First impressions

Wow, what a world of difference between backpacking around and staying in grubby $4 guesthouses and $100 hotels. I'm set up in the Beverly Hills area of Bangladesh around the embassies, so my first impressions of Bangladesh are probably waaaay biased.

I had my laundry done in the hotel, and I'm still in awe how they came back.

I have to snicker a little. Yep, these are the same exact clothes that spent the past 4 months in India being beaten and washed in the river with the elephants, oxen, and people bathing. They actually bagged and sealed my socks and boxers. Quality!

I really love all the exotic fruit in semi-tropical/tropical environments. All the great stuff you can't get at home. I bought a genuine Bangladeshi apple, but then I looked closer... Dang it!


One of the favorite things I love to do is to take roadside photographs. What I mean by that is that I'll just randomly take photos of street life while passing by in a rickshaw. Most of the time I just get blurry photos of asphalt, but every now and then I get some interesting shots.



Someone told me once before, never to ride in buses with lots of dents 'cause it's likely they'll put a few more in them. If that's the case, looks like I'll be hiring a car in Bangladesh!



Doesn't matter where in the world you are, kids love videogames.


I'm not sure what the deal is with fried chicken, but this city has more rip-offs of KFCs than anyplace else in the world.



There's this park near the embassies that joggers like to go to. They actually have an instruction and rules board posted, and huge arrows since joggers are only supposed to go in one direction. Cracked me up. Found the 50 male assistants and camera crew to one glamorous Bangladeshi actress equally funny too. Especially when all the guys were giving me the thumbs up sign.


This photo of a beggar and a street dog is actually from India, but I thought I'd throw it in here anyways.

That's one of the odd things about Bangladesh so far, no stray animals. Haven't seen any cats, dogs, goats, cows, sheep, chickens, rats lately. I kinda miss them.

This guy on the left was showing off his nifty MP3 player to me.

He insisted that I walk around for a bit listening to his tunes. And what did he have playing? Frickin' Celine Dion singing the Titanic love theme. Damn! I didn't want to offend him, so I just forced a grin and discretely hit the forward button, and what came on next? Richard Marx's crappy lovesong from the early 90's. Double damn! So far, that's one thing I really dislike about Bangladesh, they love their muzak. For those of you who don't know what muzak is, basically you take any crappy love song from the past 20 years...

... have it being completely played on an electronic keyboard synthesizer

(I always have a repulsive visual of it being Yanni for some odd reason), and there you have it, muzak.

Airport delays

Well, I didn't get too far on my trip to Bangladesh. It's amazing how a little hour and a half delay throws a complete monkey wrench into travel itenaries. Unfortunately, I missed my connecting flight and had to spend a day in Newark, New Jersey (woo-hoo!) and another extra day in New Delhi (souvenir shopping before I even finish my trip). That means I had a ton of time to sit around in the airport and be bored...

Y'know, one of the things I don't understand is all the nudie magazines at airport newstands. Honestly, who buys them? And who "reads them for the articles" on the airplane? How creepy would it be to be sitting next to they guy who busts out one of these magazines from his carry-on lugage? What do they do, excuse themselves and go sit around the tiny bathroom?


Anyways, I was walking around the Newark airport looking for my last American meal that I could find. I settled on terriyaki chicken, since I won't be eating anything remotely close to it anytime soon, and an A&W rootbeer shake. Woo-hoo! Gotta pack on those calories before switching to a Bangladesh diet.

And we're off!

After 8 days of training in Atlanta, STOP polio team 22 is all ready to go! We've been sent to all four corners of the world, to hunt down the last reservoirs of polio and eradicate it through immunizations. For people in public health, it doesn't get much better than this. Polio is about to join smallpox as the only disease to be wiped from existence.

STOP team 22-


Most of the team are from Africa, and have had years of experience in immunizations or have done STOP before. It's always a good sign when people want to volunteer for another STOP campaign! Like myself, some are not doctors or clinicians, why should they have all the fun and credit, hah!

Training was very comprehensive, some sessions were, umm... interesting. We had a UN security coordinator, a Belgium, talk to us about issues while in the field. "Jean-claude" gave an interesting briefing, until he starting diagramming ambushes on UN vehicles and giving tips on how to make them more effective by landmining the area where passengers were likely to run to. Yep, always a good thing to scare the hell out of people before they go abroad. Truthfully, the most dangerous thing abroad is not getting shot at (you probably have a greater chance of getting shot by driving through Oakland), kidnapped, or even getting some exotic diseases. It's being in a car accident.

We also had the privilege of sitting through a training session on counter-intelligence and espionage! The CDC is a bit more cautious now, understandbly with what some of the scientists are working on. He even told a story about how the Russian embassy tried to use an attractive waitress to compromise him. Personally, if an attractive Russian waitress tried to seduce me, I'd probably tell her all the state secrets on polio and syphilis that I know, hah!

Training was great though, and they gave us the little blue book, a UN passport, woo-hoo! I don't want to give it back...


