The ride to work

Scott lives the life of a "Boro Boss" (Big Boss or Head Honcho if you will) and gets picked up by a company car at 8:15am to go to work.  My organization, on the other hand, does not have a Dhaka based car to take me to work.  However, this isn't a problem because I work from home most days. When I do want to go to my office, it's only ~1 mile away and I can get there by staying on small back streets.  Yesterday I decided to take some photos of my commute to give you an idea of the scenery.

My rickshaw-wallah and I head down my street:

And get passed by a "school-bus" (notice the richshaw in front of us with a cage on it and imagine 10 kids fitting inside that!):

And pass a embroidered blanket shop (this one moves just about every day but I see it 90% of the time I go to my office):

And pass by a bunch of snack stalls:

And pass by a relatively new recycling center complete with about 5 dairy cows and some goats hanging out.  At this "recycling center" I wasn't quick enough to snap photos of were the specific processing stalls I had just passed by.  There is one for 2L and bigger plastic water bottles, one for paper, one for tires, etc. What I did get a photo of was the area where bigger items, like Styrofoam boxes and damaged woven basked are left - notice the toilet seat in the front center :)  One entrepreneur even set up a craft shop, the roof of which you can just start to see on the far right.

 After this my office is just around the corner.  


Yesterday they were also applying new "carpeting", the Bangl-ish word for pavement, to a neighborhood road. Making the pavement is a very labor intensive process as you can see.  The general summary of the process is that they stir gravel over huge fires fed continuously by ~saw dust until the gravel melts into a tar like substance which is poured on the road.  The pollution is horrendous and the heat from the fire is intense. Just imagine that they are working on this when it's 90 plus degrees outside.  (I have to admit that I found them "carpeting" the road during my return ride home when I didn't have my camera. These specific photos were from the last time I was in Bangladesh.)

And there you have it - a commute through small backstreets in Dhaka.  Now we'll just have to encourage Scott to snap a few photos on his way to work.