Although I spent much longer in Dhaka than I would normally spend in a city, most of that time was in the comparitively upmarket areas, and until Friday I hadn't really got around to exploring anywhere else in the city. Friday was the last chance to have a look around, so I went down to the Old City which is by the river, quite a long way south of Gulshan.
You can take a little boat onto the river and I went across to the dockyard where they build and repair ships. Health and Safety being unheard of here, you can just wander around the dockyard, you can even go onto the boats that are being built and see what's happening. The yard was full of men hammering pieces of metal. We wandered through the yard into a more residential street, very dark and narrow and full of curious kids. Although there are 16 million people in Dhaka, it occupies a much smaller area than London so people are really crammed in together and the streets are constantly teeming with people. They're very smiley and inevitably say "Hellooo!" when they see a foreigner, and they LOVE having their photo taken, though they'll often put on a very serious face as soon as they start posing for a picture.
The Old City is a warren of narrow streets lined with shops selling everything from electronics to Hindu statues and incense to tea and curry. Friday is the holy day so it's the quietest day to go; lots of men were going to the mosques (Women can't go to mosques here, they have to pray at home) which were all blaring out sermons and readings of the Koran. Although it's a poor area, there are very few beggars down in the Old Town, and the overall feeling I got was of a intense, busy, buying and selling and eating.
That evening, Amy, Dave and I went out for dinner in Gulshan. We went to a Thai restaurant decorated with water cascading down sheets of glass, goldfish in wall-mounted tanks. The food was pretty authentic and cost per dish about a day's wages for a shipbuilder working on the docks. I think that's one of the things that you really notcie in Dhaka; the vast gulf between the people around here driving their imported BMWs and Range Rovers and the millions of ordinary Bangladeshis working on the docks, or in the textile industry, or selling individual cigarettes, or walking up the middle of a busy road selling popcorn or newspapers. As a foreigner you really exist in the top strata of society more so than in any other place I've ever been to, and you can spend sums of money in an afternoon that some people won't earn in a month.
