Adventures in Chittagong

Here’s a funny little anecdote about an adventure we had on our first night living in our new flat in the neighbourhood (thana) of Khulshi, Chittagong. During our first week here we lived in the Changaon thana.

After moving all our stuff and settling into our new rooms, we decided that we needed some things from the GEC, which is an area surrounding a roundabout nearby that has lots of little plazas, shops, internet cafes, restaurants, etc. We were pretty proud of ourselves when we spoke to the CNG (baby taxi/autorickshaw) driver in Bangla, offered him 20 taka (it’s around 50 taka to 1 canadian dollar) and got in. We soon realised we didn’t know where we were going! At that point we still thought the GEC was a mall or something (cause everyone was saying we could find everything at the ‘GEC Moor’ and we know now that ‘moor’ is circle or roundabout!), and we knew that it was quite near but the driver took us on this long way, stopped somewhere, got out, moved the CNG into park (with us in it) and walked away! We had no clue what to do and we pondered this for around five minutes. We asked two women walking by where the GEC was (Appa, GEC kothay?) and they pointed out yonder but we didn’t know if that meant two minutes or ten minutes away. So we just sat there stupidly, waiting. Then the driver reappeared out of nowhere and, laughing, told us that we were in the GEC! We were mortified... we paid him quickly and walked away as fast as possible.

So then we went into the various stores to get our various things and did pretty well considering the language barrier. Once again we were pretty proud of our resourcefulness and productivity and once again it came back to slap us in the face. The problems arose when we realised that we stupidly hadn’t written down or memorised our new address and we had no clue how to explain to the driver where we lived. All we could say was that we lived in Khulshi, at an YPSA office (the NGO where I work: Young Power in Social Action), and that two landmarks we remembered were Asia Bank and Pizzaland. Basically he brought us to a stop somewhere and said ‘eta khulshi’ (this is khulshi). We went through the landmarks with him and he had no clue but he didn’t get annoyed with us, he drove up a couple of feet to where a security guard was standing. The security guard didn’t know what we were talking about, his friend didn’t know what we were talking about, and the random people that eventually gathered around didn’t know what we were talking about! Luckily Sehr had her mobile on her and we managed to reach someone to help us out. Too bad it was the CE of our NGO. Needless to say, the next morning, word had already gotten around and we got some hearty laughs from our colleagues.