Week in review

In this post I will summarize everything interesting that I’ve done this week. We leave tomorrow morning for our big 3-day trip to Srimangal and Sylhet. I’m really excited!
In class on Sunday we learned the present perfect tense, which is commonly used in Bangladesh instead of the simple past tense. According to Shanta they don’t use the present perfect tense at all in Kolkata, so if we go there and use the present perfect tense it will be obvious that we learned Bangla in Bangladesh. After class I met my language partner. We went to Margarita, an “Italian” restaurant in Noddabajar, for lunch. I got the margarita pizza, which was very unlike the American version. Less cheese, no sauce. Interestingly, Bangladeshis eat ketchup with their pizza; there’s a bottle of ketchup on every table in Margarita. Later, Moumita and I went to my flat and worked on homework for a few hours.
Monday’s class was important, because we learned kinship terms. I can finally say “my father’s elder brother’s oldest daughter” in Bangla! We also learned the simple past tense and were told to primarily use it in writing. I met my language partner and we went to her favorite restaurant in Gulshan Ek for lunch. It’s called Nando’s and it’s a high-end international chain. I would not be able to afford it in the US. The food was delicious; I had chicken and real bread! (We always have store-bought bread for breakfast, but I hadn’t had good bread since I got here.) There was a man there from their corporate office, and I talked to him for a little bit. He was the first South African I ever met! He obviously didn’t know anything about Bangladesh, since I mentioned Bengal and he thought that was somewhere else. Later he gave us fancy drinks on the house; I got one made with fresh pomegranate juice. Moumita was very confused by this and asked a waiter why he gave the drinks to us, even after I had explained it to her. We then went to a salon so she could get her eyebrows threaded. It’s a lot less painful than the American methods! Finally we went back to my flat to do work. On the way to Gulshan Ek I had bought a tube of henna, and so Moumita put it on my hands. I really want to experiment with more henna after this one fades.
On Tuesday I took malaria medicine for the first time. No problems (so far, at least). It’s totally worth it, because Srimangal and Sylhet have fairly high rates of malaria. In class we learned how to ask about someone’s family and how to respond when asked. We also learned how to use ach, which is a very strange verb that means different things in different situations. After class Moumita and I went to a lot of different tailors. First we stopped at my tailor in Noddabajar, to drop off the other fabric set I bought in Newmarket. Then we went to Banani Supermarket to buy cloth for a sari blouse and petticoat and for the salwar and orna to match the kameez material I bought at Sonargaon. We stopped at her tailor, but he wanted to charge me 500 taka to make each piece. We went back to my tailor in Noddabajar; his prices are much more reasonable and everything will be done by Sunday! That will be my rest day next week, so I can go pick it all up then.
Today was a very full day. We had class, where we learned animal vocabulary (useful for the tropical rainforest in Srimangal) and 2 new verb tenses. We also started to read a story from a child’s storybook. After class we met the vice-chancellor of IUB, who taught in America for a long time and had really good English. He suggested that we make contact with other IUB students who are studying our same subjects. After that we had a lecture by another professor who talked about small ethnic groups in Bangladesh. His lecture was the best we’ve had here and I found it fascinating. He’s coming with us on our trip tomorrow so I’ll have time to talk to him. After the lecture I took a rickshaw back to Noddabajar in the rain and went shopping for a few necessary things, namely biscuits (cookies) and a small power adapter to take with me. I managed to ask for both of these things in Bangla, and felt really proud of myself. The people at the grocery shop were surprised and asked me a few questions that I was actually able to answer, such as “I’m here studying Bangla.”