More Glamping

We are holed up in the CDC compound. When we come here, I don't tend to go out much.
Sarah may go visiting her old school friends, but I rarely go.

One reason is that I'm a crap traveller. I look at a car and start feeling motion sickness. Go out for an errand here and you may not be back for 4-6 hours.
My new magic ginger chews seem to be helping a lot.

The second reason is that Sarah is keeping me away from food and water. If you visit somebody, even for five minutes, out come the snacks and drinks, and you are there for over an hour before you can leave without giving offence.
In CDC, the staff are very thorough when it comes to hygiene and water treatment. All drinking water is boiled to death, and stored for our use. Most households drink water from the tap. That's fine for the locals, but foreign stomachs cannot deal with the cocktail of microbes populating the water in most of these countries. Considering what we saw from the train, what people are happy to do onto the ground anywhere and everywhere, it is no surprise that the water table is not the purest on the planet.

That's how Sarah has kept me alive for the past month.
Rule one: No water that doesn't come out of a bottle you opened yourself. And that includes brushing your teeth!
Rule two: No fresh or raw fruit or veg that may have been washed in unknown water. So no salads.
Rule three: No ice. You don't know where the water came from that made it.
Rule four: Don't touch your face or mouth with your fingers. It's surprising how often we unconsciously do this, so it's a hard one to self-regulate.
Rule five: Wash your hands as often as possible, and between washes, use sanitizer.

We found pen sanitizers in the states, and then a friend found them in a Chinese $2 shop in Christchurch. So I always had a couple of pens in a pocket.

I may have mentioned that my flash phone decided not to play well with the telcos, about two days after we landed in India. That day I was showing my crocs a good time at the pool, I noticed that my phone said No Service. I had automatically connected to the Idea network when we landed in Mumbai, but not any more. It stayed like that for the whole India trip. It actually doesn't matter, because I don't make calls while overseas, but I am planning to go into Telecom when I get home and get my sim replaced, because everything else worked. You have no idea how irritating it is to have Sarah bleating on about the wonders of her all-powerful brick. Bloody cheap Nokia. Anyway, we get off the plane in Dhaka, and it chirps into life with a local network. Go figure.

I actually don't mind staying at CDC. The entire top floor is the family home, so there is room to sit in a corner and read or write. I have managed to update the blog with photos. It's a little harder on the iPad than the laptop, so It has taken longer. But what else am I going to do, right?

Despite the size of the apartment, it does not really qualify as having a large initial on the roof. It was laid out to accommodate many visitors, so there are about six bedrooms. Some have ensuites, some not so much. Because this organization runs on the goodwill of sponsors and donations, they are often entertaining church groups who want to come and see where their donations are being spent.
That is the reason for both the number of bedrooms, and for the spartan fit out of the building.
This is a school, in a third world country. There is no justification to have hotel features anywhere in the building, so you won't find them in the apartment either. When Bishu designed the building, his plan was that when he and Vijaya are both gone, the top floor would become office space.

While locals from the villages might see this building as palatial, for Europeans it is more of a hostel. So we are glamping again.