YouTube videos of Bangladesh

Instead of uploading photos and writing about my experiences, I found a few Youtube videos of typical street scenes/life in Bangladesh. Note that they're cropped a bit so if you want to see the whole frames, you can go to the youtube link at the top of each video screen. This is my first time embedding video into the blog (can't believe I never thought of it before!) and I don't have the time to figure out how to avoid this from happening.

The first is a very sad video some of our students at AUW made a couple of years ago for a school project on gender equality issues. I never saw it before today.....I promise the rest of them aren't this depressing.



The next is a video of driving on the Chittagong-Dhaka 'highway'. It is a two-way road, as you will see from the vehicles traveling in both directions, but it's barely as wide as a country road in the US and fits HUGE trucks, buses, cars, CNGs (Compressed Natural Gas = the small, green, 3-wheeled cages) and sometimes rickshaws, too. It's WAY scarier in person than this video makes it look.



The next is just a video out a car window of the streets of Chittagong - just your average daily street life I live/experience every day. I wish you could get the "real" experience of the smells (exhaust, dust, garbage) and the crazy noise of the traffic, too! The real 'meat' of the video doesn't start until around 0:43, and the first part with the river and boats is near the airport on your way into town. The real street scenes that I experience in the city every day starts around 1:40. The first images there of large groups of men must have been filmed on Friday during prayer time outside a mosque. I like this video, not because it's particularly informative to an outsider, but because it captures a lot of things that are hard to describe or get on film - the beautiful pinkish light at sunset (~3:10), horribly crippled/disabled beggars--a painful daily sight (3:19), rickshaw pullers (ubiquitous) and the general disorganization of the traffic, buildings and city.



And finally a short video of the train in Dhaka....quick story that's related:
I've taken the train from Chittagong to Dhaka twice before and had a very nice experience. There's a 7am "express" train that is actually fairly quick, left exactly on time, nice accommodations (for Bangladesh--most Americans probably would be appalled) and the seating has been relatively organized and easy (if you can read Bangla letters to find the correct car). And it's only $6! I was even quite proud of myself for being able to use the squat toilet on the moving train--which incidentally is just a hole in the floor that empties straight onto the tracks.....
So, a few months back I was in Dhaka and was going to take the train the opposite direction to Chittagong. It was superhot (~95-100F or 35-40C), there were insane amounts of people on the platform and they just kept arriving. I was of course the only foreigner in sight so everyone was staring--at times even crowding around in a circle to gape at me while I patiently waited for the train and tried to look nonchalant, there was a garbage woman that kept sweeping this huge pile of garbage/debris/dust around me in a big disgusting cloud no matter where I moved, and the flies were swarming. The sweat was dripping down my back, and the train was later...and later...and later....The train station is a 5-minute rickshaw ride to the airport so I decided that if it didn't arrive by one hour and fifteen minutes after it's scheduled time, I was going to the airport and taking the easy way home (~$40-$60 depending). Just as I was getting ready to leave for the airport, the train pulls into the station looking (almost but not quite) as packed as the one in this video. I saw my lettered car and it was one of the very first ones on the train, so by the time the train stopped, it was WAAAAYYY far up the platform. Considering the number of people already on the train and the crowds of people I was going to have to fight through to get all the way up the platform to my car, and my general crankiness from the horrible experience already, I turned around and ran to the airport. I felt wussy; like I couldn't handle a little local "realness" but it was just too much for me that day and the easy route home was only five minutes and $50 away.....having lots of money compared to the locals certainly has advantages at times!