Sonargaon trip with Mahmud's classes

Saturday we went on a field trip with my officemate's classes, to Sonargaon and Paran Nagar, previous capital of Bengal with ruins dating back to the 13th century. Only 27 kilometers from Dhaka, but easily 2 hours each way with most of the time spent on city streets at a crawl. The bus was called a murimati (I think) which has something to do with rice that's popped like popcorn...


We started at the folk art museum


which had some electricity problems -- some of the displays I saw more clearly in the pictures Matan took!

But the newer building with the fabrics! WOW! amazing works of art.


We walked through the gardens and saw boats, flowers,


people-powered ferris wheels and many booths with fabrics, saris, etc.



Matan enjoyed the shooting balloon stand and at 1 taka per shot (70 taka = $1), it was quite a deal.

Then we had a picnic at Paran Nagar which is a very old Hindu neighborhood, with little restoration done.


(yes we eat with our hands, even rice, no silverware).
Walking through the street -- it was a place of immense wealth at one point.


I didn't understand when I was seeing it, but most of the waterways are engineered to be moats and water sources, it's not a river running through.



Pictures of the girls dipping in the water,

and others exploring more buildings.


One of the students commutes from this village and our last stop was to visit her family's home. Up five flights of stairs and they hosted all 28 of us for tea and fruits. Then the long long ride back to Dhaka. I followed the map out of the city, but the sun was setting when we got back and I was very disoriented. Really I know so very little of the city.

a very good weekend

pictures coming. but now I have to get to class.

children's literature

thinking about whether to attempt a project looking into children's literature here. learning the script so slowly that it seems presumptuous to start looking at children's books. but I will be doing a department conference (they have one every semester) which is a full day affair in Feb or March. lots of people from outside the university will participate.

just thinking right now. seems like something I could do and would work well with both teaching and research.

not that I'm counting, eh?

the electricity went out three times in the half hour I was in the grocery store. usually the generator goes on within 10 seconds, but not tonight. nope. it was out for a couple of minutes each time. some organized folks, not me, have flashlights with them. took forever to get through the checkout since only one third of the registers were working. lots of threes here. hmmm. ice cream soup for supper!

the guests aren't coming for dinner tomorrow, so we are going to look for the bike. Matan is tutoring at the school in the morning and playing football in the afternoon. hope we have daylight after that to try for a bike.

Saturday we have field trip with my officemate's class.

got the midterms graded today. the department chair checks the grades and discusses the progress for each student before she signs off on them. then the students have meetings next week with her before the students register for spring semester classes. the range of grades was very similar to the MN range (it's the same test!) but there were some interesting twists in the answers that surprised and pleased me.

maybe I'll just go swimming now. because, yes, the electricity is out again.

on and off, mostly off

ooof. three electrical outages in the last six hours (since I got home from work). at about one hour each, that puts us at having electricity about 50% of the time.

at work, when it goes out, the generators kick in and computers, lights, fans, elevators just keep running. we only notice that we're off the grid when we start to feel the lack of air conditioning. the a/c doesn't work until the real electricity comes back up.

considering that we've been in the dark so much of tonight, it's very strange to have talked to the States on skype (and helped Shaked with a paper over gmail), talked to two people in Israel on skype and one by phone. so something's been working, even if the electricity was not.

such is life.

good routines

waking up before the sunrise. riding in a rickshaw through the morning traffic. school with two classmates who are studying far more than I am (ouch!). but how were we supposed to learn all of the letters in 7 class days???

another rickshaw ride to work at 10am. teaching is going well -- we're at the midterm tomorrow. students coming in to talk about their research projects. putting classwork online since one of the classes I'm doing both semesters here, I'll be teaching next summer online at Century. lunch is trying new food at the cafeteria.

ride after work today was me alone in a minibus with a driver! so I get a ride home or, on Tuesdays, to Matan's school for water aerobics. fun group. after that I meandered down one of the main roads (got a meat pounder for Matan's shnitzel requests), and went out to eat at an Italian restaurant with a friend. so many good places are hidden off the street level, totally out of sight.

home by rickshaw. getting used to coming home in the dark. pizza carryout for Matan when he got home even later than I did. a fine day in Dhaka.

one of the pleasures of this sabbatical

is having enough time to read as I prepare classes.

I can't imagine anything better than having 2 classes with a total of 21 students -- just enough to hold classes, to prep, to try new ideas and texts and to not have too much grading! I sit at my office desk and read for the literary theory and research methodology class and look up the articles the text refers to, and sometimes I print them out. Amazing access. Seminal articles. TIME enough to read them! I tell my students that I really like going through their research proposals with them and showing them the wonders of JSTOR. And then reading a few articles on David Copperfield and The Great Gatsby, just to see what's new in the scholarship there.

In our shared space, I also listen to my officemate's conferences with his students. He teaches linguistics and teaching materials prep, and it's new content to me. He also goes over my Bangla lessons so I can study the texts with a better translation than what I've managed to capture during class.

I'm keeping a list of the readings so that at the end, when the sabbatical report comes due, the list will be full of sparkling bits that I incorporated into my lectures or that I read for next year's contemporary world lit classes at home. Or even pieces that I don't know yet if they'll ever fit in to teaching, but they intrigued me enough to read today.