Ami ashi taka diboh

Yet another eventful day today - I went to New Market today completely focused on buying all the things I've been meaning to buy since early in the trip but haven't been able to go to New Market to buy at a lower than reasonable price! Therefore I neglected to take any pictures and realized that the only pictures I had of the place were on the phone that I lost...boo. Wahid went with me and helped me out with bargaining since it takes me five minutes to translate prices over 100 taka, and he was amazingly patient with my pickiness, especially buying a lungi. Where do these guys get the bright colored ones?

After my shopping extravaganza we went to one of the parks we tried to go to when there was a holiday a few weeks ago when the park was closed. It is called Lalbagh Fort, which, according to the Lonely Planet book (Wahid couldn't really tell me what the place was about), was never finished because the daughter of the man who was building it at the time died. This was considered a bad omen for the fort, so they stopped construction of the fort's walls. They finished the three buildings inside, including the tomb of the daughter, Pari Bibi. One of the buildings is a kind of museum with paintings, inscriptions, and lots of guns and knives on display. It also has a beautiful view:

Outside the tomb of Pari Bibi

The museum building from the outside

We also revisited the park across from the Parliament building today, so I got a picture of the building that actually does the geometric holes in the wall justice. Yet again, the whimsical look reminds me of Harry Potter - I think this is what the Ministry of Magic would look like if it weren't underground:



I believe I mentioned that Ramadan started at sundown on Wednesday. Last night I went for a walk during Iftar, the meal at the evening prayer call when everyone breaks the fast. The events leading up to Iftar are a madhouse - in front of all the restaurants they have set up an Iftar take-out buffet and crowds of men swarm the tables in the hour or so before Iftar to grab their food and get home or back to their shop in time for the prayer call. Then once people have their food they sit and hover over it until the prayer call starts. After Iftar many of the men head to the mosque to pray - as I recall, Dr. Sabur told me they have to do 32 prostrations or something like that during prayers in Ramadan, but I may have misunderstood him.

Last night was kind of lonely walking around while everyone else was "in" on the whole Iftar process. I was hungry but I certainly hadn't been fasting - I had a small lunch of an omlette sandwich and banana since the usual places weren't open, and I snacked on some crackers when I got home. Today, though I decided not to eat between breakfast (which was at 10, not exactly dawn) and Iftar, which was fine because I didn't get hungry until the last hour or so. Not drinking anything was the bigger problem and I folded on that one - I bought a bottle of water at New Market since I hadn't had enough water before leaving. Anyway, on the way back to Banani, Wahid and I picked up some food at one of those Iftar buffets and had Iftar at my guesthouse, so I didn't feel like such an outsider tonight. I did feel like a bit of a cheat, but hey, I'm not Muslim anyway! It is interesting how many people I saw not fasting today. The restaurants and tea stands that stay open during the day (which is only about half) put up curtains so the non-fasters don't offend/tempt the fasters, but you can still see that people are inside, eating, drinking tea, or smoking, all of which violate the fast. Bilqis told me that about 30% of the people don't fast, but I don't know if that includes the Hindus (10-15%).