Saturday, July 18, 2009

Carpenter ants woke me up

Woke up at 7 am today because, apart from Disco chomping on my fingers, carpenter ants were also joining in the biting fun. I yelped, hopped out of bed, washed my sheets, and prepared for a busy Saturday.

Here are a couple shots of me attempting to play tennis at the Chittagong Club. I look so thin! Black is slimming! (Or, as the print ads around here claim, "sliming.")

I also took a short dip in the green swimming pool. Since I had no swimsuit, I just hopped in wearing a sports bra and my Vickies. Hah! Who can tell the difference here?

The activities were followed by lunch (the longest lunch of my life, as usual), and then I went to Central Plaza to get a couple blouses tailor-made, and finally off to Alvira's for my weekly facial.

Then I incurred some divine wrath or something, because Disco decided to (a) stink up my room, and (b) poop on my lovely new foot rug in the bathroom. And then we had a disastrous dinner at a new restaurant that opened up next door -- we tried to explain that we were ordering one dish "for all of us," and what they heard was "four." So we got four chicken kabobs. Er? And to top off the evening, I had to make more binders, which meant more photocopying. It is now 1:30 am and I just spent the last two hours fighting with the xerox machine.

This made me think of a comment one of the expats made about finished goods here in BD: "Everything is good enough." Say you ordered 25 items, and 1 is flawed, that's good enough -- for the locals, at least. But the people from developed nations see it differently. They want everything exactly the way they want them. Well, after my heroic struggle with the photocopier, I realized that with the lack of resources here, it is good enough. I just spent two hours copying at least a hundred sheets of paper on a machine that kept getting jammed and telling me it needed maintenance, and I will definitely turn a deaf ear to whoever whines about the two pages with ink smears on them.

It's a numbing experience. Boy, what a Saturday.

No comments:

Post a Comment