After I woke up early yesterday and ended up blogging, Donny woke up when Moweena came to cook breakfast. In the West, perhaps especially in the US we’re used to eating a completely different repertoire of food for each meal. Something sweet in the morning, like cereal or pancakes, a light lunch, maybe a sandwich or something, and then a heavy, hot meal for dinner. In Bangladesh, there isn’t really any distinction in the type of food served at each meal (different dishes might feature, but each is nonetheless spicy, salty, and hot). Donny was worried about me adjusting to the concept, so he made sure that Moweena made an egg dish not unlike an omelet. The flight left me with a bit of a headache, presumably a either dehydration or caffeine withdrawal (or both!). Since those two would give similar symptoms, but need opposite treatments, I figured my best bet was to just drink lots and lots of water and avoid the caffeine. If I skip it for a day or two, I should be able to recover from that. Plus, with the heat and humidity here, I’ve probably sweat more in the last 2 days than in the whole history of rowing practice. It doesn’t help that it’s not really culturally acceptable to wear shorts. Sure, we could do it and it’s not like we would be beaten up or anything, but no one else is doing it and it would just be offensive.
We grabbed a bus to BUET (Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, the country’s top University and Donny’s home-base for his transportation research). Donny gave me the tour, including a great view of the city from one of the balconies of the Civil Engineering building. Off of one side you see the sky scrapers (though Donny told me the tallest building in Dhaka is shorter than the tallest in Raleigh, despite having 20 times more people) and from the other side, you can see Old Dhaka, which we will visit tomorrow. We then visited the Dhakeshwari Temple, the National Hindu temple. The clean, quiet, cool temple was a sharp contrast from the dusty bustling streets outside, and we weren’t the only ones to realize. Families and groups of people were sitting on the cool marble floor enjoying their lunch hour. The adjacent pool, however was not as clean, but that didn’t stop a man and his son from bathing in it.
We had some palm fruit on the street, which was delicious and juicy, just what we needed on a sweaty day like today. We were about to get on a bus to head over to the American School for a game of pickup football, but we decided we needed to prepare ourselves for the journey, so we each got a popsicle and refilled our water bottles. We headed to the American School, where the turnout was suprisingly good! We had 2 games going of 8-on-8, followed afterwards by ice-cold beers and some American staples like sandwiches, wings and cake. Surely this isn’t the kind of thing you’d do every day when in a foreign country, but for Americans who’ve been here for a while I can see the appeal of some familiar food and activities, and even for me it was nice to ease my transition.
Afterwards we headed back to Aaron’s apartment, next to the American Club, but we were absolutely exhausted from exercise in the heat. We called it a night early and got home via a rickshaw, a local bus, and a tempo.