5/26/14 Day 03

Every day we buy our lunch in the university cafeteria. They offer Bangali food and also fried chicken. I generally get their vegetable and egg rice along with a sweet. Their selection of sweets is quite odd. They’re not traditional, more like bastardizations of western sweets. I’ve had some sort of caramelized peanut cake, a custard tart, and a roll spread with vanilla whipped cream, maybe? We also get coke in glass bottles that say Coca Cola in Bangla on the side. Today we sat by a girl and actually had a little conversation with her in a mix of English and Bangla. We had plans to have dinner at the house of a woman who helped translate our research documents. Her house was near language school so the plan was for Emily and me to stay at the school for several hours after class until Dr. Shenk came. We waited and waited until 6 when the office got a call from Dr. Shenk who had fallen asleep and slept through multiple alarms. We got a rickshaw to go back to the apartment. After 20 minutes, it became clear that our driver had no idea where he was going. We had been fairly clear in asking him if he knew where our place was. He had said yes. He stopped to ask someone and then changed his direction. 15 minutes later we were still nowhere near our place and he stopped to ask someone else. He turned us into these narrow alleys full of people and shops. While it was fun to see, it was utterly humiliating being two white girls on a rickshaw in a place that didn’t quite fit a rickshaw (though we saw a few others). After 45 minutes of riding on this rickshaw, he pulled over to a group of rickshaws to ask for directions AGAIN. Finally another rickshaw driver gestured that he knew it and we got into his instead. We paid our driver the fair he would have gotten had we reached our apartment and he angrily stuck out his hand for more. By this time I was MAD, so we just left. The new rickshaw took us straight home and it turns out we were VERY far away. It took us an hour to get home. It was quite the experience.

My biggest lunch so far at school

The vegetable fried rice that is SO good!