I'm baaaack!
The tea estates trip was great. We left here at about 6:30 am and picked up two new German interns (a very nice couple named Cecil and Anneciata) in another area of Dhaka before leaving the city. We were nine in total, two Austrians, three Germans, an Italian, two Chinese and myself. The roads, as I have commented before, are pretty awful but I found they were better in the North than in the South of Bangladesh, and definitely better than those in Dhaka. We arrived at our guest house in Srimangal (pronounced something like Shrimangol) around 2:30 pm, and I must say it was a very pleasant surprise! There are pictures at the end of the post because I find it very hard to manage the post when I am writing around the pictures I include. As you can see, it was very beautiful and in a nice little compound. We were five girls in the one house, and the three boys were in a room in the main house which also had a tv room, about 6 other bedrooms, a cafeteria-type room where we played cards, and the dining room with the kitchen alongside. We ate lunch (me with my hands, everyone else with spoons) which was amaaazing, the fresh village food can't even be compared to what I eat in the city. It was pretty much what I ate in the other village; lots of rice, dal with every meal, a meat dish and vegetables. For lunch the veggie was fresh pumpkin (we saw a cook carrying it in beforehand) and it was fantastic, cut up in chunks and boiled, with a nice sauce. The others all had a hard time with the spices, and that's how I know I am in fact adjusting to the ubiquitous spice. I still won't touch the chillies themselves, but I can eat a meal without a litre and a half of water- progress!
The guest house has a coordinator named Peter, one of those from the minority Christian community here in Bangladesh. Peter organized a mini-bus for us; this one was truly mini, with only seven seats so each time we were in the car two had to sit backwards on top of the motor behind the drivers' seat. We went to this little shop which is famous for their seven-layer tea; don't ask me how they manage to get it in seven layers, but the picture below shows that there really are distinct layers! We ordered one tea each of 2 to 10 layers and each sampled some of every one. Certain layers weren't all that good, but a fun experience nonetheless! After we returned to the guest house, where one of the assistant boys walked us about a half a km to a pineapple plantation. Apparently pineapples grow on bushes... I kept my mouth shut on my lack of knowledge on pineapple horticulture, as I would have guessed they grew on trees! We made it just in time for the sunset which was absolutely incredible from the top of a hill over the pineapple rows and the tiny lake at the bottom. About 3 km of pineapples are grown by this one family, which leases the land from the local government. You have to be quite well-off to begin with to be able to rent even a tiny bit of land, so I was quite surprised. That was about it for our first day; dinner was fresh fish with the standard Bangla rice, dal and veggies, and I don't know what they do to the potatoes here but they are great. Maybe, again, it's just the freshness. We played some games before dinner, and went to bed pretty quickly after we ate as we were all tired, but dinner wasn't served till after 9 so, really, it wasn't all that early. I unfortunately couldn't sleep at all, despite the mosquito net and the fact that I have adjusted to the hard beds. I was quite slow getting out of bed in the morning, but was still ready before the bus arrived to take us out for the day.
Our first stop was at a lake, which was quite lovely and had tea plants all around it, with paths cutting vertically and horizontally along the surrounding tea-planted hills. There was apparently a monkey but I didn't see it. After walking around the lake for about an hour, we had cha (tea) at a stand about a minutes walk in front of the lake. We were going to visit the national park, but we all wanted to learn more about the multitude of brick-making factories all over the countryside of Bangladesh so we asked Peter if we could stop at one. So we stopped and wandered around taking pictures and getting stared at as always, but I think this time it was more from sheer surprise that anyone would want to stop there. It is a really incredible operation; there are many different crews who work, some pulling out the necessary wet soil from the ground, others actually making the bricks by hand. Someone dumps piles of wet soil, another rolls out a chunk on the ground and another plunks it in the mould and carefully pulls the mould off in time to plunk in the next rolled chunk, always amazingly exactly the right size for the mould, which has the company's letters imprinted on the bottom (top once they flip it over and pull it off). There are lines and lines of bricks drying on the ground, which are stacked after probably a couple of weeks into huge lined-up piles. There are then women who carry the dried bricks to where another crew lines them up in a crevasse to be fired. The fire runs all the time, blowing plumes of black smoke up into the air. The heat comes out the bottom of the pillar into the crevasse, where it fires the bricks. I couldn't figure out how long they stay in the line of fire (litterally!), but it is HOT in that crevasse! Other teams move the fired bricks to another section of the field where they are again lined up, waiting to be loaded onto trucks after an order comes in. Everyone works eight hours a day, seven days a week. They make 700 taka a week, or 100 taka a day. We spent 100 taka on tea for all of us earlier that morning. Each brick weighs 5 kg; the women who carry the bricks do so on their heads, and pile up ten of them (aka 50 kg) and then walk quite a distance to the fire, all day, every day. They are the only women employed there, about 50 women to the 150 men doing the other work although we only saw maybe 6 of them; I assume we arrived around lunchtime. We had to ask several times to get anywhere near the fire as it is very dangerous, but of course it's only dangerous for tourists and maybe 15 men work directly on top of it all day long. I stepped just one step in the wrong place and was pulled back by a lovely old man who probably saved me from a burnt foot, as where I had stepped crumbled into the very bright orange of the fire beneath it. I got a picture of him maybe 5 minutes earlier, which I have added at the bottom. The old men here are very photogenic, and I am quite proud of this shot.
