I still think living in the Amazon was hotter, but there’s no question that this country is hot in the summer. My body is still acclimating, which means I’d need several buckets to collect the sweat I generate by walking outside. Thankfully no such collection mechanism is necessary, and I can just let it evaporate, thereby further increasing the humidity in the air and consequently, producing more heat (*sigh*). It’s quite a difference to the dry, mild Canadian summer we left, which more closely resembled the Autumn of São Paulo, but I don’t think either of us will have trouble adjusting to the weather within a few weeks. For now though, it’s AC and fans on all the time, baby.

After an early breakfast we made a circuit of the “cool stuff” stores (according to Taara) in Dhaka, such as Folk International, Journey into Craft, and Aranya. What’s interesting about these stores is that many of the items they carry (mostly made by hand, here in Bangladesh) are available for purchase in Canada, albeit at ten times the price. Taara was working at the TWU Bookstore for the past year and many of the “trendy” things they would order, such as handmade writing paper and greeting cards, are identical to the things we found for sale in these stores.

We stopped at GIS to sign some papers for the procurement of our boxes. These apparently cannot just be picked up, but must go through a laborious bureaucratic procedure whereby they are meticulously examined by customs officials who then decide (1) what they would like to keep themselves and (2) how much they wish to extort in exchange for granting the boxes’ owners the privilege of having them back. The papers we were signing were for a shipping company (Homebound) who was NOT the shipping company we sent things here with, but who is affiliated with DHL and has assisted GIS in “facilitating” these types of shipping matters before.

I’ll leave a longer rant about my impressions of the way business and government works here to another time (since I may well benefit from the hindsight). For now though, I will rant about Grameen Phone, my new cell phone carrier. I walked into the brand-spanking-new Grameen Phone Center, a new concept they have come up with (a place for conducting customer service, imagine that). The only problem with this great customer service hub is that the people who are providing the service don’t know much about their own systems. What’s worse, showing them my Treo 650 sent them into what I can best describe as “tilt” (for those of you who have ever played pinball on a real machine). They just couldn’t comprehend that I would have a phone that wasn’t purchased there, and that I’d like to set it up on their GPRS network for calling and using the Internet. Finally, after plowing through several clerks and being referred to others repeatedly, one Customer Service Representative had the bright and unexpected idea of calling his tech department and asking them if they had any information regarding my phone. Sure enough, I am not the only person in the world (or in Bangladesh) who has had a Treo (I was seriously getting worried), and within another fifteen minutes (I had been there for an hour so far) my Treo was set up and ready to go. This is not the end of my adventures with Grameen Phone, but I’ll save the rest for another post. Suffice it to say that I now pronounce it GRRRRRRRRameen Phone.

We “took our lunch,” as they say here, at the Bamboo Shoot Thai Restaurant on Gulshan Avenue. It’s a buffet and it’s just a-ma-zing. Taara and I thoroughly enjoyed it, the highlight being the spicy chicken soup you can see Taara sipping to the right. There were other great dishes such as different varieties of fried rice and noodles, chicken with cashew nuts, beef strips with green beans, sweet and sour chicken, and a nice spread of desserts. I’m getting hungry now just writing about it. I’d highly recommend this place to anyone in Bangladesh.

Two other interesting things which bear mentioning happened today. The first was that I went to the small market at the end of our road (I’m fairly sure the market belongs to the mosque near to it), and I saw DANO powedered milk for sale. This took me back to the days when my family lived in Manaus. A year or two after the Chernobyl incident in 1986, a huge amount of powedered milk produced in Russia and other nearby European countries arrived in Manaus, at dirt-cheap prices. At the time, the speculation was that this milk had been irradiated by the event at Chernobyl and rather than throw it away and take a huge loss, the companies involved were dumping it to third-world markets so that they could at least recoup some of their costs. Rumors notwithstanding, you can bet many, many Brazillians went out to buy the cheap milk, including (once or twice) my own family. One of the brands of milk present in my house at that time was…you guessed it, DANO. After that short time in Manaus, I had never seen a DANO can again. Ah, nostalgia…

The second interesting thing is a picture I took on the way out from our apartment. It says a lot about safety standards for workers here in Bangladesh, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions…