Monkey. Many Monkey.

Well, Dan and I have returned from our break for Eid in Malaysia. Just a bit of back story: I first visited Kuala Lumpur in 2007, on my way to Indonesia. Sandwiched between time in India and Indonesia, my one day in KL was a much needed break from chaos. The city is so much calmer than South Asian cities. The roads are paved, there are sidewalks, and being white isn't criteria for being interesting. However, since this week-long break was for Eid, the Muslim holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan, I was a little nervous that Kuala Lumpur, the capital of a Muslim country, would be a little crazy. Beyond that I was also a little nervous that getting out of KL would be somewhat impossible. We booked a hostel for one night in KL and got in pretty late. After spending what I later realized was literally 10 times the amount we should on a cab, we arrived at our clean and conveniently located hostel in Chinatown. The room was small enough so that you could almost stand in the middle and touch all four walls at once, and sleeping on the spring-loaded bed was basically like getting a night-long back massage from a car radiator, but the hostel was clean and not too expensive for Kuala Lumpur.

Dan in our tiny room in Kuala Lumpur

The next day we went first thing in the morning to the bus station and tried to get tickets to Mersing- a relatively small town on the East Coast of Malaysia where we would be able to catch a ferry to Pulau Tioman- a small island off the coast. To our dismay we were told that there were no tickets to Mersing for another few days. Eventually we were told to just buy a ticket to a larger inland city and try to catch a bus from there.

So with a plan ahead of us we set out in search of some delicious Chinese food in Chinatown. I should mention that despite the fact that both Malaysia and Bangladesh are Muslim countries, they are very different from each other. So, I was only a little surprised to find myself sitting in Chinatown in a Muslim country eating pork and noodle soup during the day during Ramadan. Malaysia is incredibly diverse, religiously and culturally. It's not uncommon to see women wearing long sleeves and a veil across their face next to women in short mini-skirts and spaghetti strap tank tops. Similarly, it's not uncommon to see a large mosque next to a Buddhist temple, next to a Hindu temple. I was also left with the impression that most people in Malaysia have a relatively negative view of Bangladesh. I was told it was conservative (when it's actually classified as a "moderate" country), there are many terrorists here, there are bombs all of the time, and that Bengali's have no respect for people who aren't Muslim.

After our soup, Denise (who we had met up with by chance at the bus station when we were all trying to get tickets), Dan and I all decided to get some moon pies. Apparently for the autumn festival in China there's a tradition of eating (and gifting) little pastries called moon pies. Since the festival was a few weeks ago they were still available in little packages in Chinatown. The cheapest I saw were about 2 ringgit (so about 60 cents) and the most expensive were about 20 ringgit (about 6 dollars). We bought some of the cheap cakes and enjoyed them on the street.

Dan and Denise with their moon cakes!

Dan's kitty shaped moon cake

Me and my moon cake in front of a moon cake advertisement

Denise and Dan with the Petronas Twin Towers in the background.

So after eating and relaxing for most of the day in Kuala Lumpur, Dan and I caught a bus to a town called Kluang. The bus ride was completely easy. We got to sit in the very front, and they played two US movies during the ride. I mostly looked out the window and came to the conclusion that Malaysia is very beautiful and very green! We got off in Kluang and had about a two hour wait for the bus to Mersing. In that time we managed to grab a bite to eat and some tea. Plus it was nice to have a little break after being on the last bus for about three and a half hours. That night was the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid, so everyone was celebrating. As we waited for the bus people around us were setting off fireworks. The ride to Mersing was pretty short- about an hour and a half- and when we arrived we were greeted by many moths, some stray cats (chasing, catching, and eating said moths) and a man with a notebook full of photos of his hostel. It was pretty late, about 11:30, and we weren't sure if we should go with this man. His price seemed reasonable, but he was being pretty pushy. An Italian woman we had chatted a little with seemed to think this man was trying to take us for a ride and overcharge us, and so she stormed off. Not really sure what to do, Dan and I followed her and quickly found ourselves walking along a deserted road hoping that a taxi would somehow chance by us. Eventually we gave up and went back to the bus station to take that man up on his offer. However, when we got back the man was gone, and we were shortly tracked down by the Italian woman who had managed to find a taxi in the meantime. The taxi driver confirmed what the man with the binder had told her- the place in Lonely Planet was closed. So he took us to the next place Lonely Planet listed and we ended up paying only 5 ringgit less than what the man with the binder had been proposing. Now, I'm not too picky about where I sleep, but on first impressions this place was pushing my limit. It was a little dingy- dirty looking sheets and walls that didn't reach the ceiling, so you could hear anything then went on in the place. There were huge dead months in a few places, and big holes in the walls. Omar, the man who ran the place (called Omar's Backpacker's Hostel) was a friendly sort of guy, and I took note that the kitchen was clean, and the bathroom didn't give me the heeby jeebies.

Our nasty bed at Omar's Backpacker's Hostel

Dan, trying to be optimistic about Omar's. Note the dead moth stuck in the chicken wire wall above Dan.
Yeah, Omar's is a pretty classy place.

