Top 5 cons of living in Dhaka

All right, all right, not everything is awesome here in Dhaka. Without being negative, I am trying to go thru the top 5 irritants.

1) Traffic and drivers

Yep, there is no nice way to put this: traffic here sucks. We’re lucky enough to live close to everything, so we can walk most places, but traffic here is a pain. On the bright side, if you do get into an accident it’s unlikely that it’ll be serious (you’re never going much more than 25 km per hour after all).

Bangladeshis make for horrible drivers. They are the nicest people on earth, but I don’t know what gets into them once they’re behind the wheel.

Traffic and drivers here make me angry, and I had to give up driving when I found myself it saying out loud “I HATE THIS COUNTRY!”

2) The Rickshaws

They are so exotic at first, and I thought they added so much character to the city! But after a while you get rickshawed out. You start seeing how badly they drive, how they stop in the middle of the road to drop/pick up passengers and clog up roads all the time, making bad traffic even worse. I know, I know, lots of people depend on them to get around, but I just wish I live to see this country making the leap to a developed stage and the rickshaws being as rare as they are in Tokyo.

3) Inefficiency

You know the Asian efficiency you hear so much about? Well, that doesn’t exist here. Blame it on the English colonial past, or if you would like, blame it on the Americans, but if there’s an efficient way to get something done, that is not what most Bangladeshis are doing.

And if you’re not convinced of the inefficiency in the city, go to the airport. Oh my gosh, the lines! It takes forever to go thru immigration and retrieve your luggage. And do not forget, we get to go through the diplomatic line at immigration. I can’t even imagine how long it would take if we had to thru the regular line.

And your luggage? It will easily take almost an hour to show up. You know when the belt gets full, in other airports there are handlers picking up the luggage putting on the side to make space to the other luggage that’s arriving? Not here. They will stop loading the belt instead until there’s more space, then the machinery will kick in again. It’s a very frustrating process.

4) “No problem, boss”

If I can never hear the sentence above again, it won’t be too soon. For the foreigner being told “No problem, boss” it means that there is a potentially really big issue.

5) The crowds, poverty and contrast between rich & poor

Poverty here is heartbreaking, the rich are filthy rich and seeing that on a day to day basis really gets to you.

Anyway, enough about the cons. There are more, of course, like the pollution, the dirt, the public urination, but there are many other pros too that I didn’t talk about, so we’ll leave it at that.