Some "recent" random happenings in Chittagong

This is a random grouping of photos I uploaded months ago and am finally getting around to adding some text and posting. It's an assortment of images that I hope will give you a little more feel for daily life here.

The first photo is some amazing flowers that signal the start of the rainy season here. I took the photo in mid-June during the few days I was in Bangladesh between my south Asian travels and US travels. They are called "kadam" or monsoon flower. They have a most amazing, heady, perfume-y scent and are huge--you can see my wrist in the lower portion of the photo holding the bunch of flowers.


This next image is of a very common practice here. The electrical outlets are endlessly frustrating--there are three main varieties: two-prong round holes (like most of Asia & Europe), three-prong square shaped holes , and three-prong round holes. Inevitably, the plug you want to insert into them doesn't match the holes available. To get around that, a lot of locals simply insert bare wires into the holes and run machinery from that.
It seems horribly dangerous and yet it seems to work.....
The next two images are a very common sight everywhere--rickety bamboo supporting new construction. These photos are taken from the patio at my apartment--the first is more of a zoomed-in photo - if you look closely you can see a worker bent over on the roof and a couple others on the lower level. The second photo is a zoomed out image of the same building to give some scale.

This next photo is of a most amazing juice smoothie I enjoyed one day during lunch: pineapple-cilantro. YUM!
And these next two are of the key-maker who came to make a copy of my apartment key. I wanted to have another copy to give a friend over the summer while I was gone and also to my cleaning woman so she could keep my place relatively clean over the hot, humid summer months. The key-maker used my original to find a rough approximation amongst his collection of skeleton keys, then hand-filed each tooth with a metal file, checked it in my door, filed again, checked in my lock, and repeated this process MANY times until it was functional. All for the low, low price of 200 taka for two keys (less than $3.00). I gave him 250 taka ($3.40) because based on his clothing and lack of shoes I could tell he was very poor and he came to my house to perform the service which took around 45 minutes.
Here he is matching his key to the original.

And finally, a not-so-great photo of a very beautiful tree that bloomed all over the city in the spring season. It's in the fabaceae family (same as peas and beans) and I really enjoyed seeing the beautiful colors and green foliage amongst the dirt and noise and urban mess.