Daily Life #1

Our cook top

Some initial impressions of daily life here:

This is an aluminum pot that I believe is called a 'Calabash' - and it does look like a Calabash Gourd. We use it solely for boiling water - tap water in Dhaka must be boiled first, then cooled in the pot next to it and then passed through a high-quality filter system.  We boil a full pot each evening and let it cool overnight to keep the filter reservoir full.

Very light traffic

There is construction everywhere in our neighborhood (Banani).  Each of the high-rise tenement buildings you see in this photo are actively under construction.  Lower floors may be inhabited even as the upper floors are being built.  It seems every other block has one or two new buildings with piles of rebar and gravel outside.  The children's school lost its only access to a small sports field to a new building.  And the only direction is up.

This is Unimart.  Basically like Walmart.  Yep.  Even in Bangladesh.  It's fairly new.  It is convenient because everything is in one place, and there are certainly things you can purchase that are hard to find elsewhere (Quaker Oats Corn Meal, for example!).  But it is much cheaper, after haggling, in the old market (much more about that later).

   Traffic: when riding in a car, this is a common view, aside from the double decker bus.  For anyone who notices that this was taken from the left front seat, the driver sits on the right in Bangladesh, as in the U.K. - I wasn't driving.
   Traffic is ... there are hardly words.  Take 53 bicycles and rickshaws, 17 motorbikes, 5 big buses, 20 cars and a bunch of CNGs (the little green three-wheelers above) and put them on about 100 yards of road.  Have some parked, some making U-turns, all of them constantly weaving and jockeying for position, a few rickshaws going the wrong way, pedestrians crossing mid-traffic and add some intersections without traffic lights.  Horns & bicycle bells are in constant use, but not as expressions of displeasure; they are used to announce your presence to vehicles in front of you to help everybody adjust to your arrival.
   What is amazing is that it is not *quite* chaos.  Your progress forward may be in fits and starts, and the standard distance between the rickshaw you are in and a car is measured in inches, but it flows (more or less) in a constantly adjusting, risk-balancing, organic motion and din.