Ok, the next update will be coming live and direct from Bangladesh!

Babas, sadhus, and monks

While traveling through India and Laos, I met many holymen, some legitimate and many not.

Hindu holymen are called babas or sadhus and are devoted to a life of meditation and spiritual reflection devoid of pleasure, power, or wealth. They may have had nothing, but many of the "sadhus" I encountered sure wanted more of the latter! No worse than our televangelists and roadside preachers I suppose.

Baba showing a picture of his mentor.




I'd often see the babas carrying around a trident, and no they're not used to expediete funding for their religious pursuits. The three points are supposed to represent love, action and wisdom.


I was actually initially excited to meet these 3 babas. They claimed to be able to perform magic and would do some for me. Woo-hoo, Hindu magic!


But then they pulled out a tiny statue and did the equivalent of the shell game that you see on the streets of NY. I had a good laugh and walked away before the hit me up for $. Yep, holymen Indian style!

But I would also meet some legitimate sadhus who really wanted to share their spiritual beliefs. They were intense and definitely had a certain aura around them.



In Buddhist Laos and Sikkim, there were many monks. This 4 year old boy is thought to be the reincarnation of a Lama in Sikkim. I talked with his Dad, who claimed to witness many miracles of the boy including being born at 6 months of age but fully developed. He took the boy to see some monks and they came to the conclusion that he was indeed a long awaited reincarnation of a lama. So the father quit his job, moved 80 kilometers to the monastery so the monks could teach the boy.
Of course he was acting like any 4 year old kid would, running around screaming, banging on sacred drums, chasing cats. Our tour guide just shook his head and said "they're so hard to control when they're that young," hah!

Among the Buddhists populations, it's really common to see mini-monks. Boys often join the monkhood so that they can get an education, and they're free to leave at any time. It really is a no pressure religion. Even the King of Thailand is expected to become a monk at some point in his life. Of course the mini-monks are still kids at heart.




And they loved to talk with tourists too. This monk would sit outside his temple day and night (he was even out at 2am!) waiting to speak with passerbys to improve his English. It took him around a year of doing this to become fluent!

More more scenes from Calcutta

So the majority of photos that I've posted so far have been from my digital point and shoot camera. A couple of weeks and $400 in processing/scanning costs later, I finally got the film back from my other 2 cameras. Woo-hoo! I'm glad I dragged 3 cameras around everywhere.

Calcutta was another one of those places in India that I loved to photograph. Not sure what's up with all the "Love", but looking back through my photos, there were definite signs everywhere!







Goat herds where everywhere, the Muslim area was very close to Sudder street so they were probably someones dinner.



This is what happens when kids pester you to take photos of them. They don't smile, and then after you take their photo, they follow you down the street for a half a block asking for rupees! I would have played cricket with them if I didn't have all my expensive camera around my neck.


Plenty of street bathing and water collecting, since water pumps were all over Calcutta...

... as well as board games. Plenty of people dragging games outdoors and inviting all their friends to come and play.


This is just plain crazy, how this guy didn't electrocute himself let alone find the right wire to repair I'll never know.

Deep Thoughts from the Piano Man

This weekend was my sister's graduation at Syracuse University (woo-hoo! now go get a paycheck, hah!). The commencement speaker was non other than the piano man himself, the one and only Billy Joel!


To sum up his speech for you, here are his deep thoughts...

"You should do what you love. 'Cause if you do that, you'll be good at it, and you'll be loving what you do."

These are truly inspirational words to live by. But the piano man redeemed himself and sung a song with the audience. Definitely the highlight of the ceremony, beats any of the other canned speeches. I couldn't make this up if I tried, you can read the AP press release here. Deep down inside, I was secretly hoping Billy Joel would come screeching up to the stadium like a bat out of hell, crash through the gates, and take out a section or 2 of chairs and stumble on the way up to the podium. It could have happened...

Funny signs from around Varanasi

In Atlanta right now for STOP training with the WHO/CDC. Since photos from inside an auditorium of powerpoint slides and random people speaking aren't really all that interesting (zzz...), I'm digging through the archives for the time being.

I'm speechless, I really am. Maybe it's the tight underwear that's causing some of the Indian men to grope foreign women. For those of you who can't read the sticker, they're bacterial resistant briefs! Woo-hoo, that's exactly what I worry about when underwear shopping!


Must be a really special gourd...


This is how they got rid of the exhaust from the generators. Funny as it looks, I guess it makes sense to use an auto muffler and exhaust.




Who is this Tirtha Purohit, an insurance salesman?


Ok, this didn't come from India, it came with my Dell laptop that I just ordered. Man, I hope this was supposed to be some sort of joke. Ok, I'm all for public safety and all, but this is just plain ridiculous. If you need some sort of warning to not put a plastic bag over your head, please keep your genes out of the breeding pool. Seriously. I've seen Indian toddlers survive navigating on streets with speeding cars, open sewers, rabid dogs, and broken glass, but we need a warning on plastic bags?!