Out and About

The head-cold has worsened, but since staying shut up in the hotel is just not an option, I've been spending the day working from the office, eating amazingly good and cheap lunches (a highlight of my day can you tell?) and having the occasional adventure.  The office is located in an amazing setting - a campus, housing a large number of agriculture related research centers.  

Tuesday evening I took the metro to meet a friend from DC whose partner is from Delhi and wanted to return home to do his dissertation research.  His area is geography and he is studying the role of the Delhi garbage pickers - how the amount of recyclables are declining causing worse sanitation and decreased livelihoods...I think.  My friend continues to work for the same organization he worked for in DC, but as a local hire.  In response to this pic, he wrote "Ah snow, falling in central Delhi".  Yeah that would be the particulates in the air.

Running the gauntlet from hotel to metro and from metro to our meeting place was not a pleasant experience but at least short-lived.  On the bright-side, I discovered the metro Ladies Car which was far more enjoyable and getting around on one's own is a satisfying accomplishment. 

Tourist Attraction

Despite a head cold, I ventured out to see the sights of Delhi.  I'd opted for the tourist mainstay of major cities, the hop-on-hop-off bus.  While there were 13 stops on the route, I quickly decided that paying the international visitor rate at each one would make for a very long and expensive day.  I chose to spend time and money at the Red Fort and one of the Tombs (above).  As sometimes happens in places where there is a lot of domestic tourism, the foreigner becomes part of the site-seeing.  My image is now on several Indian smart phones and so I thought I should probably capture the moment as well:

All in all riding around on the bus was a pretty good way to see the city, but the highlight of the day was taking the metro back to my hotel.  Like most world metro systems, it was very intuitive and the only questionable part was being crammed into the car with the rest of humanity. 

Transition

Thursday was transition day from Dhaka to Delhi.  To say that Delhi feels calm and spacious after being in Dhaka should speak volumes.  Due to a delayed flight, I had to race to the hotel and then office, to attend a presentation across town.  However, already I can tell that my time at the India office will be a good experience. Friday was also a day of meeting after meeting as I am overlapping for a couple days with my boss and there were many potential program partners to meet.

Now it's the weekend.  While the hotel is nice, it is located next to nothing.  I.e. the view from the room is the metro rail, main street and the garbage in a small green space.  Coupled with this, Saturday is Republic Day when travel is restricted in the city.  I attempted a walk outside but that was a bad idea - run down, no sidewalks, feeling very conspicuous and nothing to see.  Ergo, it's internet, TV marathon and reading in my room.  Fortunately tonight I'm going to visit a grad school friend and her family.  Pictures are the hotel lobby and view from my room:

The past four days have melded together.  I was at the office the first two days and a project workshop for the second two days, with various evening activities. Monday a friend of a friend who works here took me to a handicraft shop and the we went out to dinner.  Tuesday evening a friend of a friend's father, a Rotarian, took me to his Rotary Club meeting.  It was quite an experience.  In addition to the speaker, who gave a lesson about the prophet Mohammed's origins as an orphan and the need to remember the poor (and how this relates to Rotary's core beliefs), I was given 10 minutes to tell about my club and my job.  What followed were back-to-back questions about herbal supplements, research on food safety, what is a healthy diet, my thoughts on GMOs, and how to make healthy food cheaper for the poor.  A picture from the evening:

My last evening in Dhaka, I went out again with the girl from Monday, first to a shop and then to The American Club for dinner.  The Club is one of many clubs in the city where expats of various nationalities go to get away from the city.  While it wasn't as posh as I was imagining, there were aspects that are a little slice of USA - the pepper flakes, parmesan cheese, ranch dressing were common American brands.  A bar, tennis courts, pool, yoga classes etc are also available on the grounds.  We even ran into my expat colleagues having dinner that evening.  Tomorrow early I depart for Delhi.  It's been a good introduction to Bangladesh, but it's time to move part 2 of this trip.

Alternate Transport

Today was my one day off which was good timing consider jet lag was horrible last night resulting in very little sleep but great progress in my book and email response rate.  Today I moved hotels from the mayhem of some part of the city to a much quieter neighborhood and a smaller Sri Lankan run hotel.  Also, since it was my only down time, I decided to try to find a well-known handicraft store.  This proved to be much more of an adventure than intended.

Since arranging transport through the hotel seemed expensive, I decided to try my luck on the street hailing my own vehicle.  Minutes later I was in the back of a bicycle rickshaw bumping over the pot-holed back-streets, with the occasional hair-raising moment on main roads.  Turns out the "driver" didn't know the store but took me to a popular shopping area.  I called over a bystander who spoke English and she, plus a bevvy of other rickshaw men, helped explain to him where I was going - another 3 km away.  It doesn't matter if they have an address or not, transport finds your destination by getting into the neighborhood and then asking every passerby until they find it.  The driver was finally stopped at a neighborhood boundary and I had to disembark and cross over myself.  Fortunately a stranger helped me get into a tuk-tuk for the last 1/4 mile to the store.  The drive back was less adventurous but still a bit of hassle in a tuk-tuk.  I now get why they are en-caged vehicles.  Perhaps to keep the beggars and street vendors separated from passengers.  That was enough adventure for one day.

