Lunch with behrouze
Trip Start
May 01, 2002
1
33
64
Trip End
May 01, 2009
Chittagong,
Bangladesh
Saturday, December 30, 2006
on my first morning in chittagong, i pulled the drapes apart and looked out upon sheikh mujib road and saw pretty school girls waiting for the bus and sidewalk shops selling sweaters. it being a hell of a lot colder than thailand i decided to go down to the road and buy a sweater. i found a good one. i offered 100 taka and he took it right away. i should have offered 50. the hotel breakfast consisted of fried veggies, chapatis, and homemade tea. it was quite nice. if you come to chittagong, come to the st. martin for the tea if for nothing else.
after breakfast, i found a phone shop and bought a local simm card. it was only 140 taka. i slipped that simm into my thai gsm phone and voila, i had a phone. i called my old school buddy behrouze becuase i thought he lived in chittagong. i was wrong. he lived in dhaka - about 200 km north of chittagong, but by weird coincidence he was in chittagong at that time for a meeting with the mayor of chittagong. wow! after the meeting he met me for lunch at a restaurant called pitstop. behrouze handed me his business card. it said that he was the chairman of the board of the largest tea company in bangladesh. wow again! we chatted about the good old days and also about poverty and corruption and decided to meet up again for chirstmas.
after lunch i checked out of the hotel and hired a taxi to take me to a place called bhatiary. it is a verdant valley way out in the hills with a very beautiful 18-hole golf course, a lodge, a restaurant, and a bar. i had hoped to get in a quick 9 holes before sunset but it was not to be because my taxi driver was a moron and was hopelessly lost. fortunately, there are only so many roads out there in the hills and so if you go back and forth enough times you are bound to get where you want to go simply by a process of elimination, but by then it was almost sunset and all i could do was check in to the lodge and look out wistfully at the golf course. it was laced with the last rays of sunlight. there was a lone golfer out there enjoying the cool winter sunset and all of my envy.
after dark, the concierge knocked on my door. his name was jahangir. i asked for beer and dinner and he quickly and fluidly obliged. he even brought me a battery powered light as the electric power supply in this part of the world is always only for a while.
i had a really great dinner of curried lamb and rice with tiger beer and even had reason to use the flashlight before dozing off to dream about birdies yet to be.