After we paid and started to get into bed, being sure to take out our sleep sheets and wrap them securely around us, I noticed that the sheets were covered in tiny little blood stains- an indication that there were bedbugs. I pulled my silk sleep sheet tighter around my neck hoping that the sheets were old and that any potential bug problem had since been taken care of. So at about 12:30 in the morning Dan and I shut the lights off and went to sleep. I dozed uncomfortably for about a half an hour and then woke up from being afraid of bugs. I woke Dan up (somewhat unsympathetically) and asked him to turn the light on. I then asked him to hand me my camera bag where my flashlight was. I was hoping that I could get out my flashlight, closely examine the bed, and then sleep feeling more assured that there actually weren't any bugs. BUT, as Dan dropped my bag onto the bed in front of me I saw, to my horror, a bed bug scurry quickly into the seam of the bag. No flashlight necessary! It was confirmed: we had bedbugs! So Dan and I spent the next half an hour or so removing the stuff from our room one item at a time, thoroughly checking every seam and crease and removing any bugs that we found. We put everything in the kitchen and then sat down at the kitchen table. We sat there, exhausted, until six in the morning, playing cards and playing the game: What would __________ do if he/she/they were here? After going through basically everyone we knew we decided there was no good solution. We were stuck in a small town that we didn't know our way around, in the middle of the night, with basically no other options. I spent a long time looking at a sign that said: Malaysia: Fascinating Destination. It apparently took me being awake at 5am at Omar's for me to realize what an interesting word combination that was:
Fascinating
Destination
So we sat there until six am when we went to the jetty to try and catch a boat to Tioman Island. Much to our dismay we were told that the early ferry wasn't running, and the mid-morning ferry was full. We bought two tickets for the 2pm ferry and started our mental countdown for the eight hours remaining before we could get out of Mersing. We tried to look on the bright side of things- we now had time to go to an ATM and get some breakfast before leaving (we actually had time to do these things several times over, but let's not get too specific...) We decided to search for someone who could tell us where an ATM was and the first person we ran into was the man who had been soliciting us at the bus station the night before. 'How are you?' he asked with a great smile on his face? We told him we were tired and that we had tried to find him. We explained that we had stayed somewhere with bedbugs and he immediately said: oh, Omar's? He then asked us if we had gotten tickets for the 10am bus. When we said they were all sold out he told us that he had come down to get tickets for the people that ended up staying with him and, finding that they were sold out, had dome some finagling and had managed to get seats anyway. He pointed to the three people who were staying with him. I looked over and saw three people, all seemingly well rested, laughing, and eating something. The man then chatted with us for awhile about Bangladesh and the importance for educating women. He referenced female politicians in the US and Bangladesh and Malaysia and gave us his opinion on Bangladeshi politics and religion. Eventually he pointed us in the direction of an ATM and told us where we could get a bite to eat, and we trudged off, resenting Omar's at every step.

We ended up getting a bite to eat from a food stand run by a Chinese family. We weren't sure how it worked, and were much too exhausted by this point to really try hard to get food. We probably spent 5 minutes just standing or sitting with our mouths open, watching other people come and go, buying lots of food and eating it. Eventually someone took pity on us and asked what we wanted. She gave Dan a bag and he started filling it with pastries. We paid and went into a nearby coffee shop to eat.

I honestly don't even remember eating this.

After getting some tea and eating enough to at least quell our hunger a little bit, we headed back to the jetty.

A funky boat on the jetty

Dan stayed with our bags, and took a little nap, and I sat politely in front of where the handed out boarding passes. After waiting for awhile someone took pity on me and gave me a boarding pass for the 10am ferry. We were quickly herded onto the boat and slept the entire way until the boat slowed down as it headed into the first jetty on Tioman Island!

On the ferry to Tioman Island, at last!

The boat dropped us off on ABC (Air Batang beach). I'm not exactly clear on what we did next, but I know we ended up finding a great place on the beach and I think we may have even gone swimming. We got food, and properly went to sleep after being awake for over 36 hours.

We spent the next week mostly on ABC. The decisions we had to make each day were: where do we eat? Should we swim, snorkel, sunbathe, lie in a hammock, or go for a walk? what should I eat? That was basically life on Tioman. We went snorkeling a few times. Part of the reason we decided to stay on ABC was that right off the beach there was nice snorkeling. We would just walk into the water, stick our faces in, and see pink and yellow coral, rainbow fish, jelly fish (with fish living under them), clown fish and anemones, sting rays, and many other kinds of fish! We pretty much spent every night eating at a sea-side restaurant that wasn't too expensive and watched the sunset. Most nights there was a lightning storm going on on the other side of the island and we could see glimpses of it when the lightning lit up the sky behind the high ridge of the island. Also nearly every night we were treated to an Eid fireworks display put on by the children who lived on the island.

Noodle soup- Noodles, squid, chicken, shrimp, cauliflower, corn, tomatoes, greens, chillis, cinnamon, cloves, aniseed, cardamom, mystery white balls... pretty good but a little tricky to eat since there was so much that actually wasn't edible.

Watching the sunset on the beach.

Going for a short hike to the next beach over.

Watching the Sunset, again!