Architecture

Today was holy Friday which of course meant more meetings for ex-pats who take advantage of the nearly no traffic to actually get around.  Due to jet lag and a late night, I was able to easily bow out of the early morning breakfast meeting but was in time for the next 2 hr partner meeting, followed by an inter-agency meeting, lunch and a visit to a new project office (followed by work, dinner mtg and night Skype call with DC).  The staff was so excited to show it, they met us on their day off.  And it was quite fancy - a brand new renovation in a building that is still very much under construction.  The office will oversee the collection of country agriculture data, forecasting and associated research studies.  All very impressive.  But the best part of this space - the view of the famous parliament building.

Per the wikipedia entry, built in 1961, there is a lake on the other three sides:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatiyo_Sangshad_Bhaban

Gridlock

I'd heard about the horrible traffic in Dhaka and upon asking a Bangladeshi friend if it was similar to Jakarta, he replied "Jakarta on crack."  I'm not sure what that looks like, but today I spent what felt like half of my waking hours traveling on the notorious Dhaka roads, and, yes, to say that it is bad really doesn't begin to describe the experience. 

We had a series of meetings with government officials and mostly due to traffic and partly due to the nature of visiting ministers, we shuttled back and forth between offices either hurrying up to wait, or just plain arriving late for each meeting.  And the traffic was phenomenal.  Apparently no one follows traffic rules, just complete mayhem, resulting in grid-lock and a survival of the most fearless.  It's a wonder there aren't continual collisions.   People speak about never knowing how long it will take to get somewhere.  Case in point, this evening the head of our office hosted a dinner at his house.  It took 1 1/2 hrs to get from the hotel to his house and 20 minutes to get back.   

I could not imagine facing the traffic on a daily basis, but for the short time I'm here, it is somewhat entertaining.  One thing I definitely noticed is the use of bicycles.  Bicycle rickshaws, bicyclists, bicycle garbage trucks, bicycles moving enormous construction materials - and the tiny, rail thin men/boys powering these vehicles is also quite something.

Day 1

Per usual, the first night at my destination meant sleeping well.  This lulls you into a false sense of security that you have been spared jet lag.  Oh no, the internal clock will not be tricked and I so I’m thankful for the rest I had and anticipate the insomnia that awaits.  However, with 8+ hours under my belt, I hit the gym, caught up on email and explored the vast buffet breakfast before meeting up with my boss to get down to business.  And even with impending jet lag, I glimpsed the top of the learning curve when I found myself explaining a complicated reporting mechanism to my boss instead of the usual vise versa. 

Today was an all-day workshop.  It was supposed to be morning to evening but because of a city-wide strike, the time frame was moved to afternoon to late evening.   The only benefit of which was we were able to cancel joining a 9p call with DC.  The workshop was somewhat typical.  An opening with back-to-back speeches by diplomats and several Ministers with media cameras swarming the room thrusting cameras in the audiences’ faces.  The speakers and presenters went long, the audience talked to each other, talked on their cell phones, and Q&A was more a stream of long comments than really questions.

Long Road to Dhaka

The trip to Dhaka went extremely well.  The flight from Dulles was on the new double-decker plane.  I actually wish I’d picked a seat upstairs just to say I did.  But as it was, another woman and I split four middle seats which saw us head-to-head trying to get a bit of sleep over the Atlantic.  In CDG airport, while waiting to board the plane to Delhi, delayed due to cold weather, I suddenly found myself on the receiving end of a hug by a friend from Rotary who stated “We should hold a meeting here”.  He was on his way back to the US.  Completely random in an airport that size to run into someone I know which I took as an auspicious sign. 

I had been worried about Delhi because I was booked to stay at the hotel airport, though I wasn’t sure how to get my luggage, and then access the hotel from outside the terminal. Fortunately as I exited the jetway, I saw my name on a hotel sign.  I was guided through all the various hoops, security and back-ways to access the hotel and in my room found a lovely view of the airline check-in hall (picture).  Because they boot you out early from the hotel, I spent the morning in one of the low-end lounges – but for coffee, breakfast, internet and a quiet place to sit, it was money well spend (and reimbursable). 

Arriving in Dhaka, I again was met by my name on a hotel sign.  Further, I was happy to discover that a Delhi-based colleague had also been on the flight and we ended up sharing an unmarked car to the hotel together and had ample time to get to know each other on the way.  While I had heard nightmarish stories about the traffic in Dhaka, the drive to the hotel was really no worse than experiences in other vehicle clogged mega cities.  A mish-mash of buses, motorcycles, cars, tuk-tuks, bicycles and humans, somehow avoiding accident and injury amid a soundtrack of horns and revving engines.