We were getting ready to leave to carry on to the forest, but the owner of the factory (an ancient and very tall man in Muslim dress with a walking stick) wanted to serve us something so we waited with him in the overseer's quarters while two men drove to get snacks and another two went for tea. It is here that I discovered my new favorite Bangla snack, their version of trail mix. I can't really describe it, but it has soy nuts and a few different-sized savory bits which are, of course, slightly spicy. I bought some in the bazaar today, and am enjoying them as I write. The tea was great, not the usual condensed milk-tea but a delicious clear cinnamon tea. After a few group photos with the factory owner, we sardined ourselves back into the bus and went to the national park forest. There is a fare for Bengalis and a fare for foreigners, which is US$ 5 compared to probably less than US$ 0.50 for the locals. There were signs everywhere about not littering which, in Bangla style, are obstinately ignored. The further in you go the less garbage you see, so we were glad to get on the less-beaten path. Some people actually live in the national park, and cultivate lemons around their houses. Not much to see other than trees, so we took a few photos and moved on. We read in the Lonely Planet book the Italian had procured that there are traditional tribes still living in the region so we wanted to see that, but we ended up at a fenced-in Christian community. I could have spent maybe two minutes there but we were there almost a half hour. Nothing all that exciting, but Bangladesh is the land of hurry up and wait so everything takes longer. The Church is only open on Sundays so we couldn't go in to see it but we did go find it, and the very Christian structure (not as impressive as a Cathedral) was somehow comforting. Everyone dresses the same apart from the Christian women not covering their heads with a scarf; they do wear Salwa Kamis so it didn't really feel any different other than the Church itself.
We then went to a tea estate, which was the last thing on our schedule for the day. It was, of course, closed until March so we went to the tea estate region and didn't even visit a tea estate! It was still a fantastic weekend away. We went back to the guest house and ate lunch at around 4pm. I finally convinced the girls to try eating with their hands, a. because it's fun and b. because Sana rightfully proved to me that it actually tastes better when mixed by hand. They wouldn't ever believe me until they ate with their hand (right only, as it's very rude to eat with the left since it's the hand used in the bathroom) and ALL agreed that it tasted better! The mini-bus from Dhaka was supposed to arrive at 5 pm, and by 6 pm we were getting quite worried. We couldn't get ahold of the man at Grand Prince hotel who had organized the transport for us, and I won't go into the details of the ensuing drama but finally at 7 we found out that there had been some mechanical troubles and he was on his way. 3 or 4 of our group were supposed to be leaving Dhaka at 7:30 this morning (Sunday) for their village trip, so we were very concerned about getting back Saturday night. He did eventually show up and we made it back to Dhaka at 12:30 am, dropping off the German couple and getting back to the hotel by 1 am. I was very happy to shower and collapse into bed. I went into work a little late today, which I would normally never do intentionally but here is the norm. So I was there at 11 instead of 10:30 and it was a non-issue.
Regardless, I am still quite tired so I think it will be a very early night for me after a Chicken Steak and Naan dinner. Today I just couldn't handle Chinese food again so I ordered a chicken pizza which was very good; any dish with vegetables mandatorily comes with chillies so I just wanted a cheese pizza, and got talked into chicken as well which I was fine with. I think it will be added to my standard fare because chinese food twice a day is tough to manage a month in. I don't know what I am going to do two months in when I can't stand to even look at beef chowmein! Maybe venture into the Indian menu now that I can stomach the spice, although nothing comes with descriptions on the menus so I will have to prepare for disaster a few times.
The last picture I will include is one for my Dad, so Mom please make sure he sees it. This is the building next to the Grameen building here in Dhaka; as you can see, their bamboo "protection" structure starts in one place and ends about three rows of bamboo over at the top, a testament to Bangladeshi security standards for their construction workers.
