Sylvia's Journal

I am happily ensconced in my Platinum Suites (or Suits as my colleague called it) hotel on busy road 11 in the Banani section of Dhaka. It is the same street where I had a nice lunch with my friend Sayeed last time I was here and a pedicure before going home, then a reward for a trip in vain, this time hopefully for mission accomplished, at the end of next week.

The Suites (suits) hotel looks a little tacky on the outside, squeezed between lots of dangling wires, a large hole in the ground for a new neighbor and thousands of advertising signs. Inside it is quite comfy with lots of bowing staff attending asking me whether there is anything I wish (sleep).

To get here was a little less comfy. All the flights were full to capacity, crammed together with several hundred other people I tried to ignore the unpleasantness of the 14 plus hour flight to Dubai, jealous of the people stretched out on their flatbed seats in business class. I have been there in the past so I know what I was missing. Sometimes it is better to not know.

Something about the feeling of comfort in the very first few minutes after I settle into my plane seat tells me whether it is going to be a sleepful or sleepless flight. So at 9:30 PM on Thursday night, leaving Atlanta, I knew it was going to be a no-sleep flight. In spite of a triple dose of the Ayurveda sleeping pills, sleep never came. I read, I watched movies, I listened to music and watched the excruciatingly slow countdown to arrival time.

I arrived in Dubai at 7:30 PM, emerging from the transit desk and security check at the Pink Berry shop but I had no appetite for its creations. All I wanted was to catch up on a missed night and a missed day. Thursday had imperceptibly turned into Saturday.

I purchased sleep for a steep price (50 dollars an hour) at the Dubai International Airport hotel – it was nice to get away from the shopping frenzy that is continuous at Dubai airport where there is no sense of day and night.

The place is like a post-Thanksgiving shopping mall all year round. Foot traffic from all corners of the world (except Latin America) is clogging the major central walkway from Terminal 1 to 3. People carry large quantities of the Shop Dubai plastic bags with stuff to take home.

My fellow travelers to Bangladesh carried, or rather dragged, an average of three giant plastic bags per person. I was wondering what was in those bags. Goods purchased here are not cheap and Bangladeshis here are not part of the middle class. I suspect many are deep in debt for having had the privilege to work in the Emirates, having a paying job at all.

Because of all that hand luggage, boarding the Dhaka plane as an economy passenger requires much patience and forbearance as it is a most chaotic and pushy experience. The crowd is unruly, anxious and impatient, and not very experienced in airplane travel.

The latter is clear from the state of the toilets just half an hour into a five hour flight – dirty footprints on the seat, un-flushed and a wash basin full of brown water, the floor soaking wet. I decided to refrain from drinking any more water to avoid the toilet 3 or 4 hours into the flight, a sight i couldn’t even begin to imagine.

After a four hour nap in Dhaka I ventured out into the street to get some sunlight and reset my body clock and stock up on bottled water. For dinner I joined two of my counterparts at a Thai restaurant in another part of town. The hotel tried to talk me into using their house taxi for an outrageous amount of money but I declined and opted for a CNG (compressed natural gas) tuk-tuk – according to the receptionist unavailable at this time of the evening and expensive too, which turned out not to be true, both ways. And now it is bedtime and of course I am wide awake.