Bangladeshi Parliament

Yesterday (Tuesday) we got to visit the Bangladeshi National Assembly building and witness a session of Parliament. Of course, there were no cameras allowed, but the wonders of the internet allowed me to pirate other people's images for you! It was a truly amazing and unexpected building! I was expecting some sort of Mughal/british era brick building, but since Bangladesh didn't attain autonomy until 1971, it's very modern. A very famous architect Louis Kahn designed it--I won't write too much about him, mainly because I don't know anything, but he's an American architect. You can read about him here.
Here are few images of the outside of the building--it's almost completely surrounded by water, which is very fitting because Bangladesh is a land of endless water:
The inside of the building was also great--lots of beautiful natural light and houseplants lining every hallway. All the surfaces are bare gray concrete which gives it an interesting feel of being unfinished (something I feel about a lot of this country also)
Here's one image I'm really glad I found--I was standing in this same location taking in this view and wishing I had a camera!
The diagonal sections are stairways, so you can see the immense size of the openings.
The inside of the actual assembly wasn't too exciting--your typical government assembly setup:

This was pretty much the view we had, too! We only sat for about 20 minutes, as all the proceedings were in Bangla (of course--they are VERY proud of their language and actually fought a war over it--hopefully I can write more about that at a later date). The topic of the day was the horrific traffic situation in Dhaka. They were proposing flyovers so people could cross major streets safely, a subway system is being investigated based on some european cities and Delhi and also widening the freeways for more lanes.

Yesterday morning we also visited the National Museum (no cameras allowed) so I don't have any photos, but it was pretty interesting. We only had an hour and I could have spent all day there, so I hope to come back and visit again. There was some ratty old taxidermied animals native to this area, some plastic fruits and vegetables and fake plants (still interesting to me because there were latin names attached), but there was a lot of interesting artifacts from the Hill tribes, Hindu art, some modern Bengali art and a very extensive modern history display that covered the two major wars (1952 and 1971) and also the genocide afterwards. We were running out of time and had to get to parliament on time, so we literally only had time to walk quickly through, so I didn't catch much. But now I know it's there and can return (maybe if/when someone comes to visit?!?....)