The tea estates trip was great. We left here at about 6:30 am and picked up two new German interns (a very nice couple named Cecil and Anneciata) in another area of Dhaka before leaving the city. We were nine in total, two Austrians, three Germans, an Italian, two Chinese and myself. The roads, as I have commented before, are pretty awful but I found they were better in the North than in the South of Bangladesh, and definitely better than those in Dhaka. We arrived at our guest house in Srimangal (pronounced something like Shrimangol) around 2:30 pm, and I must say it was a very pleasant surprise! There are pictures at the end of the post because I find it very hard to manage the post when I am writing around the pictures I include. As you can see, it was very beautiful and in a nice little compound. We were five girls in the one house, and the three boys were in a room in the main house which also had a tv room, about 6 other bedrooms, a cafeteria-type room where we played cards, and the dining room with the kitchen alongside. We ate lunch (me with my hands, everyone else with spoons) which was amaaazing, the fresh village food can't even be compared to what I eat in the city. It was pretty much what I ate in the other village; lots of rice, dal with every meal, a meat dish and vegetables. For lunch the veggie was fresh pumpkin (we saw a cook carrying it in beforehand) and it was fantastic, cut up in chunks and boiled, with a nice sauce. The others all had a hard time with the spices, and that's how I know I am in fact adjusting to the ubiquitous spice. I still won't touch the chillies themselves, but I can eat a meal without a litre and a half of water- progress!
The guest house has a coordinator named Peter, one of those from the minority Christian community here in Bangladesh. Peter organized a mini-bus for us; this one was truly mini, with only seven seats so each time we were in the car two had to sit backwards on top of the motor behind the drivers' seat. We went to this little shop which is famous for their seven-layer tea; don't ask me how they manage to get it in seven layers, but the picture below shows that there really are distinct layers! We ordered one tea each of 2 to 10 layers and each sampled some of every one. Certain layers weren't all that good, but a fun experience nonetheless! After we returned to the guest house, where one of the assistant boys walked us about a half a km to a pineapple plantation. Apparently pineapples grow on bushes... I kept my mouth shut on my lack of knowledge on pineapple horticulture, as I would have guessed they grew on trees! We made it just in time for the sunset which was absolutely incredible from the top of a hill over the pineapple rows and the tiny lake at the bottom. About 3 km of pineapples are grown by this one family, which leases the land from the local government. You have to be quite well-off to begin with to be able to rent even a tiny bit of land, so I was quite surprised. That was about it for our first day; dinner was fresh fish with the standard Bangla rice, dal and veggies, and I don't know what they do to the potatoes here but they are great. Maybe, again, it's just the freshness. We played some games before dinner, and went to bed pretty quickly after we ate as we were all tired, but dinner wasn't served till after 9 so, really, it wasn't all that early. I unfortunately couldn't sleep at all, despite the mosquito net and the fact that I have adjusted to the hard beds. I was quite slow getting out of bed in the morning, but was still ready before the bus arrived to take us out for the day.
Our first stop was at a lake, which was quite lovely and had tea plants all around it, with paths cutting vertically and horizontally along the surrounding tea-planted hills. There was apparently a monkey but I didn't see it. After walking around the lake for about an hour, we had cha (tea) at a stand about a minutes walk in front of the lake. We were going to visit the national park, but we all wanted to learn more about the multitude of brick-making factories all over the countryside of Bangladesh so we asked Peter if we could stop at one. So we stopped and wandered around taking pictures and getting stared at as always, but I think this time it was more from sheer surprise that anyone would want to stop there. It is a really incredible operation; there are many different crews who work, some pulling out the necessary wet soil from the ground, others actually making the bricks by hand. Someone dumps piles of wet soil, another rolls out a chunk on the ground and another plunks it in the mould and carefully pulls the mould off in time to plunk in the next rolled chunk, always amazingly exactly the right size for the mould, which has the company's letters imprinted on the bottom (top once they flip it over and pull it off). There are lines and lines of bricks drying on the ground, which are stacked after probably a couple of weeks into huge lined-up piles. There are then women who carry the dried bricks to where another crew lines them up in a crevasse to be fired. The fire runs all the time, blowing plumes of black smoke up into the air. The heat comes out the bottom of the pillar into the crevasse, where it fires the bricks. I couldn't figure out how long they stay in the line of fire (litterally!), but it is HOT in that crevasse! Other teams move the fired bricks to another section of the field where they are again lined up, waiting to be loaded onto trucks after an order comes in. Everyone works eight hours a day, seven days a week. They make 700 taka a week, or 100 taka a day. We spent 100 taka on tea for all of us earlier that morning. Each brick weighs 5 kg; the women who carry the bricks do so on their heads, and pile up ten of them (aka 50 kg) and then walk quite a distance to the fire, all day, every day. They are the only women employed there, about 50 women to the 150 men doing the other work although we only saw maybe 6 of them; I assume we arrived around lunchtime. We had to ask several times to get anywhere near the fire as it is very dangerous, but of course it's only dangerous for tourists and maybe 15 men work directly on top of it all day long. I stepped just one step in the wrong place and was pulled back by a lovely old man who probably saved me from a burnt foot, as where I had stepped crumbled into the very bright orange of the fire beneath it. I got a picture of him maybe 5 minutes earlier, which I have added at the bottom. The old men here are very photogenic, and I am quite proud of this shot.
