Bangladesh, Part I.

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

- Rudyard Kipling

As soon as we stepped outside of the airport in Dhaka, my coworker Saumil, who lived in India as a child and has been back several times visiting family, stopped and then said to me, "Do you smell that? Now I know I'm in south Asia."

There are many smells here. Some good, like the smell of curry and other spices. Some not so good, like the smell of burning garbage or traffic fumes (so much traffic! at all hours!).

There are days I have curry for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so if I come back smelling a little differently, you'll know why. Either that or smelling like my hotel room does after the nightly mosquito spraying (which I guess is better than getting dengue, although on the days I'm actually in the room during the spraying I'm not so sure).