn’t seen it yet, Sam has...) to see how the majority of people in Bangladesh actually live- whole families living crowded into one room with one big bed and not much room for much else. Here’s a picture of Shakhouri, his mom, and his aunt (who works in a restaurant not far from our house) - I wish it had turned out better, but I want to include them in the blog, so here it is.
PHOTO: Shak’s fam
Afterwards we took the boat back over to where we started, gave a little taka to the trio of kids for showing us around, and headed for home. Well, headed in the rough direction of home, because we needed a cng and there weren’t really any available on the little streets we were on. We were just taking some snapshots here and there, and these guys were really excited for us to take pictures of them working. They even posed for the photo so it would look like they were hard at work. (I think the guy in front was totally flexing his guns for the second shot too!) So, in the spirit of their excitement, the photo shoot is below.
PHOTO: Hard at work…

We ended up meandering around a bit more, and then we noticed that we were surrounded everywhere by onions. Piles upon piles of onions in every single shop we passed and on rickshaws and carts that passed us. Seriously, we are talking a lot of onions (especially since onions aren’t all GMO here so they are really only about 1-3 inches in circumference). The smell was…something.

This wasn’t totally uncommon- thing usually come in streaks here in the shops. There will be a streak of just watch shops, or just motor oil shops, or just bicycle part shops, etc… but this was more than a streak. I’m pretty sure we had to have encountered the epicenter of onion distribution for the entire country. We passed through for a while, then crossed into chile pepper-ville which was smaller than onion-ville but still interesting.


PHOTOS: Onions – those bags are all filled onions, everywhere - both sides of the streets, as far as the eye can see...



Finally, we caught a cng home to rest with tired feet and sunburned arms and faces. Actually we came home and had to cook dinner (mmmm – chana masala!) , clean up the mess from dinner, sweep the apartment and do laundry, but Atticus had a nice rest…) It was a great day and nice end of the weekend to get us ready for work tomorrow. We got some other interesting shots while out that we’ll post in separate posting just to let you see more of the area.