The day began full of promise: our cable Internet access was going to be hooked up in the afternoon! This would bode well for us, since I can’t do any work without it, and Taara was nearly going batty without access to her e-mail. As we ran our other errands, I was eagerly anticipating the moment when my umbilical cord would be once again hooked into the Interweb. But that certainly didn’t stop us from having lots of fun in the meantime!

Our first stop was at the tailor who had made our curtains, to order a few more. Some of the colors that were in our apartment when we arrived didn’t quite jive with Taara’s decorating plans, and after picking out the appropriate materials from the tailor’s wide selection, and leaving him with intricate drawings (Taara is in the wrong business, I tell you), we left the shop with assurances that everything would be delivered by Thursday.

I also ordered a 2-meter curtain to hang in our hallway. In spite of assurances that we’d be able to place our AC in one of the other bedrooms (our apartment has 3) so that it could be used as a study, upon arrival we found that the only bedroom with an AC box was the master bedroom. After careful consideration I came up with a revolutionary idea. I would make the bedroom next to ours into an office, leave the master bedroom’s door open blasting the AC, and put a curtain in the hallway so that the cold air would waft into the office, thereby cooling all the critical computing equipment. Now it was just a matter of getting the curtain (ordered from the tailor above) and praying that my hare-brained scheme would work.

We still had more curtains to buy, however, so we CNG’d it down to Aarong (Taara’s new favorite store) and picked out three curtains for our living room. The store is huge, and carries everything from clothes to pillows to candles to lamps to pretty much anything else you can find in a house (ok, maybe not, but it has a lot of stuff). The curtains Taara picked out were white with stamped patterns on them (you can sort of see the pattern at the lower right of the picture), but it was only when we got home that Taara would realize that the Aarong folk had cleverly tricked her: only TWO of the curtains’ patterns matched exactly…the other had similar patterns, but she quickly surmised they weren’t similar enough, and that we’d have to return to Aarong on some other day.

Speaking of returning, on the way home we caught one of the small blue Dhaka cabs (a bit larger than a CNG but small enough to give anyone with claustrophobia a need for therapy). The driver asked us where we were from (this is an every day thing, to be asked where you’re from, what you do, how many pimples you have, and we’re told it will not stop until we leave Bangladesh), and upon learning we were Canadian and Brazillian felt confident in entering into a 20-minute tirade about how the American empire was going to fall, letting us know the many ways that George W. Bush was evil and that America’s foreign policy was destroying the world. An interesting cab ride, to say the least.

We arrived home only to be whisked away in the GIS van to Sajna’s, an Indian restaurant in Banani, where we were treated (along with the rest of the new GIS staff) to a finger-licking-good (literally — we ate with our hands in Bengali fashion) Indian meal. Taara and I particularly enjoyed the dosas (I would interject a “sp?” here but I doubt the word was ever intended for English), which are sort of a thin wrap filled with spicy vegetables and meat. You can see her holding one here, mere seconds before she decimated the hapless wrap with aplomb.
Finally, at the end of another long day, we came home and waited for the cable guy to show up. Sure enough, at 5 PM, the Grameen Cybernet (not to be confused with Grameen Phone — an explanation for another day) guys came to install our cable. I had cleverly (albeit somewhat deceitfully) hidden our wireless router, since local ISPs (somewhat deceitfully) try to charge more for a connection if more than one computer is going to be using it, even though it costs them no more for the installation or for the maintenance on the connection itself. I figured one somewhat-deceit deserved another, and when they asked me which computer was to be hooked up, I sheepishly pointed to mine.

Only one problem. The lords of electrical fate (i.e. the Bangladesh Electrical Commission) had decided that 5 PM was precisely the time when they would inflict our area with a power cut. I’ll save the power cut rant for another day, but I’ll just say that our building’s generator powers the fans and a few lights, but none of the sockets, which meant that cable guy’s power drill wouldn’t work. “No ploblum,” he assured me, and he pulled out needle nose pliers and proceeded to chew (for lack of a better word) the pliers into our window’s aluminum frame, making a hole large enough for the cable to be snaked outside while still retaining the window’s ability to close. Well, it wasn’t as neat as using the drill could have been, but it did the job.

Finally, with the cable in place, I looked around for the modem to hook it up to. As my search returned void, I asked the man about the modem. “Oh, sir, no ploblum, modem man come in 1 hour.” As the cable guys left and hour after hour dragged on, I realized it would be at least another day before our Internet addiction could be sated.