Part 1: Small and Random Things I Observed
Junlin Yang
I went to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, for the first time this year. However, my actual experience was nothing like what I had originally anticipated.
Welcome to a blog-style article about my own experience in Dhaka! This is Part 1 of a series of my experiences in Bangladesh. Read other parts of this series here.
I originally came here for my Grameen Bank internship, and yes, I did learn a lot about microfinance, and you can read about those experiences in my other articles, but here are some small and… quite interesting things I observed here.
When I first landed at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, I observed many things that were different from airports in China and other places I’ve been to. The airport looked a lot less modern, a lot more like the inside of a normal building than what you’d expect an airport to look like. As expected, there weren’t any familiar shops in the building, only small local ones.
Right as we exited the airport, we saw a huge crowd of people gathered at the entrance, probably waiting for loved ones to come out. I even saw a woman holding flowers, looking at the door with eyes full of hope. All of them also collectively stared at me with curiosity. At the time, I felt a little scared and just walked quickly behind my mom.
When we got in our car, I saw a huge building with a beautifully decorated design. When we asked the driver what the building was, he said it was the new Terminal 3 that would be opening by the end of the year. I looked it up on Google, and it looked way more modern and much closer to a real international airport standard!
The roads leading to our hotel were really smooth. I noticed many buildings that looked run-down or very old in the darkness, since it was nighttime.
It had stopped raining, but the roads were obviously wet. The driver said it was supposed to be the rainy season all month, but the sewage and drainage systems were not very good, so many roads could fill up with water and floods could happen! Luckily, during my internship, it only rained 3 to 4 days and I didn’t have to walk in floodwater!
Some other things I saw on the road that surprised me included restaurants playing the World Cup, since this was during World Cup season, bakeries, and even boba tea shops too!
Near my hotel in the Gulshan area, I saw many tall buildings too, including their trade center! Gulshan is actually one of the most “city-like” and developed parts of the country. From the top of my hotel, it actually looked pretty impressive, but dense. I described the area to my friends as a small Shibuya!
Anyways, as we approached my hotel, we actually got approached by 5 men dressed in white robes knocking on our window. I was very scared at first and held tightly onto my mom, but our driver said not to worry about them since they were just asking for money and would soon go away. Soon after, I also saw a shoeless woman doing the same thing, but by herself on the busy road.
Moving on to the second day, it was officially the first day of my internship and I finally got to see Dhaka properly in the morning. When using Uber, I realized you could even order a motorcycle! Obviously we didn’t, but that was something I had never seen before. I noticed that many men on the street dyed their beards and hair orange! I later learned that some Muslim men use henna to dye their beards orange or reddish because of religious and cultural traditions, which was very interesting to me.
It was drizzling that day, and I saw a man wearing a COVID SUIT while biking!! Maybe it was his raincoat? Many people simply put a plastic bag on their head as protection from the rain…
Something else I learned about Bangladesh from a friend I made at the internship was that hijra people, a recognized third-gender community in Bangladesh, are relatively visible in society, although attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people more broadly can still be quite conservative. We saw many hijra people while in the car knocking on people’s windows!
Every single day during my internship, me and the other intern friends I had made only went to a very small building called “Sunny Square” to eat lunch, since they had KFC, Pizza Hut, and Domino’s! My food experience in these fast food chains was also very different from other countries.
Interestingly, the menus were very different. For example, KFC only had 2 types of burgers, both with fried chicken inside. To be honest, my stomach felt quite bad after eating there for only a week straight!
Instead of Uber Eats, they used Foodpanda there. Although I never got to order anything from Foodpanda, I always saw many guys wearing pink clothing riding bikes. The delivery guys didn’t even have motorcycles or mopeds!
One more interesting anecdote. Since it was the World Cup season, everyone in Bangladesh was hyped about it. There were so many football fans! Many people were wearing Argentina and Brazil team shirts, although they were knockoffs, and they were everywhere! We even saw more Argentina and Brazil flags on buildings all over Dhaka than Bangladesh flags! Even the little kids we saw all supported Messi!
Now something I really want to talk about is transportation in Dhaka, and I wrote an entire article just on my experience with transport, including rickshaws and CNGs. Read about that here in Part 2!