We were getting ready to leave to carry on to the forest, but the owner of the factory (an ancient and very tall man in Muslim dress with a walking stick) wanted to serve us something so we waited with him in the overseer's quarters while two men drove to get snacks and another two went for tea. It is here that I discovered my new favorite Bangla snack, their version of trail mix. I can't really describe it, but it has soy nuts and a few different-sized savory bits which are, of course, slightly spicy. I bought some in the bazaar today, and am enjoying them as I write. The tea was great, not the usual condensed milk-tea but a delicious clear cinnamon tea. After a few group photos with the factory owner, we sardined ourselves back into the bus and went to the national park forest. There is a fare for Bengalis and a fare for foreigners, which is US$ 5 compared to probably less than US$ 0.50 for the locals. There were signs everywhere about not littering which, in Bangla style, are obstinately ignored. The further in you go the less garbage you see, so we were glad to get on the less-beaten path. Some people actually live in the national park, and cultivate lemons around their houses. Not much to see other than trees, so we took a few photos and moved on. We read in the Lonely Planet book the Italian had procured that there are traditional tribes still living in the region so we wanted to see that, but we ended up at a fenced-in Christian community. I could have spent maybe two minutes there but we were there almost a half hour. Nothing all that exciting, but Bangladesh is the land of hurry up and wait so everything takes longer. The Church is only open on Sundays so we couldn't go in to see it but we did go find it, and the very Christian structure (not as impressive as a Cathedral) was somehow comforting. Everyone dresses the same apart from the Christian women not covering their heads with a scarf; they do wear Salwa Kamis so it didn't really feel any different other than the Church itself.
We then went to a tea estate, which was the last thing on our schedule for the day. It was, of course, closed until March so we went to the tea estate region and didn't even visit a tea estate! It was still a fantastic weekend away. We went back to the guest house and ate lunch at around 4pm. I finally convinced the girls to try eating with their hands, a. because it's fun and b. because Sana rightfully proved to me that it actually tastes better when mixed by hand. They wouldn't ever believe me until they ate with their hand (right only, as it's very rude to eat with the left since it's the hand used in the bathroom) and ALL agreed that it tasted better! The mini-bus from Dhaka was supposed to arrive at 5 pm, and by 6 pm we were getting quite worried. We couldn't get ahold of the man at Grand Prince hotel who had organized the transport for us, and I won't go into the details of the ensuing drama but finally at 7 we found out that there had been some mechanical troubles and he was on his way. 3 or 4 of our group were supposed to be leaving Dhaka at 7:30 this morning (Sunday) for their village trip, so we were very concerned about getting back Saturday night. He did eventually show up and we made it back to Dhaka at 12:30 am, dropping off the German couple and getting back to the hotel by 1 am. I was very happy to shower and collapse into bed. I went into work a little late today, which I would normally never do intentionally but here is the norm. So I was there at 11 instead of 10:30 and it was a non-issue.
Regardless, I am still quite tired so I think it will be a very early night for me after a Chicken Steak and Naan dinner. Today I just couldn't handle Chinese food again so I ordered a chicken pizza which was very good; any dish with vegetables mandatorily comes with chillies so I just wanted a cheese pizza, and got talked into chicken as well which I was fine with. I think it will be added to my standard fare because chinese food twice a day is tough to manage a month in. I don't know what I am going to do two months in when I can't stand to even look at beef chowmein! Maybe venture into the Indian menu now that I can stomach the spice, although nothing comes with descriptions on the menus so I will have to prepare for disaster a few times.
The last picture I will include is one for my Dad, so Mom please make sure he sees it. This is the building next to the Grameen building here in Dhaka; as you can see, their bamboo "protection" structure starts in one place and ends about three rows of bamboo over at the top, a testament to Bangladeshi security standards for their construction workers.
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| Heed Bangladesh Guest House- so nice! |
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| Pineapple Sunset |
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| Beside the arm in the bottom left corner you can see a pile of mud |
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| My saviour and bff |
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| Eating by hand- you push it into your mouth with your thumb |
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| Women carrying bricks |
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| Newly made bricks drying- endless! |
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| Marzia (Italian friend) and Pineapple plants |
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| Rickety Bamboo |
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| Pineapple valley |
Strangely enough, I already knew that about pineapples! Most people don't realize that they grow on buses, so don't feel bad - haha!
ReplyDeleteJust wait til you get back home. You're going to think that the food here is so bland.
Glad you're having a good time :)