Where were we?

The blogger was down ALL day yesterday, and I'm not sure what I have and have not shared, but a few nights ago I went on a walk around the National Assembly (Parliament building) and the sidewalks were full of people, chatting, walking, playing and hawking. It was the night version in a low key way of the daily hubbub, a word I've always wanted to use legitimately, and THIS is the city that smacks of "hubbub"!

When we had dinner, Saad's sister, a lawyer, and her husband came, and even later, maybe after 9 or 9:30, his brother arrived. Here is Saad's mom, Shamim, as we were chatting after dinner

In the morning when we leave the house, these women are sitting on the sidewalk, chatting, making baskets or other things, and they stay until school is over because the traffic is so bad that going back home after dropping their children off for school would take such a long time that they just stay!

Because I'm doing some investigation into the use of the Bangla language - Bangladesh means land of Bangla, which is their language - I am photographing signs that give me pause, and I noticed this No Parking sign at the end of a driveway. The sign has no Bangla on it, which assumes that the drivers will know English, but the bizarre thing is that the "drivers" in this household are Bengalis who do not speak English! The man who has been driving me all over the place speaks a little English, but we mostly nod and laugh, thinking we understand each other; one day recently he asked it I would like to see where his mother-in-law lived, and I was totally game. We went into a teeny, short door in the side of a fence, walked through a "courtyard" the size of a bathroom, down a line of rooms, all with flip flops outside the doors, and into one room to say hello to his brother-in-law who seemed just to be arising from bed, which took up most of the room, giving maybe three feet of floor space on one side, the other jammed against the wall. This is the family house. Note that things are stacked and folded neatly, there is a television, things are hung up, but this is the family home. When we went back out into the courtyard, the woman who had been squatting in a dark room, peeling and cutting a vegetable asked if we would like tea. They brought one chair and a small table, urged me to sit, brought the sticky, sweet conconction, and one woman began to fan me. I yearned to get her to stop, but I knew that it would be miscontrued; this is what they do for a guest. I took photos, we laughed when I struggled to find a Bangla word for "delicious," and they all finally just said, "very good," which settled the whole matter, and we all tumbled into laughter.

When we returned to the house, the ladies were still sitting in wait for their children, and when they invited me to sit down, I did, discovering then that each of them had wares to sell; I bought some junky earrings in the interest of international relations, and we became friends.