Believe it or not, but I am getting very close to the halfway mark. Tomorrow I will have been here for 4 weeks, and will have a little over a month left.
I am so happy I decided to keep a blog, because my perceptions of Bangladesh keep changing (practically every day) and it will be nice when this whole experience is over to remember how I felt at various points throughout my stay.
Yesterday I went to the Indian Embassy to try and get a tourist visa. The guidebooks and expat websites are filled with horror stories about how difficult this can be from here, so I was prepared for the worst. It opened its doors at 9, and I arrived by 9:10. The bottom floor already completely filled with a huge number of people. I prepared for at least a few hours wait. (Afterward Sayed told me that people will spend the night outside the embassy with the hopes of getting to the front of the line.) As I headed towards the back of the line one of the guards stopped me and asked what I needed. I told him I wanted a tourist visa. He told me to go to the 3rd floor. I headed up the stairs (and on each stairway was a pot of flowers with an aromatic incense stick burning) and found the foreigners visa office. I had to wait for about 5 minutes before they showed me into a private office. (This is just another ridiculous example of how much better white people are treated pretty much automatically.) The guy asked me when I was planning on going to India, and I told him I wanted to leave at the end of July. He told me that I needed to come back 10 days before I'm going to leave and he will give me one then. I asked him numerous times if I would for sure be able to get one, and he said yes, that it would be "no problem." I'm not sure how it works in India (maybe someone can clue me in), but after being here a month whenever I hear the words "no problem" a red flag immediately goes up, and I brace myself for a very big problem. (Like when Mr. Dhar tells me it will be no problem to fix my ceiling, which still has not been done.) Right now I am operating under the assumption that my visa will be good to go...
Later that night, Alizeh picked Charlie and I up and we headed to the American Club to meet her friend Misha (a different Misha than the one with Dengue fever from Cornell). He is a member and was able to sign all of us in as guests. This meant we got to eat pizza, nachos, buffalo wings and drink alcohol. It ended up being a really fun night, and makes me even more annoyed that our application is taking so long. I also ended up meeting a girl who's parents are from here, but who grew up in L.A. and was so excited when she found out I went to Michigan Law. She told me it was her dream school. (Don't worry my fellow Wolverines, I said only positive things about Michigan, but did caution her to think long and hard about law school itself.)
Because no blog entry would be complete without an extreme juxtaposition between my life as an American expat and the complete and utter poverty that fills Dhaka (noticing a trend?) on the way back the streets were filled with many beggars pounding on windows of the car. In particular the most gut-wrenching was a little boy who was pushing his very disabled mother in some sort of cart and both of them crying out for money.Thinking about it now honestly brings tears to my eyes.
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