From Dhaka to Bangkok ... and Back Again (Part 2)

The first few days in Bangkok were a bit of a blur, but quite fun. We arrived on a Wednesday evening just before a major holiday weekend, but hit the ground running on Thursday morning for extensive check-in procedures with the Embassy. The American diplomatic community in Bangkok – which includes the State Department, USAID and a slew of other agencies with southeast Asian headquarters here – numbers about 600 direct employees, not including families. Quite a change from the 75 or so in Dhaka! With a Embassy this large, this meant a whole new ballgame in terms of procedures and policies. We were whisked from office to office to have photos taken, fill out forms, choose furniture, etc. We were happy to know that a five-day weekend followed all of this bustle.

The next few days were spent walking around, wide-eyed at the amount of shopping, food and cultural activity on offer, and locating our new neighborhood (where our permanent apartment is) and Jennifer’s office. During all of this, we were doing our best to avoid being splashed with water and talcum powder, which is the traditional way to celebrate the Thai New Year, known as “Songkran.” The mood in the city was indeed festive and what was originally the splashing of a few drops of water on friends and family to signify the rebirth of a new year has now become license to pull out buckets and water cannons and soak any who cross your path. Pickup trucks loaded with young Thais armed with loud stereos and plenty of liquid ammo drove up and down the streets, joyfully blasting everyone in sight. It was a lot of fun!

We also decided that immediately upon arrival it was time to start making up for the last two years physical laziness! Our weekly ultimate frisbee game with friends and our daily walks with Bhago had become our only physical activity in Dhaka ... and we could feel it. Our temporary apartment was outfitted with a nice gym and we were a few minutes’ walk away from Bangkok’s biggest park. We really enjoyed the chance to get outside, wear shorts and t-shirts, and not be stared at during physical activity. Lumpini Park is an amazing site at 6:00am with hundreds of Thais and a few foreigners enjoying morning exercise – from jogging to tai chi, aerobics, calisthenics, and even ballroom dancing. Yes, they were dancing tango at 6:30 am! Coming from Dhaka, it was liberating to see people enjoying whatever activity they wanted outside in the open air.

After two weeks we were able to move in to our permanent apartment. It’s on the 18th floor of a high-rise apartment building in the middle of downtown. We live just off Sukhumvit, the busiest road in all of Bangkok. To one side of our building is “Little Pakistan,” featuring the Pakistani Embassy and all sorts of Middle Eastern restuarants; to the other is Sukhumvit Soi 11, one of the major entertainment locations for tourists in Bangkok, with nice restaurants, chic nightclubs, sleazy bars and cheap tailor shops galore. It’s a funky neighborhood, but we like it.

Our apartment is, thankfully, much smaller than the house we had in Bangladesh. We have spent most of our free time working on getting it set up the way we want it to be. One of our biggest mistakes in Dhaka was not concentrating on home stuff immediately, so we’re determined to have a nice place to spend the next three years! We’ve been painting, buying cushions and dishes, hanging pictures, and exploring the possibilities of what can be. Once we have a few more things taken care of, we’ll put up pictures here on the blog ... but we have a nice guest room all set up for you, so why not come see it for yourself?

However, life here isn’t all water fights and interior decorating. We have to work, too. Patrick works in an office building across the street from the U.S. Embassy. He has five colleagues in his section: two Americans, four Thais, and a Filipina. Patrick and the head of the office are the only men in the Regional Office of Procurement – and in fact, women make up the large majority of the Thai workforce at USAID. The current USAID Mission in Thailand opened in 2003, so most of the Thai staff are new to USAID and U.S. Government work in general. Everyone is remarkably friendly and happy – Thais believe that “sanuk,” or fun, is an essential part of anything one does in life, so they find sanuk in the office as often as possible.


Patrick brought the Nepal portfolio with him to Bangkok, and soon after his arrival took over duties for Vietnam, as well. When Patrick’s new boss left in late June to become the Deputy Mission Director in Bangladesh (!), Patrick gained East Timor, Burma, and Laos, plus regional disaster assistance work. He’s been back to Nepal twice since we arrived and is hoping to get to some of the other countries he covers soon.


Jennifer continues to work with the International Finance Corporation in Bangladesh as Communications Officer for the new Bangladesh Investment Climate Fund (BICF). As BICF begins operations and programs in earnest, Jennifer and her boss worked out a deal for a six-to-nine-month transition period to remain on board full-time, operating 50% remotely from Bangkok and 50% in Dhaka. Yes, that’s a lot of travel and the challenges of remote management when she’s not there have come to light. Still, it is a good job and the frequent travel to Dhaka is cushioned a little bit by friends and colleagues who are still there and generally happy to see her. She has seen Shanti and Rabin a few times to say hello, and even visited Bhago to receive lots of puppy kisses and ensure that he is happy and well, which he definitely seems to be.

From Dhaka to Bangkok ... and Back Again (Part 1)

It takes only a little over two hours to fly direct from Dhaka to Bangkok – and in doing so, you find yourself on a different planet! Having been to Bangkok a couple of times during 2006 for vacations, we knew what to expect upon leaving the airport. But to have come on a one-way flight with everything we own that hadn’t been packed and shipped a few weeks earlier, the feeling was different indeed. We were picked up by one of Patrick’s colleagues and a hired driver and taken to our temporary home in a swanky serviced apartment, as our assigned apartment was not yet ready for us. Whoa. How much life had changed in only a few hours!