Lovely Tioman Sunset

Sleeping in a hammock some afternoon.

Probably verging on sunburnt

Island Monkeys! Mama and her baby.

Monkeys on the road (path) that went along our beach.

All Monkeys!

A firework being shot off!

View of Tioman from the jetty on ABC

In a hammock next to the restaurant where we most often ate.

On the beach after snorkeling

Our beach- it's lovely.

Island cats. We were always in danger of being followed by these guys. They were professional beggars. One night at dinner I was sitting too far forward in my chair and a cat jumped up behind me. I was startled, but was even more startled when two seconds later a second cat jumped up. The next night I was sure to sit all the way back in my chair, but then the cats just jumped onto my lap.

So the highlight for the entire week on the island was probably the day that Dan and I decided to go on a trek through the jungle. The island has a ridge going through the middle, so the hike was mostly uphill. We prepared with plenty of DEET lots of water, and our cameras (I regret to inform you all, however, that I shot almost exclusively in film that day, so the photos won't be available until I get myself out into Chittagong and find a place to develop film for me).

Before we could set out into the jungle we had to walk through Tikkek, the beach/city that was just south of our beach. It was basically one of the most brutal walks of my life. We had sunblock on (and with us) but it was a long walk along a wide concrete road without any shade. We definitely should have headed out earlier to avoid having to make the walk to the jungle trail head in such heat. But, I can honestly say it was worth it when we got into jungle. The path was a a narrow boulder path with some stone steps put in place during the steeper parts. It followed the power lines across the island, but the jungle around us was still really dense. There were times I couldn't see more than about 10 feet to the right or left of me. We were basically just surrounded by forty foot high ferns and huge trees, bugs, bats, birds, monkeys, and giant squirrels (which we were luckily quiet enough to see!) The entire walk was pretty tiring and I haven't been that sweaty in a long time, but it was also completely awesome. We hiked up to a waterfall and then decided we should head back because we didn't want to get caught at night in the jungle when the snakes and bugs really started coming out.

So after 5 nights on the island we headed back to Kuala Lumpur for one night (where we stayed in a really nice hotel), and then back to Chittagong.

Dan among the throngs of street vendors in Chinatown in KL

Back to Chinese noodle soup with sweet pork! Okay, not too creative of us, but delicious nonetheless.

Fresh kiwi juice! mmmmm!

Fruit vendor selling interesting fruits.

Dan in Chinatown. Not *really* smiling because it is a little overwhelming.

Dan and a statue in Chinatown. Which one's Dan? Which one's the Chinese statue? It's hard to say.

Ramadan in Chittagong

I should admit that I haven't been updating for several reasons. Primarily my life here in Chittagong has settled into a routine schedule of work and eat. Additionally, I spent about a week and a half sicker than I can remember ever being before, so my energy for even writing emails was entirely diminished. More on that later, though!

So despite finding myself back in a routine in life, things here are still staying interesting. With a bit of turbulence and some improvising the school year here at AUW has started. I probably only know about 30% of my 75 students' names so far, but am learning more every day- and like I said, I was sick for a week (that's my excuse anyway).

Life in Chittagong has changed dramatically for me in the last few weeks in two ways. Firstly, Dan has arrived! I'll post a link to his blog at the end of this entry. He will probably be better than I am at posting interesting photos. He arrived right when I was starting to actually recover from the flu (perhaps of the swiney variety?!), so it was nice to have someone feeding me right when my appetite came back. I think Dan was a little shocked when the nurse came in to check on me and said that I was looking more lively than I had in a week. I think Dan had thought I was looking horrible- little did he know how horrible I had been! Basically I was stuck in bed with fevers that spiked and dropped as if someone were tuning through my internal radio stations looking for a good song- 99.8 100.3 101.5 102.4 103.6 102.3 100.0 101.3 99.6 100.5... up and down up and down. I developed a rash basically all over my body. I basically couldn't open my eyes without feeling pain behind them. After a few retrospectively hysterical bouts of delirium (during which time I found myself clutching desperately at a thread that I found in my bed and weeping that the thread was my closest friend...) the nurses and doctors at AUW decided that they should take some blood to make sure I didn't have typhoid or malaria. A man came in from the lab that AUW uses and I was called forward to sit at the table in the Health and Wellness Center and have my blood taken. However, this man and I were not on the same page. As soon as I started sitting at that table I started feeling light headed. I lost my vision and started losing my hearing- I was definitely about to black out. However, there was a part of my consciousness that was aware of the fact that this man had to take my blood so that eventually someone could give me something to make me feel better. So I resolved to stay sitting at that table until he took as much of my blood as he needed! But as I was sitting there my arm would start to droop sadly and the man would say: HOLD STILL! And I would mumble an apology and try to hold still- which is harder than it sounds when you think the room around you is moving. As soon as I felt him finish up taking my blood I decided I needed to lye down. "I think I need to lye down" I said, and I started to crawl onto the floor right there under the table. The man, panicking and perhaps a little nervous that someone might come in and think he had put me in this floored state, grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. He called for a nurse who rushed in and found me, once again, trying to lye down on the floor. The nurse pulled me up and started herding me towards the "chill out room" where I had made myself a nest on one of the spare beds. Luckily I was lucid enough to alert her of the fact that I was about to throw up, and she managed to get me into the bathroom in time. After throwing up and then sleeping for the rest of the day I started feeling better. Eventually they got my test results back and I came up negative for both typhoid and malaria, and have actually been feeling great the last few days!

