Catching Up!

I’ve definitely fallen behind on the blogging. I originally hoped to post every day, at least until the days got too routine to do so, but it takes up a lot more time than I expected, and classes and homework assignments are getting longer every day. I’m not abandoning the goal of posting every day, but I am going to catch up by providing a summary of the last several days below.

Thursday, June 21:
Truly not much to say. I went to class until 1 p.m., and felt sick (dizzy/lightheaded) the entire time. It sounds like dehydration, but I don’t know how that’s possible because I drink SO MUCH water. I came home, slept ‘til 5 p.m., did some homework, ate some plain rice for dinner, did a little more homework, and went to bed.

Friday, June 22:
I did homework and studied for about three hours, then met up with Farina, my “native” conversation partner. She took me to the Liberation Museum, which is all about the 1971 Liberation War. Museum seems to be a loose term here, as it was more like a house with newspaper clippings tacked all over the walls. The newspaper clippings were not even in chronological order, which was kind of confusing. Farina’s father was a freedom fighter, though, as I had mentioned before, so I knew it was important to her to take me there. When I came home, I had about an hour to relax and get ready for a party at Jamal Ahmed’s house/studio. Jamal Ahmed is a fairly wealthy, fairly well known painter in Bangladesh, and was educated in Dallas, TX. He is also the guy who pulled the bottle of wine out of his pants at our program director’s party last week. His wife prepared a HUGE meal with a variety of different Bangladeshi dishes, and it was all excellent. He also had some musicians singing Bengali folk songs (which later digressed to a few random verses of Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Beatles). Our teachers were also at the party, and, not entirely surprisingly, I like them a whole lot more outside of the authoritarian setting of the classroom.


Saturday, June 23:
After a late night, I slept until 11 a.m.! Upon waking, I began to realize how much studying would be required for Sunday’s test, and felt sort of doomed from the start. I joined up with several other people for a trip to “Coffee World,” a very sterile (comfortingly so) bookstore coffee shop. We all ordered waffles and coffee (yum!), then got down to studying. We were there for six hours, and even then I didn’t know even half of the vocabulary that was fair game for the test. We came home for dinner, then returned to studying late into the night.

Sunday, June 24:
As I walked into the classroom, the teacher was neatly printing (in English) “Welcome to Hell” on the whiteboard. Nothing like a little pre-exam encouragement! The test was a 20 question nightmare. The first 10 questions listed English words for our conversion to Bangla. Sounds easy, right? Not when you had 150 vocab words to learn… the odds of remembering the Bangla word, then writing it correctly in Bangla were pretty slim. I left one blank, as I could only remember the first letter of the Bangla word, and took my best stab at the others. The last 10 questions showed Bangla conjuncts (such as the combined letter for b + d), and asked us to write out the letters that composed the conjunct. I knew a few, guessed at a few, and left the rest blank. It’s been a few years, but I can confidently say that I still don’t like tests!

Sunday night we hung out with some Bangladeshi guys in their 20’s whom we had met at Jamal Ahmed’s party. There are never girls to hang out with because they all have either curfews or husbands. We watched “Borat” together, and after the guys had left we nervously wondered whether they had been offended by the jokes made in the movie (particularly those about all Muslims being terrorists).

I apologize that this post has lacked the detail of my previous postings - but sometimes, you just need to economize!