While we were certainly ready to leave Dhaka, the last few days and hours were more emotional than we had expected. Bangladeshi culture was a big part of this – Bangladeshis are very emotionally demonstrative, no matter what the emotion. So if they’re happy, they’re dancing and laughing; if they’re angry, they’re shouting and throwing bricks; and if they’re sad, they’re not afraid to cry.

We had spent the last several weeks saying goodbye to friends and colleagues – in fact, we had another great rooftop party with all of our close friends from Dhaka.



Jennifer didn’t have to say too many goodbyes as she knew she would be returning for work quite often over the next few months. Patrick’s colleagues threw the traditional USAID farewell party for him at the office. His boss read a poem he’d written for the occasion while on an ayurvedic holiday in India. It featured such immortal verses as:

Patrick anchored the band with electric guitars
And helped shake the Atrium with other rock stars
He liked to play frisbee, but that game was to blame
For the month spent on crutches – he was totally lame

... and so on. After the poem, Patrick’s various colleagues throughout the Mission stood up to say a few words about his time there. The ten or twelve people who spoke had wonderful, kind stories to tell, so it wasn’t long before there were tears. Patrick himself could only get through about a third of what he’d planned to say before he broke down, too. Patrick’s farewell gift from the Mission was a painting done on aluminum in the style typical of Bangladeshi rickshaw art. The artist, S.M. Samsu, is the best rickshaw artist in Dhaka, and he did a fantastic job of capturing our likenesses – and Bhago’s too! – for the ages.


The hardest goodbyes were with those who had been a major part of our everyday lives almost from day one – Shanti, our cook/housekeeper, and Rabin, our guard/gardener. While we had our difficulties with the fact that having people to help you out at home was an absolute necessity in Dhaka, and our difficulties with Shanti and Rabin getting along and us getting along with them, we had spent almost two years seeing these people almost as much as we saw each other. We had developed quite a relationship.

The stress of packing out, cleaning up, taking care of last minute errands had kept us all quite busy so that there wasn’t time to really think about saying goodbye until those last few minutes once the van had arrived to take us to the airport. All of us became surprisingly emotional in these last few minutes. Shanti’s husband had come to help her transport some of the things we were leaving behind, and Rabin’s mother had come to see us off as well. Again, it wasn’t long before the tears started to flow. Then, in typical Bangladeshi fashion, a passer-by on the street who we did not really know stopped to become part of the hugging, well-wishing and crying ... by standing and watching with an open-mouthed stare.

So with a huge mix of relief that the moving out was complete, anticipation of our new city and an onslaught of emotions realizing we were closing a very interesting chapter in our lives, we waved goodbye out of the van window with tears in our eyes. (We won’t even focus on the fact that we knew Bhago was probably lying in the sun just down the street at his new home, unaware of our departure after we had visited with him briefly earlier in the morning before packing up the suitcases).

Bangladesh had one last parting gift for us at the airport. In Dhaka “expediters” – Bangladeshi travel assistants who take care of all of the paperwork, immigration & emigration, etc. – help us at the airport whenever we travel on official business. We had gotten to know these travel guys pretty well over our two years and had become friendly with most of them. So much to our disappointment, we had a new expediter, one we’d never met before, for our last official trip in Dhaka.

As we got to the check-out counter, we discovered we were overweight on our luggage. However, the man at the check-in desk didn’t bother to explain this to us. Instead, he simply motioned curtly that we had to leave his line (where we’d been standing for 20 minutes) and join another line. Patrick demanded to know why, but the man refused to explain. The expediter told him – and us – that we should be able to check in immediately and insisted that we not leave the line. Finally, a manager came over and explained that we would have to pay for the extra weight. “Fine, that’s no problem,” Patrick said. “It would have been nice if your colleague had explained that to us.”

Then, once the whole problem had been solved, a Bangladeshi man standing behind us in line decided he wanted to be part of the fun. He said something to the expediter along the lines of, “Of course they have to pay, why didn’t you tell them?” The expediter told him that the man at the check-in counter was to blame. “No! No!” the other man shouted, pointing at us, “you misled them!” The expediter shouted something back. Then the other man said, “No, you are stupid!” Apparently this was the wrong thing to say, because the expediter shoved the other man ferociously, shouting, “No! No! You are stupid!” (Remember what we said about Bangladeshis being emotionally demonstrative?)

Patrick stepped between the two so that they couldn’t start swinging at each other and finally had to drag the expediter away bodily to an isolated corner of the terminal. He then – quietly! – read the expediter the riot act. The expediter tried to excuse his actions by saying that he’d lost his head when the other man called him “stupid.” “I don’t care what he called you,” Patrick said, “you attracted the attention of every single person in this airport. You work for the U.S. Embassy now, and you just created a very serious security incident. I don’t think the RSO [Regional Security Officer] would like that, do you?” Finally the expediter realized that he’d put his new job in danger and apologized without further excuses. We didn’t report the incident to the RSO or the guy’s boss, but we did call one of our buddies on the travel staff and asked him to talk to the guy.

After that, we were really ready to leave Bangladesh!