So I have physically recovered, and Dan is here to entertain me, so thing have been going great in that respect!

The other huge change that's happened in Chittagong in the last few weeks is that Ramadan has started. For those of you who aren't familiar with the ins-and-outs of Ramadan, I'll just give you a short run down. Basically Ramadan is the month of fasting in Islam. What this means is that Muslims who are observing Ramadan do not drink any water and do not eat any food from sunrise to sundown every day for the month. This has become a part of my life for several reasons despite the fact that I'm not fasting. Firstly, every morning at about 5:20 a siren alerts all people in Chittagong that it is now officially time to stop eating. The siren then sounds again at about 7:30 in the evening to alert everyone that it is now okay to eat again. The first time I heard this siren I thought it was a tsunami warning and I found myself wondering if living on the 6th floor of my building would be protection enough against a tsunami. However, I soon realized what the siren was actually for and now I anticipate its sound in the morning while I'm half-awake after my neighbors inadvertently wake me up when they get up to make an early meal for themselves, and again in the evening after work.

Because there is no eating during the day during Ramadan, every restaurant is closed all day. This basically means that Dan and I are making all of our own meals. It's still possible to go out during the day and buy uncooked food- vegetables and fruits, grains and lentils, etc. because people really do feast during Ramadan after sunset. Also on the streets you can buy what's called iftar (iftar is actually the meal that happens at the end of the day after sunset- but people also refer to the food by this name). So every restaurant that is closed during the day opens up street stalls at night and sells all sorts of iftar- samosas, chick peas, fried chilis (a lot of deep fried food actually), and desserts (also deep fried). I've found it's difficult now to buy naan or parota or roti on the streets, whereas before it was incredibly easy, but now it's easy to go out and buy samosas, so it's a compromise.

Something that I find interesting here is that by the end of the day people are far less productive. Dan and I went to Central Plaza to buy fabric and even though iftar time was still not for another half an hour, we were told to come back another time. People just get so hungry that things literally shut down. Also right after iftar time it's possible to go out onto the street and just walk down the middle of it. Traffic has stopped, and shops are quiet. Even beggars won't follow you around during this time because everyone is busy eating for the first time in 14 hours. When I was working in NYC I had a job taking 15 boys to Central Park to go ice skating. Needless to say that experience was loud and chaotic. When the boys were back on the bus, however, we would give each of them two chocolate chip cookies. The moments that followed us handing out the cookies were the only quiet moments in the entire afternoon, and this is much what Bangladesh is like at iftar time. The streets calm down, the beggars don't follow you down the street, and people don't yell at you from their shops. Everyone is busy eating.

Well, I should actually get going to go buy some samosas and some bananas before things start closing at iftar. I'll try to give some general updates soon- maybe with photos! There's a vegetable market near my house that Dan and I went to the other day, and I really want to return to with a camera. You basically get to it by walking through a little alley where men sell fruit and dried fish. In the market you can buy all sorts of vegetables or you can buy fish or shrimp, mutton (which hangs, whole, from the rafters) or chickens (which you pick out, live, and they kill and feather for you). So hopefully I can get up the courage to take some photos there, because it's a pretty awesome spot.

I hope you all are well

--- Catie


Dan's Blog:

http://blog.danbretl.com/travel/

Solar Eclipse

Some of you may have read that there was going to be a solar eclipse in this part of the world. Most articles highlighted the fact that it would be visible through India, China, and then the Pacific Ocean, with no mention given to us here in Bangladesh. But we all knew what to look for. So early on Wednesday morning we all met downstairs at the van and drove out to the future AUW site. AUW is currently located in a series of not-quite-finished-yet buildings here in Chittagong, but someday it will be housed on 100 acres of hilly land just outside of the city. The drive out there was pleasant- shopkeepers were just setting up shop, and we drove through what appeared to be a rickshaw colony just before we got to the gate to future AUW. Apparently whoever has the keys to the gate was still asleep, or possibly eating breakfast by this point, so we all got out of the van and walked a few hundred meters through the future AUW site.

At this point the site is nearly completely wild. There's a main dirt road that runs into the land a ways, and a few families living here and there along the road. Michelle pointed out to us where the property ended on the other side of a ravine. Apparently the AUW side of the ravine is completely picked dry because villagers come out and take whatever they can use- sticks and branches, plants, etc. So as we walked along we could see these little huts with wood fires in front, families making breakfast and dogs stretching to wake up.

Apparently like most of Bangladesh, the AUW site was nearly entirely clay- gray clay and red clay. Sometimes something that looked like a piece of schist would be in our path, but really it was just dried up clay that broke as soon as you put any pressure on it. What a job it will be for these engineers to come in here and figure out how to build a campus on this flood prone clay ridden area.

