Yoga, pinky toe and sarcasm.

This place couldn't be a more perfect setting to try out some meditation and yoga. The ocean, crashing against the rocks. The choir of birds serenading (or the cacophony of birds screeching..take your pick). The perfectly temperate weather. The zillions of trees shrouding you away from the rest of the world, except, of course, for the window to the ocean. Then there's Strider - the resort dog that comes to every yoga class and stretches out on a yoga mat while you get your downward dog on. And the food here is so healthy and delicious. Even if it wasn't - the fact that my yoga teachers are usually around when I'm eating is enough to make me pick the muesli and yogurt over the pancakes (and even those are stuffed with bananas, yogurt, dates and palm sugar syrup). Except I didn't care who was watching when I had coconut & palm sugar crepes with ice cream for dessert.

So - to fill you in, I'm spending my first week in Sri Lanka at a yoga retreat, at the southern tip of the island. Every day, it's a 6:30 hour-long meditation session followed by a 1.5-2hr yoga class. Then, a bit of delicious breakfast. A leisurely walk on the beach. Read a bit. Grab a light lunch. Read. Take a nap. Go for a dip (ocean or pool, your choice). Then go for another 1.5-2hr yoga session. Write. Eat dinner. Fiddle around with a stray guitar. Read. Ward of mosquitoes. Sleep. Repeat.

It's kind of ridiculous to be spending all this time and energy on just me. Particularly when you've just spent the summer seeing extreme poverty on a daily basis, and tried, in a very small way, to put your two hands into helping mitigate the affects of it. Yea, no - it is ridiculous - I recognize it. Lavishing so much time, energy and money on myself. So, I'm acknowledging it, and recognizing that I am so incredibly blessed to have the privilege of - even having the option - to invest in something that I think is important for my wellbeing. And the abundance of papayas is just an added bonus.

So far, I'm doing okay with this whole mind, body, spirituality thing. I'm really trying to keep an open mind about this, and trying to go beyond the physicality that is yoga. I mean, sure, during meditation exercises when my instructor tells me to breathe into every part of my body and awaken my cells, in my head I'm saying "hellllooooooooo! How's it going mr. pinky toe? Helloooo ms kidney, looking fine this AM!". I know, I'm a dork even inside my head. And you thought it was just for show.

But overall, even through all the mushy squishy 'feel like water, move your body with the flow of your breath, use your inner eye like a torchlight in your body'…I sort of get it. I doubt that I am fully realizing the exercises my yoga teachers are imparting on me just yet, but at the end of the class, and each day, I feel more centered. I feel more content. I feel more connected and aware of my body. I feel like there's just a bit more of me that I understand and like. I definitley feel more trippy and spacey after each class. As my wonderful yoga teacher said when I told her this, in her lilting, hypnotic voice…"yea..just go with it".

Don't worry people - my sarcasm inner eye is still intact and functioning. And it's looking right at you.

Dip in Dhaka

The week that I left Porto, after a wonderful six-month experience, I remember it rained trucks full of buckets. A friend told me jokingly that the city was crying because I was leaving. But I had such an extraordinary time there - growing, making new friends, learning about myself, flexing my strength in discovering things on my own - that I wanted to believe that maybe, just maybe, the city would miss me just a smidge. Years later, I don't want to go back for a visit, because the city has such wonderful memories for me, and I don't want to ruin them with older and perhaps less romantic eyes.

 

This past week in Dhaka - the last few days of my 2.5 month stint in B'desh - it's just been a constant torrential deluge...but I know this city is not crying for me. Dhaka is an intriguing city. It's not that it's a hard city like New York or Delhi. Nor is it a warm city like Vancouver or Cape Town. The Lonely Planet describes Dhaka as a "giant whirlpool that sucks in anything and anyone foolish enough to come within its furious grasp". But I don't think it's that either. Dhaka is a city with a big hearty, betel-paan stained smile. If you can look past the bad dental work, you can plainly see that it's a beaming, genuine smile. It might be laughing at you, or with you, or a bit of both, but at least it's heartfelt. And for a city that has been fighting an uphill battle against poverty, over population and climate change for decades, you got to have respect for the resilience of that smile.

 

So, alas, Dhaka isn't crying for me…it's just giving itself a good rinse in preparation for the next migrant that might dip her toe in the waters.

 

How to get out of Dhaka

Step 1: Flag down a CNG, bargain, and cross your fingers that they understood that you want to go to the airport train station, not airport. At 6am on a Friday morning, you might have a to wait a while.

Step 2: Arrive at the airport train station, and wait eagerly in the area you think your cart will be. Surely this will be incorrect. Politely ignore the man who asks for money repeatedly but in such a comical fashion that you suspect he is on repeat mode more for his amusement than for the money.

Step 3: When a train pulls in around the time your train is supposed to leave, and the announcer calls out the name of your train and destination you are hoping to go to, assume that the train that just pulled in (the only one in the station) is in fact the right train for you. This is a false assumption.

Step 4: Because people told you that the train would only stay at the station for a few minutes, jump onto the first cart you see, and ask people to help direct you to your seat.

Step 5: Listen to the 4-6 people you show your ticket to, and tell you that you have to keep moving a few more carts up to get to your seat. Bash people with your big backpack as you attempt to squeeze past the mash of people filled in the train carts.

Step 6: 3 or 4 carts down, show your ticket to a couple more people and then listen to their advice when they say, no, your seats are a couple carts back down the other way - where you just came from.

