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Posts tagged ‘Dhaka’

The Best of Southeast Asia

Just as I did with South America, here’s a quick roundup of my favorite food-related experiences in Southeast Asia. In terms of food and beverage (as well as many other things), these two months were quite different than the previous two – entirely different styles and flavors, different traditions surrounding food, and different attitudes and behaviors on our part. For instance, by this point in our travels we became far more comfortable with eating street food, which was much more abundant in Southeast Asia than in South America. At the beginning of South America I was generally fairly wary, unsure of how to tell what would be safe. By the time we got to Southeast Asia those feelings were long gone, and I happily and readily dug into anything and everything we saw on the street that looked delicious. More often than not we’d sit down at a place based on the signage, hold up two fingers (“two orders, please”), and eat whatever they brought out. It was definitely to our benefit, since a lot of the non-street food we had was incredibly mediocre. (I’m sure if we had gone to fancier places, there would have been some pretty great stuff.) We also discovered some of our most favorite dishes this way.

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Dhaka: The Food

After two weeks in Bali, we spent a very quick two days in Bangkok before flying to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to visit a good friend of ours who works at the US Embassy there.

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There’s so much to say about Dhaka that I’m not really sure where to start. It’s not the sort of place we would have put on our itinerary if we hadn’t had a friend to stay with and show us the ropes, and that’s exactly why we went. We had an amazing time – a once-in-a-lifetime sort of experience, actually – but it was certainly not an easy place to travel. We had it about as easy as humanly possible, with a lovely big apartment to stay in and a kitchen in which to cook with items bought from the American Commissary and a constant source of distilled (i.e. safe to drink) water, a driver to bring us where we wanted to go, a ready-made social group of our friend’s lovely colleagues, and a friend to bring us to great restaurants (more on that later) and recommend places to go and things to see. Without all of that, Dhaka would have been much more difficult. Read more