Being a tourist in Dhaka...

A couple of weeks ago, one of the other volunteers, Rhodina, and I decided to get out and see some of the tourist sites in Dhaka.  There aren't many...tourism isn't really a big thing here, and the city is mostly just full of people...but we figured that we should try to get to at least a few of the places that the travel books suggest.

We decided to take a taxi to our first location, and paid way too much for it, but oh well (and really, too much was about $8 Canadian dollars for an hour long ride, so not that big a deal)!  We went to Lalbagh Fort, which is a fort built in the late 1700s.  We walked around, looked at some really old buildings...it was interesting.  Here are a couple of pictures...

We also discovered that Lalbagh Fort is a dating/courting location!  Bangladesh is a primarily Muslim country, and it is extremely unusual to see men and women together and showing any type of affection towards each other in public.  So we thought it was pretty funny to pay our admission fee and go into the fort, and find that it is full of couples all sitting close to each other, sometimes even touching or holding hands!!  A few of the women were even wearing burkas.  I took a picture...not a very good one, but you get the idea...

We were the only Western tourists at Lalbagh - everyone else was Bangladeshi.  Apparently, seeing Western tourists is a pretty interesting and unusual, cause every few minutes someone would come up to us and ask us to pose for a camera-phone picture.  Or maybe they just thought that a Canadian girl in a salwar kameez was interesting and unusual...  Either way, I thought it was really funny when a whole family came up to me, grouped around me, and started taking pictures!! Here's me in my salwar kameez...

After Lalbagh, we took a rickshaw to try to find the Armenian Church, another historic site.  The rickshaw puller had no idea where it was, even though he said he did, so we took a very circuitous route to get there, which involved stopping multiple times to ask directions, traveling up and down bumpy alley-like streets in Old Dhaka, asking for more directions...until we finally got there.  From outside the walls, the church was unimpressive, but inside it was pretty interesting!  This church was built in the late 1700s or early 1800s, so it has a long history.  Here are a few pictures...

Last stop of the day was at New Market, which is this huge market that sells pretty much anything and everything you might need...clothes, shoes, housewares, books, etc. etc. etc. By that time we were too tired to do any shopping, though, since shopping at this kind of market is pretty high pressure ("sister, sister, come look, very nice") and involves negotiating the price of items (to at least half, if not more, of the original price that they tell you...and even then that is still more than Bangladeshis pay!)

To get home, we planned to take a taxi, but couldn't find one.  So, bus it was...fortunately, we knew the name of our bus stop, and people were really helpful in making sure we bought the right bus ticket and got on the right bus.  One guy even came and checked to make sure that we would get off at the right place. The people here are overall really helpful, and I feel quite safe here.

I wish I could describe the craziness of traffic in this city, but I really don't think I could do it justice...and pictures don't do it justice either because they don't really show the chaos and noise that is rickshaws, cars, buses, trucks, and CNGs all trying to use and cross 4-lane highways with no clear traffic rules except for the biggest vehicle wins.  I try to take buses as much as possible for that reason, although they are an adventure in themselves...and I probably shouldn't have as much confidence in their size as I do.  The fortunate thing is that there is so much traffic that the buses typically don't get going very fast.

These are a few of my adventures getting around Dhaka city!  Next weekend I am hoping to take the train out of the city for a day or two...just to get away from the noise and busy-ness here and try to see a different side of Bangladesh.  So hopefully the rain co-operates!!

PS Facebook is still blocked by the government of Bangladesh...and it's too much bother to try to find a proxy server that works...so I continue in my Facebook-less state for a while!