Step 7: Show your ticket again to someone on the train, after when you've retraced your steps a few carts down (and re-pissed off the people you squeezed past again). Bear in mind that at this point the train has already been on the move for the past 10 minutes. Process the next few words a kind stranger tells you when he looks at your ticket. "You're on the wrong train".

Step 8: Ask a few other kind strangers if in fact you are on the wrong train, and surrender to your tourist badge of shame. Kind strangers explain that the next stop is not for another 2 hours, and that you'll have to then catch a train back to Dhaka and then maybe from there, you can catch another train to your destination.

Step 9: Politely answer questions from kind strangers (all this is Bangla of course), particularly when 2 men offer you their seats. I am from Canada, she is from USA. Yes, my parents are originally from Kolkata. Yes, I do look Bangladeshi. Yes, West and East Bengal was all one region at one point. Yes, I understand Bangla a bit, but I'm not good at speaking it. No, she is not Chinese. Her family is originally from Korea. You want my number?

Step 10: Hark! 10 minutes later the train starts to slow down. One kind stranger shouts to the people on the other train and you find out that the other train is on its way to Dhaka. Kind stranger tells you that the train will only stop for a few moments, and to quickly jump off and jump on to the train going in the opposite direction.

Step 11: Like Indiana Jones, gracefully dismount from your train, ask the guys on the other train to confirm its destination is Dhaka, and squeeze yourself in to the other train. Repeat Step 9.

Step 12: Once back in Dhaka, take a rickshaw to the nearest bus ticket counters, track down a carrier that has room for you. As luck would have it, the third one has seats available and it's a luxury bus line.

Step 13: 14hours later, arrive at your destination. Reward yourself with mango juice and a paratha (or soup if you're Miji).

*My next post will have stories of our lovely visit to the Hill Tracts and visits with some of the Indigenous groups in Bangladesh - one of the highlights for my time here in B'desh for sure. Stay tuned! Oh, and I promise to include photos!

Fear factor, comic genius, cats, and other related topics

It's amazing how dull my internal panic button has become here. I know my mom will read this and get mad at me and say I should be more cautious - and then my dad will tell me to stop using rickshaws and wear a hardhat at all times, but the fact of the matter is that you have to numb your fear senses to be able to circumnavigate this city. Traffic lights, for example, are an endangered technology, and I'm not sure if there is a 'right of way'. I think the only "right" belongs to the biggest vehicle on the road. And this is no different than most megacities in the global south. When you turn on to a major road for example, the rickshaw driver doesn't really slow down, but just plows through and stares down the oncoming vehicle. And rings his bell. Yes, because that's how you get the SUV heading straight at you to slow down. If riding at night, the only vehicles on the road with headlights are motorized vehicles, but remember, there are a whole lot of un-motorized, passenger-carrying contraptions out on the road (namely, the one I'm riding on). I'm banking on the fact that the bigger vehicle that's headed toward me has lights, so they can see me. Good logic right? And vehicles that back-up on a major road, they may or may not check to see if they might run over a pedestrian or oncoming rickshaw. It's just assumed that everyone is alert and will give way if they have to.

And so, when my rickshaw makes a quick turn onto oncoming traffic, I no longer take in a sharp breath and clutch my seat. When a car makes a quick turn into the path I'm walking along, I don't scream in shock. So although I numb my knee jerk reaction to near-misses, I certainly have amped up my sense to dodge, and when appropriate, shout at the oncoming swerving car to slow down a touch. I have climbed over rickshaw wheels as necessary and smacked a CNG or two. Constant vigilance people. (And yes, I finally finished re-reading Harry Potter. I'm so ready for the last movie).

There is this one particular road in this one particular neighbourhood (on the way to Niketon off of Mohakali…) - it has the most remarkably porous path. No, porous doesn't do it justice - you'd think you were traversing the moon's surface. But on a rickshaw, and with a very acute awareness of gravity. I am convinced every time I'm on that road, particularly after an afternoon deluge, that my rickshaw will in fact, topple over or throw me out at the point where 2 out of the 3 wheels are launched mid-air at 45 degree converse angles. It hasn't happened yet, but I've got another 2-3 weeks here.

So, I know this blog post is not particularly well-thought out, but perhaps entertaining, with shades of snarky sarcasm. Interestingly, a friend just sent me an email: "wow. no sarcasm in that e-mail at all...you feeling ok?". And that's the thing - sarcasm does not translate well here, so I've had to really keep it on the down low. Or even my sparkling wit. The other day, I was taking photos of a friend's football/soccer team - all B-deshis+ an American. For the team photo, instead of saying to the guys, "1, 2, 3…cheese!" I said: "1, 2, 3…paneer!!". Get it? Get it? I got it. They did not, in fact, get it.

My comic genius is stifled.

But I'm not complaining. I must say, Dhaka has grown on me. There are little gold nuggets I'm discovering in the city and its people. And the many worlds that are smashed up together in this city. So allow me to go on one last tangential path. One of my favourite Margaret Atwood novels is Cat's Eye, mostly because of her prologue (and because it's not really about cats..):

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

The many worlds that live in parallel or on top of each other are amplified in a city like Dhaka. My Dhaka is so very different from the Dhaka of a Program Officer from a large international NGO, or my rickshaw driver, or the middle/upper-class young Bangladeshi, or the woman who lives in the neighbouring slum. And in a city where everyone and everything is so densely packed, it's easy to put on blinders to the world that is brushing past your shoulders. But on occasion (if I may be so bold to borrow Ms Atwood's beautiful analogy of time) the different worlds bubble up and if you're lucky or if you choose to take off your blinders, you can catch a glimpse of another world.