Zelda, Michelle's intrepid daughter, down in a ravine at the AUW campus.

So we got as far as the picture above and started to look for the sun. We then realized that we had walked ourselves into a kind of bowl where the hills around us were blocking out the sun. So we walked back on the dirt road a ways and stopped to wait for the clouds to clear and the eclipse to reveal itself. Unfortunately it's the monsoon in Bangladesh right now, so things are pretty cloudy. We had prepared a pin hole (actually, pen hole) camera, but couldn't get enough direct sunlight to actually cast a shadow.

Jalene, Zelda, and Denise working on our pin hole camera.

So despite many warnings to not look directly at the sun, we all wanted to know if we would be able to see it. The sky was completely filled with clouds, but they were moving quickly, and were layered, so we were hoping they would clear enough so that we could get a glimpse.

Sarah, Eva, Polly, Faheem, Meg, and Calvin, all theoretically avoiding looking directly at where we were hoping the sun would show itself.

In the end we did get a few glimpses of the eclipse. The clouds would break apart long enough for us all to say: "OOH LOOK! oh NO! Don't Look directly at it!" and then the clouds would pass in front of the sun again and we would be back to waiting. I did manage to get a few shots, mostly of clouds, but here's the best of them:

I know this looks like the moon, but it's actually the sun during the eclipse. I swear.

Even if we couldn't exactly see the eclipse, we could tell that it was getting darker instead of lighter out. Frogs and crickets came out in full force for a few minutes, and I felt satisfied.

Other than that things here have been pretty work centered for me. I've been recovering nicely from a little bit of a stomach thing I had going last week, and have been enjoying Bangladesh a lot. Two nights ago at 11pm a parade went down my street. I couldn't see it, but I could hear a whole loud brass section, drums, and people marching along and cheering. Then last night at about 11pm a concert started from somewhere in my neighborhood. South Asia seems to have a way of using speakers that is unknown in America. Basically I've found that the sound quality has no value compared to the sound quantity; the louder, the better. So last night the sounds of this concert filled my room- over the sound of the fan on high, over the sound of the dogs barking on the street and the cars honking from below. This lasted until I fell asleep at 1am, and continued for what I think was several hours after- I kept waking up and realizing that the music was still going, and then would fall back asleep, assured that Bangladesh water was just as I had left it when I fell asleep at 1am.

So I've been having some thoughts about life in Chittagong. At home in Anchorage the city butts against the hills and flows down to the inlet. There, 250,000 people do their best to keep nature at bay. Still, a spider creeps in to your house and dogs wake you up at night, barking at wandering bears. A car hits a moose and your friends all hear about it.

Here in Chittagong, again between hills and water, it's nature that's doing its best to keep the 3 and a half million people at bay in the jungle. We creep into ant hills, curl up and take a nap, and call it our bed. We put concrete where moss once grew, and act surprised to see it returning on our white washed walls and floors. Instead of a moose wandering into a city and trying to live skirting around traffic jams and construction sites, Chittagong is a city wandering into a jungle, unsuccessfully trying to force the wild life to submit to man-made boundaries and barriers.

bat poem

Not to make excuses, but I don't consider myself a poet. That being said, I've really started to appreciate writing poetry since I've arrived here. Even if I'm just jotting down images and adjectives and arranging them into some form that I think has some meaning derived from rhythm, it's been helping me understand my interactions with the energy that permeates everything here.

I spent some time in the last few days getting out a little bit. I walked to a vegetable market where I bought a vegetable called portal (the texture of which is probably best described as being similar to what you would imagine a mini-alien to be like). I also got some oranges and a large mango and some candy from a man who is known as Mr. Moonshine and is apparently from Tamil Nadu (so I got to stretch my Tamil skills a little bit). Then this evening I spent some time up on the roof with Denise and Eva. When we first got up to the roof it was still pretty light out and there were dozens of crows everywhere you looked (very reminiscent of some certain Hitchcock scenes), but as the sun dropped behind the trees on a hill near our building, the crows started to disappear and the bats started to emerge. So this is kind of coming from that. Again, I'm not a poet, but I've been thinking a lot about content versus conventions in writing (from the TESL standpoint) and at least the ideas get across in this, even if they aren't necessarily the most eloquent.


slow silent bat wings somehow manage
to dampen the chaos
pumping up from the streets below:
the quick sounds of
screeched breaks
hands on horns
bicycle chains gritting
and grinding
and crackling, metal
against oil
against metal.
unfed or underfed
babies, wives, workers, beggars.
clothing, mostly unwashed,
rattling on the line
monsoon wet and snapping
air against water
against fabric
against twine.
chicken and beef
sizzling from inches below
oil turning in its pan.
chicken and cows
cackling and clopping and
cleaning up everything that
we've left behind in the
streets,
too busy to notice our own
peels and papers and piles
as we step over them,
force our way into our refuge
through our silent rooms,
up our lonely staircases
up to the red roof
where we're met by bats, still higher,
enabling us to leave everything below.

