A Night Out in Bangladesh!

One of the main reasons I created this blog (and gave it the name that I did) was to bring to life the often comical stories that come about while traveling as a vegetarian. If you are vegetarian yourself, you know about all the ridiculous questions you get asked regarding your dietary choices. Take those deitary preferences overseas, especially into a developing nation and the disbelief at the thought of someone conciously choosing not to eat meat is prevalent.


Last night my fellow expats and I decided to give our chef and maid (it's much less glamorous than it sounds, trust me) the night off. We ventured out with a couple of our local coworkers as escorts for a night on the town (an evening in the village is a more literal description). We hired an ez-cart (electric rickshaw) to take us into the center of Jessore. We went into a pool hall and played a couple of games of pool. We quickly obtained a large audience of men, something very hard to avoid here (apparently Bangladeshi's aren't taught that it's rude to stare). Once we had enough of that we headed out to dinner. Dinner was at the Sunmoon (or maybe it
was monsoon, I can't really remember) hotel, which was a hotel guaranteed to send you home with bedbugs. The restaurant was quaint and they had our places set when we arrived. Bottles of water with the seals intact were placed on the table for us.

As we were perusing the menu I just asked my friend to order whatever there was on the menu that didn't contain meat. I wasn't picky except for that. What I didn't realize was, this was the sort of place where you order a ton of food and share it family style. Not wanting to force everyone at the table to follow my dietary needs on our exciting night out, I requested some vegetable curry and veggie noodles to be shared with the table.

Our appetizers came out, veggie soup and veggie wontons, and all was good. Then the main dishes started coming out. The waiters wanted to put the food on our plates for us rather than us scooping it ourselves. The table ordered fried rice with chicken in it and yet the waiters brought me my own huge plate of egg fried rice which I don't believe we requested (very kind of them). So based off of the plate of rice I had in front of me, it was quite clear who the vegetarian at the table was. Yet, everytime they came around with one of the chicken plates and tried to scoop it onto my dish they gave me this look of utter disdain when I would politely decline the chicken. "but it's just chicken!" I could read in their eyes. Over and over they would attempt to serve me chicken and over and over I would graciously decline. At one point we all just started laughing because they just couldn't comprehend that I wouldn't eat chicken.

One last note of humor on the dinner's events. One of my friends at the table with me is a diet coke fein. It's her one guilty pleasure. While at dinner we all ordered sprite (mostly to help wash down the heat of the peppers in the food), with the exception of my friend who ordered a diet coke. The waiters brought sprite to my friend and nothing for me. They could not grasp the idea that the one who wouldn't eat meat wasn't also the one who wanted a different drink. My friend never received her diet coke and after the meal was over and we were all ready to leave, our eager to please waiters, brought her a full bottle of sprite!

Photos: 1) Nazmeen, one of the English teachers here, trying to play pool with several young men standing very close behind her and staring.
2) a typical meal here of veggies and rice, that I am served by our chef (not from the restaurant as it was very dark and photos did not turn out)