Sylvia's Journal

I have no standing with Thai Airways, no access to red carpets and special lines. I am with the rest of the ordinary people, seated in the back of the bus.

There are thousands of other ‘back-of-the-bus’ people surrounding me in the area outside the gates. It feels like a holding pen. Many are young men who are being ferried out of the country, lured to places with work and the promise of money, often in the Arab world. They travel in clusters, staying closely together; many may never have never been outside their small towns or villages. You can read the anxiety from their faces. There are stories, each day, in the newspaper about unscrupulous recruiters and young men just like them who end up in a no man’s land at their destination. The lucky ones get sent back right away; some spent months in a jail to be eventually returned to Bangladesh, having lost whatever sums they paid to get work. If you are poor and illiterate you get screwed – unless you are lucky.

But there are also middle class Bangladeshi families in this crowd, some with American passports who have, I imagine, visited the relatives who stayed behind. They are happy to go home; the kids will go back to their computer games and friends, McDonalds and the order and cleanliness of the US (everything is relative). One family in front of me belongs to this group. The kids are regular American teenagers; they dress and talk like them, part of the global tribe of middle class teenagers, boys and girls alike. Only the mother still wears a sari; she’s the one who is neither here nor there. The father wears a suit and holds all the travel papers in a little sissy bag. He’s the IT professional who made it in the new world. The grandparents stayed behind. They are proud of their son and mystified about what an IT professional does. They have shown off their smart offspring to the neighbors and friends. They have no worries about their old age. There are families like that all around me.

Foreigners are a minority in this departure hall and stick out. One sticks out like a sore thumb: a Chinese business man who sits a few rows away and talks on his cell phone as if he is the only one in this place. His voice is loud and of the in-your-face (ears) kind. He is totally oblivious of how loud he is. I throw him a few glances, a weak and useless hint. He doesn’t read my body language.

The newspaper has an editorial about the road that is closed to women and I learn that the signs have been taken down and the self-appointed women chaser is arrested and his mosque council berated. I’m glad that the publicity worked and outraged others as it did me.

We leave Dhaka late but the nice male flight attendant assures me that I will have plenty of time in Bangkok to make my connection to Cambodia (35 minutes is all you need he tells me – I am glad I have carryon luggage only). A good tailwind comes to the rescue and I ended up having an entire hour. I use it to buy Droste chocolate and a cheap camera since the battery charger of my camera died in Dhaka. I will pretend that the chocolates came all the way from Amsterdam, a gift for my hosts. The ones I had bought in Amsterdam had all been given away in Dhaka.

We are clearly in the China and Japan sphere of influence. The hotel has a Chinese restaurant on the right side of the lobby and a Kobe restaurant on the other side. A confusing shower system comes from Japan. I cannot figure it out. Like so many other Japanese appliances it has lights that flicker and change color but I am clueless about how to take a shower, other than using the handshower that does not seem to be an integral part of the unit but rather an attempt to give us, foreign guests, something that is familiar. The minibar has soybean milk, grass jelly drink, Pulpy C (lychee with jelly and fruit) and Tiger beer. The latter I recognize and am grateful for after the dryness of Dhaka. There are also two large tubs with the ramen noodles and small packages with ‘flavorings’ (variations on salt) that you can pour water over and turn into a meal. That was dinner.

I am now exactly 12 hours ahead of my homeland, which makes it easy to determine what time it is here and there. Next stop is breakfast. I hope it is not French, as the name of the hotel suggests (Le President) but more noodly than that.