Fishing Village

I just returned from our 'Survival Bangla' trip to a fishing village outside of Chittagong (I would offer which direction from Chittagong, but the ideas of East, West, North, & South seem to be esoteric here). So every morning the faculty and TLC staff (I'm part of TLC- the 'Teaching and Learning Centre') meet to learn a little Bangla. Today the whole gang piled into a 14 passenger van and drove out to practice what we had learned and to gain a little experience and knowledge about this place we're living!

On the drive out there I kept expecting the traffic to break up, the roads to narrow, and the buildings to diminish in size or frequency. However, this never happened. I guess in a country so densely populated even the rural areas seem urban in some ways. However, as we turned off of one of the main roads and drove into this village area there was a drastic difference in the types of buildings and shops that we saw. Suddenly billboards were replaced with baskets full of eggs, hanging from open front shops. The streets really did narrow, and when our van pulled to a stop and we stepped out, we were stepping onto mud roads. Somewhat predictably we were immediately surrounded by a crowd of interested Bengalis. We were led into a complex of houses- down narrow little footpaths between two houses, or between a house and a wall.

This is Sarah and a little bit of Sangita working their way between a house and a wall in the fishing village.

We were led into a little court yard with maybe four or five homes surrounding it.

Katrina, Sangita, Sarah, Matt, and others standing in the small courtyard between the homes.

The young women and little girls came out of their houses and asked us, in English, what our names were, and how we were doing. A few gestured to Carol and me to join them in their home, so we went in.

Young women standing in the doorway to their house.

The house was probably three small rooms- one entrance, a step up into a living room area that was probably about the size of a queen sized bed, and one bedroom with an elevated cot in it. In the living room area there was an image of a Hindu goddess and two swamis. The woman then told me they were Hindu and that was their god, but they didn't tell me her name.

Next we walked for about 5 or 10 minutes out to the beach. On the way out there I attempted to chat with about four girls who were about 10 years old or so. They taught me how to say goat, wind, flower, dog, and rice patty (just a hint at what we were experiencing on the walk out there).

Fool in Bangla (Flower). The girls I was speaking with kept picking these and giving them to me.

One girl told me that her mom works in the rice field (at least, that's what I think she was telling me). When we got out to the beach we saw huge ships in the distance and small fishing boats near the shore. Instead of sand on the beach there were huge square man-made stones that had been placed where the water meets the land. No one spoke to this, so I'm not exactly sure if this was an erosion or flooding solution or what.

Ships, Fishing Boats, and huge cement (?) stones on the shore

So we spent some time walking along the beach and just madly attempting to speak with the people that had gathered around us out there.

A group of boys that had gathered and were excited about having their photos taken.

A group of girls and their fool which I'm pretty sure was eventually given to me.

Okay, I don't really want to spend a lot of time bragging or anything, but this cow photo is probably the greatest photo of all time. This was taken right on the beach.

Some young boys were playing in the waves crashing against the square stones.

Just a quick glimpse at the crowd that had gathered around us. The two white folk are Meg and Matt.

A very colorful Polly surrounded by some very happy young girls.

Me and a young girl I bonded with on the beach.

Chittagong Trash, Bats, and a Golf Club Getaway

Today is Sunday- the beginning of the week here in Chittagong, so I think I'll write a bit about how I spent the weekend here. But before I get into the nitty gritty of my weekend getaway to a golf club outside of Chittagong, I think it's important to first illustrate to you all what kind of atmosphere there is in here in the city.

Despite the fact that I'm here in Bangladesh as a "writing specialist" there is no way that I can adequately describe to you all, in words, what the streets here are like. For those of you who have spent some time living or traveling in South or South East Asia you probably have a good idea of what it's like. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of experiencing the sheer tumult of Asian traffic, let me just tell you it is chaos. At times I'll be riding around in the back of a CNG (aka auto rickshaw, aka tuk tuk) and actually manage to forget which side of the road people here drive on because so few drivers actually adhere to this lax suggestion of order. The driving laws here are actually survival of the fittest; the larger vehicle you drive, the more likely you are to have the right of way.

Keeping all of this in mind, I will tell you A) that I walk mostly everywhere and B) in terms of pecking order and road rules, pedestrians are pretty much as low as it gets. Even if you do find a strip of road that is more or less unoccupied by a moving vehicle, it's probably occupied by something else only slightly less unpleasent. For example:



Here you can see a street that's near AUW in Chittagong. So in this you can see that this two way street is mostly filled with oncoming traffic (somehow always the case). There are CNGs, rickshaws, and a parked car. But where a pedestrian might have some room to maneuver there is a pile of trash and crows. The crows here are a form of recycling, I suppose. Everything organic here gets consumed in some way- by crows or dogs or cats, or possibly the occasional goat or cow. Definitely the most common feature of every pile of trash on every street though is 10 or so crows having their pick of the garbage.

So in an attempt to get out of Chittagong and search for an oasis of sorts, a few of us loaded into some vans and headed out to the Golf Club outside of the city. The morning was beautiful and clear but by the time we got there it was pouring. Still, we had driven all the way out there, found some green, and were dedicated to taking advantage of it! So the 10 or so of us wandered out onto the course.

