Teaching has been occupying the vast majority of every waking minute of my day. I'm pretty happy with how my class has been going and the students have been great. There are only ~3 more weeks left of the semester!! Then a big push to grade final papers, projects and the final exam before some BEACH VACATION! (planning on some time in Malaysia and Singapore, so stay tuned.....)
This past week there was the "other Eid" or Eid-al-Adjha, which is the sacrificial holiday in honor of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his own son. There is literal sacrifice in the streets in the form of many many goats' and cows' throats being slit, the blood allowed to run out until it's dead (the halal method). This is more gory than you are even imagining - and don't forget about the smell! I will have another post on this topic with a few photos of this hopefully soon....
Because of the Eid holiday, we had 3 days (plus the weekend) of vacation, which was a great opportunity to catch up on some grading and sleeping! The other two days of school were cut short due to a Hartal. This is a hindi/urdu word for general strike with the threat of civil disobedience. Apparently, the opposition party's leader has been living in a large, posh government-funded estate for 40+ years (she was married to the former leader who was killed many years ago). The ruling party decided they had enough and tried to force her out of the residence because it was very expensive. The Hartal is basically a general strike which forces voluntarily shutdown of businesses, schools, etc. as a way of appealing to the masses. I had no idea any of this was happening and the night before our classes, we got an email saying everything was cancelled the next day and we should stay in our apartments to be safe. I didn't see anything going on in the streets, but apparently there were large groups of young men "roaming around looking for trouble" and you never know what they might do. Often, they target vehicles because they're a sign of wealth, but as far as I know it was relatively nonviolent and uneventful. The opposition leader did leave the residence, so I guess it was successful? It lead to another loss of a lecture for me (and I'm already behind!) and I was planning a quiz before the break, so I made them all come in the next morning to take the quiz anyway.
So that's pretty much the "news" from here - other than the weather change, which has been great. It cools down to mid-70s at night and only about 80-85 during the days with much less humidity. My feet ~almost~ felt cold on my tile floor this evening, so I did some jumping jacks to get the blood flowing and was fine.
Now, onto the couple photos I promised - a couple weeks ago I was leaving school in the evening and this GIANT BUS was parked in the driveway - it was a mobile library! It's at least as big as The Big Yellow Bus, and ~maybe~ even a slight bit bigger......if that's possible!
I had been wondering if there was such a thing as a library here and I guess this is it. It had quite a few books for its size and fans, lights, aisles, everything! All the books were in Bangla, but the Bangladeshi students were excited and I enjoyed the quick walk-through for curiosity sake:
This place is full of surprises!
Oh my! The Eid-al-Adjha sounds awful :(
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