Ok, so the weekends here are weird. It’s like having Sunday before Saturday. So Sunday is actually on Friday, Friday is actually on Thursday, and Monday is actually on Sunday. And if any of that made sense to you, you’ve either been living in Dhaka way too long or you need to have your head checked. Basically, Friday is the holy day (like Sunday in the Americas and Europe), but Saturday is still part of the weekend. So a lot of people have Friday and Saturday off. Sunday is the first work day of the week, like Monday in the Americas and Europe.

After a quick breakfast of toast and nutella, we set out determined to get many things accomplished on the ever-increasing list of things to do/buy that we had been accumulating. We started off on a ricksha but soon decided that (1) this particular ricksha was not built well enough (or was so old that its original builder wouldn’t even have recognized it) to carry the two of us and (2) the ricksha wallah probably hadn’t had his breakfast, because we were moving slower than the small children staring at us from the side of the road. So we paid the man a lot more taka than the trip was worth and hopped into a CNG (pictured above) to take us to DIT I, a market near the Gulshan 1 circle/crossing.

One of the things marked “urgent” on our list was the procurement of two office desks so that we could start setting up our technological addic…er…work paraphernalia. We walked all through DIT I and saw some gorgeous desks which could only have been intended for government officials (the kind large enough to sleep on, with leather details on the front). After escaping several “deals” that were thrown our way by the vendors, we managed to find a shop just off of the main market, where the prices seemed very reasonable. We arranged for two desks and two office chairs to be delivered to our flat that afternoon, and as we toasted the deal with the owner (Coca-Cola and cha), Richard Waddell arrived and proceeded to conduct business at the same shop (which made us feel better about our purchase, since he likes getting good deals).

Most of our allotted shopping time had run out, so we started home, swinging by the school to pick up two UPSes (uninterruptible power supply) that Debra had ordered for us when she made a large purchase for the school. These would prove to be invaluable given the daily random power outages we experience in Dhaka.

We made it home by 1 PM, when we had set up to go upstairs to Debra Harvey’s flat and play Settlers of Catan with her and Greg Warkentin. Taara won the game and we were able to show off the Portela Power at Settlers. After the game, we dined on Purnima’s very nice cooking: chicken curry, vegetables and rice with dahl, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

We had set up for the desks to be delivered at 5 PM, but it started raining at about 4 and my call to the furniture man simply resulted in “Raining is much problem, vangari can not go, we wait for rain stop then go.” My enthusiastic suggestion to “Put some plastic over it!” seemed to have been ignored. This was a problem since Greg was returning to take us swimming at the Canadian Club at 7 PM. Thankfully, the vangaris (kind of like a ricksha with a platform attached on the back of it) arrived at 6:50 PM and we managed to get everything up into the study before Greg arrived. As we walked down the stairs to Greg’s truck, I noticed that my suggestion of using plastic to cover the desks had indeed been helpful, as the wallahs stood there by their vangaris folding the plastic and stowing it away.

As we drove to the Canadian Club for our swim, we told Greg about our day and he responded with sage words which would reveal themselves as true over and again, over the days to come: “In Dhaka, if you make a list of things you need to get done, and if you get one of those things accomplished in a day, you’re well ahead of the average person.” Looks like we hit the ground running then, because we certainly feel like we’ve accomplished a lot already.