Here is the whole group wandering through some trees somewhere along the golf course. The woman in red is Nussrat, my Bangla teacher who was kind enough to take us out here. As you can see, this place is immeasurably greener and calmer than the street pictured above.

This is just a shot I took of Sarah's umbrella, which she put on the ground while she attempted to roll her pants up so they wouldn't drag so badly in the rain and mud (an inevitability which I'm pretty sure she soon submitted to).
Here's a photo of myself, Eva, and Sarah (two other ESL writing specialists) after getting a little drenched in the rain on the golf course. Still, you can tell that all three of us were happy to be out in grass and fresh rain (in Chittagong rain pretty much means you're walking through wet garbage, which is somehow worse). Also, check out my sweet hot pink salwar in this picture. haha. I didn't realize when I bought it that it was just one big hot pink suit- kind of ridiculous, but when in Bangladesh...

So this is sunset from the roof of the building I'm staying in right now. Apparently last night Eva and Sarah went up to the roof and saw lots of bats, so tonight a few of us headed up there, cameras in hand, bug dope applied, and went in search for these bats. And boy did we see them! These weren't the fast flittering bats that I've seen in California before- these were huge loping slow fruit bats- bodies as large as cats, wingspans as long as maybe 3 or 4 feet sometimes. A few flew really low above us- coming out of the thick trees around the building and setting off in search of something. We actually got out there just in time to see a crow chasing a fruit bat away. For every 5 beats that the crow's wings would take, the bat would beat once. It was pretty amazing. I took this photo of the sunset with a bat in front, but it turns out it really just looks like a spec. Take my word on it though, this is a really serious fruit bat! I've got to get Dan up there when he gets here finally and get him to take some adequate photos!

Well, that's the update from here. Let me just leave you with these two hilarious photos from Chittagong:

This is a photo of Eva and Sarah posing in front of the sewage system here in Chittagong. Usually these trenches of water are mostly covered, and you're actually walking over them (hoping over the gaping holes in the cement when the need arises). I liked that you can see some sort of trash hanging up in the background like laundry. I also find Eva's and Sarah's expressions hilarious. For some reason Eva is really skeptical of the trash and water, and Sarah just seems so pleased to be standing next to this disgusting river of trash water.


So this photo is from an adventure that Eva and Sarah and I went on in search of the legendary Jack fruit. Many people here at AUW haven't experienced the joys and woes of eating a jack fruit, so Eva got the idea that we could go out, purchase one, bring it back to AUW, cut it up, and share it with whoever would like one. So yesterday afternoon the three of us set out in search of a jackfruit, armed with our knowledge that the bangla word for the fruit, when written out in English script, looks like this: kathal. We wandered near and far but there were no jackfruits to be found. We eventually started asking people- kaathal? kaadal? kathaal? kadhal? jackfruit?, gesticulating frantically (if you've never tried to mime out "jackfruit" before, it's well worth trying, FYI). Eventually we approached a man in a store filled with books. We showed him our best guess as to how to write the name of the fruit out in bangla, and when he didn't understand we pathetically asked "jackfruit?". At last! he understood! So he wrote down the Bangla name for the fruit (we were way off, by the way), and also wrote down the name of a market where we might be able to purchase a jackfruit. He also was kind enough to tell us how much a rickshaw ride to the market would cost, and how much a single fruit would cost. So the three of us loaded into two rickshaws- Sarah and I took the younger, spryer looking cyclists, and Eva flew solo with an elderly rickshaw driver. The ride there was mostly downhill and took us to an interesting part of Chittagong which was much different from the area we're staying in at AUW. The streets were narrower and filled mostly with cycle rickshaws and potholes. The buildings were really low and by the time we got where we were going almost every shop was a small fruit vendor. So Sarah and I got there first and I managed to snap this photo of Eva pulling up. I have to admit that I think this photo might have cost us about 50 taka because pulling out my camera probably wasn't the most modest thing to do. In the end we paid about 50 tk too much and ended up with more jackfruit than I would care to consume in a year (it's definitely not my favorite fruit).

Well, that's the update from here! I hope you're all doing well. I have to get up early for bangla and curriculum planning tomorrow! Give me some updates from America, etc.

with love

--- catie

Chittagong, Bangladesh

Hello all,

It's Thursday night in Chittagong. I'm sitting on the 9th floor of a building where I'm currently staying and the wind is howling outside. It's dark out, with an occasional flash of lightning, and as per usual, it's raining. In about a half an hour I think the final call to prayer will sound for the night.

I realized today that it was exactly one week ago that I flew into Chittagong and took the hour long van ride from the airport to the AUW buildings in the city. I left New York from JFK and boarded my flight to Abu Dhabi. While boarding I was forced to wait in line until I could get back to my seat- no big deal, and not surprising. I think it's pretty common that we get stuck in first class on our way back to coach, and stand there just long enough to absorb the little details of comfort that we're about to be deprived of for the next 24 hours. Anyway, while taking in all of these painful little details, a man seated in first class smiled at me. He pointed to my Alaskan Grown shirt and told me he was from Palmer, Alaska. What a small world.

