A Literary Evening

 

One of my yoga group Paola Fornari was presenting her expat writing group's anthology, Foreign Encounters  so I thought I would drag Lon along to support her (we were late and missed her bit- oops), but we did catch Rilla Norslund reading some of her poetry. I've had a quick look round her site, and didn't find many of the poems she shared this evening, but did find one I liked - its worth taking a minute to look at some more - they are deceptively simple, but capture the essence of some common experiences here very well.

http://www.rillaspoems.com/what-i-would-share/

Please don't panic - semi-sporadic blogging will resume again from now on...

Home safely

Friday morning saw us dropping Dad off back at the airport for a long days journey

5.5 hours from Dhaka to Dubai
just over 3 hour wait in Dubai
7.5 hours from Dubai to Heathrow

him and his luggage (including jars of pickle) arrived safely.

I think he will have some tales to tell once the jetlag wears off.

Besides the sights and the tastes of the city, the sounds of Dhaka are compelling too, and I will try and make some recordings, the bird that says woo-o in increasing urgency, the sounds of the building sites, the incessant unnecessary car horns, the street hawker selling snacks announced by a conch shell blow, and a rolling brrrr noise. The weather the past two weeks has been incredible - increasingly warm, with a mid-afternoon temperature of 25 in the first days, to 32 in the last - sunny with blue blue skies.

School buses and pavements

Since Dad drives the school minibus every day, it was good to see the local school rickshaws - sorry the pics are on the fly out of the car - essentially a cage with 2 benches, each driver has about 8 regular kids.

This is a pavement between our house and the local park. I'm not sure that they grasp the notion that pavements are for pedestrians so they don't have to walk in the street. Look at all the obstacles!

Dad ably demonstrating another typical pavement nearby, they are about 45 cm high! quite a step up and down when you have to negotiate trees/bricks/tea stalls and other obstacles.  Walking in the street is generally easier, which defeats the object really.

Sonargaon - or actually Panam Nagar

At 2 hours it took us longer than we had hoped to travel the 25km to reach Sonargaon - this was largely due to the chaos round a new overpass in construction.

But we did get a chance to see some transport types unseen in our part of Dhaka 

diesel tuk tuks

the red tuk tuk is extra large

We confused our driver by not wanting to go to what was obviously a very popular tourist attraction for Bengalis (coaches parked in a full car park) - which was some kind of museum and picnic spot, but we could tell that we would be the main attraction if we went in.

Instead we carried onto Panam City, a very photogenic, peaceful place - which is a deserted village of landowners built at the beginning of the 20th century. A few tourists came from the nearby attraction in rickshaws with camera phones on, some local villagers meandered through, schoolboys on bikes ask "your country?" with incredible regularity.  We ambled through looking at the architecture, and life..and taking a few photos

 

Lon inspects the shaded workshop

 

Dad remembers a stove like this from his childhood in India

lady washing herself in the pond (tank)

dung drying for use in fires

open space + boys= cricket

 

 

cut throat action

Girls + camera = giggles

this chap came to chat we sat in the shade with a drink