We woke up early on Saturday morning to enjoy yet another meal at the BRAC center’s restaurant. I’m not entirely sure whether this has been mentioned to date but the staff at the Restaurant are indescribably courteous and nice and it is so refreshing to see them every morning. We then piled into our vans are set off for a tour around the foremost shopping areas in Dhaka.
We stopped at a conventional (by American standards) mall where Puspita took us to a DVD store selling unusually cheap DVDs. I was immensely impressed that they already had Iron Man on DVD considering its still in theatres in the States. All the films hovered around 80 taka (a little over $1 US) so everyone bought around 5. Galiba then recommended that we go to a more traditional Bangla shopping area with endless rows of stalls selling absolutely everything. We weaved through the market and one thing that really struck me was how segmented it was with jeans all clustered together, and all of the belt stalls in their own niche. This is something I also noticed when we visited the third tier of microfinance on Wednesday where all the cloth stores were next to one another. I wonder whether this is the result of legal restrictions, cultural customs or pure convenience. Anyway after touring the clothes we made our way to the local fish market. This was probably one of the most interesting stops to date. The vast majority of the fish in the market were being kept alive in small amounts of water and the catfish were absolutely terrifying. Scott was trying to get a photo of Rob standing next to the catfish and one of the men feigned throwing a live fish at Rob before catching it in a bowl and Rob jumped a good 2 feet. Adam also enjoyed being sprayed with fish blood as a man cleaned a live fish. I get the impression that Peta might be fairly cranky after reading this.
Later in the day we visited Aarong, BRAC’s profit making store. Aarong has an expansive collection of clothes, home-goods and accessories and Scott and Rob modeled the Lungi or more descriptively, the man skirt. I think all the products had added significance considering we saw the factories and the immense dexterity of the workers. We also ate a late lunch at the Aarong café and most of the group tried Tamarine juice, which is apparently fairly common in Bangladesh. After a lot of shopping we made our way back to the BRAC center for dinner and then back to the training center to conclude an amazing day.
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