So, I have to just summarize and say that my journey here was long but pain-free. There were no hitches or problems- not even turbulence, really. The highlight was probably stopping over in Abu Dhabi and getting to see their amazing airport. The design was appealing to me, although a little confusing when it came to reading signs- simply because everything was so stimulating.



Here's a photo of the inside of the Abu Dhabi airport, which was mosaiced with shades of green and blue.

When I arrived in Dhaka I was so afraid of making my flight to Chittagong. I went through customs and then waited and waited for my one bag to come. I was constantly counting down until my flight to Chittagong- 3 hours, 2 hours 45 minutes, 2 hours! I was staring to get nervous. Eventually my bag came and I hurried over to the domestic "terminal". When I got there I found myself in a room with several small counters with various airline names over them. Just to put this into a familiar context, these counters were about the size of a booth you would expect to find at a college job fair, and there were about five of them. I quickly located my counter- easily spotted by the balloon and rainbow decor- and headed that way. My airline was UNITED AIRWAYS. The motto is "FLY YOUR OWN AIRLINE" which seems to be somewhat problematic to me in that I would actually prefer it if someone else would fly my airlines for me.

When I got to the deserted counter a man stood up from the waiting area and asked, Chittagong? I showed him my itinerary and he told me to sit down. I sat and watched the domestic terminal come to life in front of me for the next hour. Women in saris came in and started opening up the counters. Men started filing papers away, organizing luggage tags, and cleaning counters. When I had about 50 minutes until my flight they asked me to come up. I showed them my itinerary and they hand-wrote me out a boarding pass, stapled my luggage claim to it, and sent me off towards security. There was no ID checking or bag weighing (which could have been an issue, I'm told)- they just simply sent me through. So security consisted of an x-ray machine and a metal detector-the working order of which I'm suspect, on both accounts. I then found a seat in the one room domestic terminal- referred to as the "departure lounge".

This is my view from the departure lounge- TOILET GENTS

While sitting there waiting a man in front of me turned around and started chatting. He gave me his card and told me that he owned the only rated hotel in Chittagong which happens to be directly behind AUW. He told me that we'd definitely run into each other again, and I actually just saw him yesterday! Despite being in a country so packed full of people I manage to already have chance run-ins with those that I know!

So I continued to wait in the departure lounge until five minutes before my flight was scheduled to take off. Then a man entered the room and simply yelled: UNITED 523! and a few of us started lining up. We then all loaded onto a bus which drove us to a little airplane. Since it's monsoon season I wasn't really able to catch many glimpses of Bangladesh from the flight, but could occasionally see brown strips of river splattered and sliced through really green land. At times I was definitely seeing more of the murky brown than of the rich green- just a hint at how wet it really is here!

An interesting juxtaposition of things in the newspaper that I was given on the Dhaka-Chittagong flight. And here are some shots of what I saw while landing in Chittagong:

Probably an oil ship, which I've seen quite a few of. Chittagong is the major port for Bangladesh because it's slightly hilly so there's actually enough depth in the water for ships to come into port.


Some smaller boats- maybe fishing boats? I'm not really sure.

So the drive from the airport to AUW was exciting and refreshing. It's good to be back in South Asia! Of course I found myself inadvertently stepping on my imaginary break in front of the passenger's seat- a habit which I eventually lost in India after being there for some time. I immediately saw that Chittagong, like Madurai, has a lot of poverty and economic issues. But how different this city feels from Madurai, overall! The traffic may be a little crazier here- there are fewer cows and goats wandering into traffic, and fewer bullock carts and bicycles. On the other hand there are so many more bicycle rickshaws. It also seems that Chittagong has a much better system (read: a system) for getting water out of the streets after it rains. In Madurai during the monsoon we would walk through the streets and be actually wading through dirty waste water run-off up to our knees. Here the streets get muddy, but the water drains into deep (mostly) covered trenches on the sides of the roads.

I'm still piecing together this city and the neighborhood that I live in. Things seem to be a bit more expensive than Madurai, but maybe it's the places I'm going. For example, a "butter masala dosa" here costs 150 Tk, which is about $2.20. In Madurai I remember masala dosa being about a dollar. (then again, in NYC a masala dosa would cost somewhere near $15!)

Well, that's mostly the update from here. I'm living in temporary housing until tomorrow, when I move to slightly less temporary housing. I'm anticipating moving at least twice more before being put in the apartment where I'll live for the year. Basically they're still working on the building where I'm going to be living with other ESL writing specialists and staff.

Well, the call to prayer is just sounding for the evening, which is my cue for bed time. Tomorrow I'm going to go on a trip out to the Chittagong Golf Club, just to check out what it's all about. Then on Saturday a few of us are going out in a van to Cox's Bazaar- the longest beach in the world. It will be about 4 hours driving each way, so hopefully I won't get too sick!

Review: I'm really liking it here, and enjoying being back in S. Asia. I'm finding Bangladesh to be a lot like India in some regards (I've been proposed to once by a stranger already! haha), but I'm also finding the style of life to be a lot more posh here- my fingernails aren't getting as dirty as quickly, I'm eating at nicer restaurants, etc. We'll see how that progresses as I begin to settle in to the community more. I'll keep you all updated!

Much love

--- Catie