There are of course pharmacies with fridges and stuff, but most of them look like this. And it was about 30+ degrees.
BANG-BANG! ladesh
Every day worth a post
Author Archives: ver
Coffee shop
Haha, here is the local coffee shop, but of course it doesn’t serve coffee, it serves cha — black tea with milk and A LOT of sugar
Usually some local snack is being made/sold in the same place. In this particular case it was singara — thin pastry-like dough with potatoes, lentis and spices (of course) deep fried!
Local street food
Main local street food is “puchka” or “fuchka”. If you are lucky, you can choose between two options — withough yoghurt and with it. I prefer the latter.
In the tasty crunchy shell you get a mixture of peas, lentils, potatoes (?) and spices. Very tasty. And the yoghurt is a little sweet..mmm
Trip to Savar
One day we decided to go and watch metal casting. And after researching the area a few other things got added to the list, so the furthest point this time was Shailan Mosque and this time google maps was about right, but again we had to leave at 6 am.
Thanks to wikipedia we learned about the mosque and it was our first destination
The person who is looking after this mosque offered us some mangos right off the tree!
We walked around the mosque a bit and found the local gym (nobody was working out though)
Our next stop — Dhamrai Roth, a hindu wooden kind of temple that gets moved around the town once a year
While waiting for the metal casting we were walking around the city visiting various temples (majority of the population in this particular area are hindu). We randomly found a very nice man who was looking after one of the temples and showed us the others in the neighbourhood. In one of those temples the reaction to me saying that I am Russian was “Russia is good, Russia is India’s friend”
The metal casting happened right in front of the Roth. The family that runs this workshop has been doing it for over 500 years. The technique is called “lost wax” and the idea is that at first a wax figure is made, then it is covered with a few layers of clay and afterwards is being put in the something like an over when wax runs away and the metal is poured in the forms instead. The process of metal casting is the most interesting one and it was very very hot and very very dangerous. The metal looks beautiful though — acid orange and green.
These were the pieces that have been sitting there for a whle already waiting for us
But this is not over — because it comes out with many defects, a lot of work is needed to fix it and make it perfect. At that moment they have been working on a big statue for one of the temples (the base was casted), and the head was getting last touches. In italic because it takes months to make it look shiny.
There is a shop by this workshop and once can see some examples of their work
The statue like the one above takes about 3-4 months.
And a must-have picture with the family that runs this workshop
They have a very nice house
The next stop — Natinal Memorial. I mentioned the war of 1971 many times already. Here it is like the 2nd World War in Europe, but for one country. It took them 16 years though to build this place, it looks a lot like many other concrete memorials I have seen in my life, but one should never tell this to the locals, for them it is the best memorial ever. Because the locals like to pose (A LOT), we decided to blend in (but we definitely suck)
Speaking of posing — many people pose with the bushes. I showed some examples before, but it is super funny — even when there is a monument, a Bush is thing to take a picture with. So we have been working hard on blending in even more
And in the end — a selfie with Mr. Bush!
Tasty discoveries
One of my food discoveries in Bangladesh is the beal fruit, or wood apple.
It has an interesting texture of pumpkin/mashed potato, quite sweet, but the best part is the smell — sometimes it smells like flowers and sometimes like men’s cologne
Toilet paper
Here is a question. Do you know how many sections does your toilet paper roll have? I know how many mine does!
In Bangladesh using toilet paper is not a very common thing, as you might have notice from the picture of the toilet I showed before. So it is mostly for tourists/expats and a little fraction of the locals.
It is being sold like this
And each roll is wrapped in its own plastic bag with detailed information about a numer of sheets! (and notice that it is hygienic!)
Behind bars
All windows in Dhaka have bars. I live on the 8th floor, here is my window
Weekend
Working week here is Mon-Thu and weekend is Fri-Sat, so I am probably somewhere outside Dhaka right now, but here is my buddy!
Indian restaurant Sajna
As I am not the biggest spicy food fan, the idea of going to the Indian restaurant was pretty new to me. Sajna should have been one of the two best Indian restaurants in Dhaka and we decided to give it a try.
Food was average (only one type of bread was very nice), nothing was spicy (or maybe I managed to adjust a bit in the last two months). But! Two interesting things worth mentioning. First, they had about 40 kinds of dosa
We had one of the special ones.
And look what salad they had!
Olivie salad is my favourite salad and I had many variations of it, but this with dried fruits and without any kind of meat is definitely a winner (and no, I didn’t order it)!
Ras Malai
There was a story about the local sweets before, but here is another one. In Comilla there is supposed to be the best rasmalai in Bangladesh, but in the place where we tried it one of us found an ant o_O But! In Tangail we were brought to a place with very and very tasty rasmalai. Here
Good rasmalai is made and sold in the clay bowls (on the picture the is only sweet yoghurt left, the last bowl of rasmalai is being packed)
You get everything in a box and a bowl
And at home can enjoy this very very sweet mixture of sugar-milk-flour in cream. Very sweet.
