The curse of Economics

Salaam,

Hope everyone is well inshaAllah,

Two weeks in i have now finally found myself a proper internet cafe (for anyone else who finds themselves in Sylhet, its in the Manrou shoping complex, 5th floor and is called Sylnet (clever name..)). And at 15p an hour its not a bad find. To be honest i was told about this place in the first few days i got here but never had the chance to come. Incidently as i was coming here i had to go past my local shopping centre from which i wrote the previous post, and was somewhat suprised to see half of it burnt down...there had been a fire earlier today and around 500k worth of damage was done-a LOT of money for Bangladesh. Something tells me the shopkeepers did not have insurance...

Anyway, i think i have finally finished visiting most of my close relatives, even though some of these "visits" consisted literally of dropping in for half an hour, having some tea and shooting off again. As some of you know, i haven't been to Bangladesh for a loooong time, so its pretty much the first time my extended family are seeing me so its been quite awkward for much of the time...often i've like im at thee zoo or something with lots of people just looking at me....All these visits have reaffirmed two things though- the complexity and the huge scale of bengali families and the Fact that some how or the other, i think every bengali in the world is related. For example i have found out that i am related to half a dozen people i have known all my life in Burnley through speaking to various people on my visits. One of my best "finds" though in terms of relations has been my grandad (my dads mums brother...).

This guy is the definition of "McDaddy". He's 86 years old despite having smoked 30 cigarettes per day and drinking tea and eating paan six times a day since he was around 12 (work that one out medics). He has not got one grey hair on his head, has all his teeth and refuses to use any form of transport and so walks the 5 mile round trip from his house to the local bazaar every day. To add to his "dont mess with me" factor, he spent eight years in jail for..lets not go there...but his sentence was quashed when new evidence turned up. The best thing about him though is the ridiculously long and sometimes fairly like stories he tells (which remind me of uncle Albert from Onl;y Fols and Horses). Whatever the topic, as soon as he says "lets me tell you something from the olden days" you'd better run and leave the room or else you could be stuck for hours. He has all these great bengali sayings too, whatever the context. One which i remeber is something like:

"If a cow swings it tale often, it will give good milk; if a piece of land is shallow towards the centre it will give good crops and if the mother is of good character, the daughter will be a good wife"

It sounds a lot better in Bengali, but that was the gist of it...


Anyway, what else? I went fishing the other day which was quite cool. We have this quite big fishery type thing, so we got some guys to bascially drag a net from one end to the other so we could see all the fish in it. As the net drew in closer and closer, all the fish started jumping into the air, some a good 6/7 foot high, which was quite a sight. At the end we kept a bout 5 fish to eat for the day.

Also on the same day some of me relatives were showing me around, and some how or the other they got this 7 year old boy to climb a 30ft tree and bring down some fruits for us...the 30ft is an estimate but it was a huuuuge tree, but the kid climbed it and came back down in under a minute.

Another quite big thing i've realised in my two weeks here (which is actually quite sad i think) is that im definately an economist? Why? Everywhere i go, all i think of is inefficiency, inefficiency, inefficiency. Lol. Seriously, whenever i go to the bazaar, i keep thinking "My god, of they did x,y,z they could be soo much more profitable..." And a lot of the people i've seen so far seem very laid back and not really wanting to do better than the hickeldy pickeldy "shop" they own. Anthother economics related thing i've realised is how little i know about economics...to keep it short, i failed to explain to my cousin the other day why the Bangladesh government could not just print more money and become rich...but im claiming it was my poor bengali rather than lack of economics knowledge which led to this.


I had better finish. I've been taking quite a lot of photos and video clips so inshaAllah will try and put some of them up soon.

The plan for the next couple of days is to go to Dhaka and then maybe Coxs Bazaar but now that i've found this place, their should be more frequent updates inshaAllah.

Salaam