Two Strikes and I'm Out...of My Mind

Let me start this blog with a bit of loving travel advice from my father. This is cut and pasted from an email he sent today:


PS: If you fly Bangkok-Cal , be prepared like a Ultimate Road Warrior . Those "Day-Trippers" from Calcutta and back are total hooligans that you have to cope with (especially on Indian Airlines route)


I love how Dad squeezed the words “road warrior” and “hooligans” into the same email. When are we gonna start writing that book about Mom and Dad, Sonya???

Anyway, regarding the title of the email, the Awami League has called a second three-day continuous strike. I didn’t realize it earlier, but they mean business. It’s been determined unsafe for us to go pretty much anywhere fun or do/buy anything since all the stores are closed. It really is the worst. My trip to the village for this week was cancelled due to rioting in the area we were to travel to. To top it off, in a huge moment of embarrassment for Bangladesh the SAARC summit (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation)—which was supposed to be held in Dhaka—has been cancelled. The government has been preparing for this for years, building new roads and planting skinny seedlings in the partitions of the highways (the poor plants look like they’re choking to death from the pollution). Also, if you haven’t heard, the king of Nepal just liquidated the government and took over the country, leaving it ripe for a Maoist takeover. There go our vacation plans for trekking in Kathmandu. Never a dull moment in South Asia.

On the bright side, John and I got to do some tourism yesterday. We went back into old Dhaka and took a little wooden boat into the Buriganga river. John had his new Apple laptop with him and I was paranoid it would fall into the filthy water. We went down “Hindu street,” and saw the traditional artisans of one of Dhaka’s oldest and most vibrant communities, and we stopped by the looming pink Armenian church, but it was closed. It then took us almost two hours to get home due to rickshaw traffic jams. We sat in one ‘shaw’ (as we like to call them these days) for almost an hour and moved about 100 meters. We learned never to go out the night before a strike. Everyone’s trying to get their groceries and errands done.

I leave you with that. Will be posting more since I have so much free time these days. One more strike, and I’m out…seriously, I will get the Hell out of Dhaka…