Pleasure No.1: Food & Attire

My pleasureful food journey started in Bangladesh at New Market, a busy shopping strip in Dhaka.

We had this fantastic snack called pushka - a chickpea based thin round case about the size and shape of an egg, filled with dahl and spices and herbs and you lace it with a sweet fruity sauce. The cases are kept inside a large cabinet heated by light bulbs once its cooked to keep it crispy till ready to serve. It certainly is a delicacy and something I've never seen before. Except I ate it too quickly to get you a picture, so hope this drawing does the job.

While everything is quite new to me, it does seem like here are only a few common staples at restaurants, eg. lamb, beef and chicken mild curries and dahl, at most with a bit of ruti (flat bread) on the side. But there's numerous little snacks to entice your apetite such as shish kebabs (given that they are Muslim and have quite a bit of Middle Eastern influences), those evil fry up shops that serve up lots of shingaras (potato and ginger balls in thick pastry), lentil balls, and samosas, and a times-ten-sugar-and cholestrol version of deep fried donuts. By far the most different thing about food is that you eat with you right hand (left hand is banned on the table.) Its quite a messy business, and the curry can get very sloshy to handle, but its actually quite fun!!!

Shopping malls here are not the white shiny sparkly sort of thing we see in the west, but big grey concrete buildings resembling more of a skeleton of the building, often without basic rails or windows refraining people from falling off the side, office desks are sometimes right at the edge of the forth or fifth floor. I'm actually more worried about people falling on me rather than them falling...


New Market has mainly household goods on the first two floors, like clothes and accessories. The top floor is devoted to an array of hand printing fabric workshops, where you can bring your own material to and select your prints and designs from a sample book, and the apprentices will work on it for you. The feature of this is that the printing blocks are all small square blocks no bigger than 5 or 6 cm squared, its a painstaking and crafty job to get the reoccurring patterns exact and matching throughout the fabric to make it perfect, and it almost always is.


In the hall ways amongst the goods the middleclassed women in perfectly groomed and colourful salwar kameezs walk leisurely inside, not a speck of dust on their multi coloured ornas (scarf). The men wear tailored dress pants and shirts and always have shoes. I feel really scruffy compared to these people, and I don't feel particularly comfortable in a two piece western outfit where the pants are tight around my butt. Salwar kameez is also known as a "Three Piece", which is the most common outfits for women in Northern India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The top is a long dress which comes down to the thighs usually with a patterned collar. The trousers can be either loose or tight, and goes straight down to the ankle. The orna is warn like a loop around the front as to cover one's breasts from those "wondering gazes". It does amaze me how they ever keep cool when they are asked to cover themselves up like this all the time.


In my search for a kameez, I found a lot of the local designs is a little too ostentatious with just a little too much gold and jewel sewn on, or at the complete other end with crazy psychedelic tie-dyes that I just couldn't possibly bring myself to put on despite it being quite popular with the local girls... I did manage to find a more earthy coloured one (to my surprise cos I thought I was gonna go all out on something like fluoride pink and ocean blue...) oh I feel sooo much better, and surprisingly cooler due to the light fabric.

Here are the two that I brought during my stay here - you may note that I did not wear the original pants with the kameez in either shots as I found them a little clumsy to get around with, so have chosen my own 3/4 pants underneath instead.