Category: Places
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Gulshan 3: Weekend Escapes to Thailand
Mae Klong Market and Bangkok’s Unexpected Order Living in the diplomatic heart of Dhaka—nestled between Baridhara, Gulshan 1, and Gulshan 2—you learn to appreciate the finer points of organized chaos. Twenty million people, constant honking that’s considered not just normal but polite communication, and traffic that defies all logic. So when we learned the expat…
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Another Year, Another Itdyadi
I see it has been 18 months since my last post. In that time, a lot has happened in Bangladesh, to say the least. It has kept us all quite busy and on our toes. In the meantime, in the weeks prior to Eid ul Fitr 2024 – which was way back in April –…
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Our Truly Amazing TV Debut: Behind the Scenes
A few months ago, we got word through the Dhaka expat network that someone was looking for “foreigners” to play roles in a Bangladeshi television show. No acting experience or Bengali language experience required. It turns out that this “someone” was none other than television personality, writer, producer, comedian, voice actor, and singer Hanif Sanket.…
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Holi in Bangladesh Part 2: the Ruined Roll
A bit of clicking around this site will reveal I’m a film photographer. And when I went to photograph the Holi celebration for my previous post, I took with me three rolls of film. Only two turned out as intended. I had two small developer tanks that hold two spools each – two in one,…
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Holi in Bangladesh
For those of you familiar with the holiday Holi, it may come as a surprise to see a post about Holi, a Hindu holiday, in Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim country. The number of Hindus in Bangladesh has declined significantly since the country’s independence, but given a total country population, of 170 million, there still remain…
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Hashing Out Old Dhaka
In my previous post, I shared impressions of Old Dhaka gained from an unscripted walk and a 30-minute ride on one of the small ferries. Recently, however, I had the opportunity to enjoy a completely different kind of tour of Old Dhaka – somehow simultaneously more organized and more disorganized – with the Dhaka Hash…
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The Blog is Back: First Impressions of Dhaka, Bangladesh
Taking a break and going back to school for the last two years has been such a wonderful opportunity! But then again, writing, reading, doing photography, simply because I want to, and not because I’ve got an assignment due…well, I’ve kind of missed that. So here’s our first installment from the latest phase. Adventure is…
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“Artisans” documentary series – final (?) episode
Some of you may have seen my “Artisan” series of mini-documentaries. The plan was to highlight different occupations in Madagascar’s informal sector that involve a specialized skill. Jobs that don’t really exist in the West, with detail that may even surprise some people in Madagascar. I didn’t expect the project to take over two years!…
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Every Day is a Surprise. Also, People are A$$h0Le5.
Life is funny. Some days you wake up and things are – meh – run of the mill, nothing to write home about. Other days you wake up and experience a day you never imagined. I’ve had three traffic accidents in the last month. In the first, I was found at fault – a “tuktuk”…
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When Langtang Vanished
April 25, 2015. I was enjoying an idyllic vacation in Mauritius, swimming with the largest animals in the world. When we returned to the dock, my phone rang: how quickly could I get to Nepal? There had been an awful earthquake, thousands had perished, and many were still missing and/or trapped in the hills and…
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Reunion Island: a Little (Volcanic) Piece of France in the Middle of the Indian Ocean
Living in Madagascar, people would sometimes ask, “Don’t you get island fever?” Of course, this never happened – given that it stretches the distance from New York City to the tip of Florida, it’s more like a small continent than an island. Still, from time to time, it’s nice to visit some of the smaller…
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Onward to Mahajanga, Madagascar
In my previous post I talked about our meticulously planned trip to see all four islands of the Comoros archipelago, which was so rudely interrupted by political violence…and so we shifted to Mahajanga, on the west coast of Madagascar. I’ve blogged about Mahajanga before, and I’ve even made videos similar to what I plan to…
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Episode 3 of “Artisans” Published!
Eons ago (ok, October last year) I posted the first episode in a series of mini-documentaries about jobs in the informal sector in Madagascar, about the traveling blacksmiths that wander through the city repairing umbrellas, plastic tubs, roofs… A couple of weeks later, the second episode, about brickmakers. And then, for a long time, nothing.…
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Memories of Favorite Places: Ile aux Nattes, Madagascar
Off the eastern coast of the island of Madagascar stretches a 57-kilometer long by 5 kilometers wide island, covered mostly in green and dotted with thatched-roof villages. Ile Sainte-Marie (Saint Marie’s Island), or Nosy Boraha, as it is known in the local Malagasy, is a popular destination among the whale watching community (see this post…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (3)
This is the third in series of posts in which I write about introducing kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s, at the youth center, Le Cameleon, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. You can find previous posts in this series here, here and here. When it came time for the kids to choose their third…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (2)
This is one of a short series of posts in which I write about introducing kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s, at the youth center, Le Cameleon, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. You can find previous posts in this series here and here. Previously I wrote about how we had sent the…
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Introducing Kids in Madagascar to Photography: Results (1)
I wrote last time about the youth center, Le Cameleon, we crowdfunded and built in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and the project we organized to introduce a half dozen interested kids to photography, using point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1980s and 90s. I was excited and hopeful the kids would wind up with good results, because I…
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Sharing our Passion: Kids in Madagascar Get a First Taste of Photography
A few years ago, I joined a couple of other folks with a passion for photography and an interest in doing something for the local community in Antananarivo, Madagascar. We collaborated to successfully crowdfund a small youth center that would cater to local vulnerable kids who, for whatever reason, were not attending school. Thanks to…
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Visit to Isalo National Park, Madagascar
Shortly before leaving Madagascar after having lived there for more than three years, I finally made it to Isalo National Park, which is one of the premier tourist destinations in country, and one I would have regretted missing out on. My wife and daughter had visited this huge national park, established in 1962, which incorporates…
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One Last Trip – “Lemur Island”
Given today’s justifiable flak surrounding the keeping of pet lemurs or the existence of lemur “petting zoos” that rely on capturing lemurs from the wild, Madagascar’s “Lemur Island” (officially “Vakona Private Reserve”) near Andasibe-Mantadia National Park is seen by some as controversial. The reserve consists of several different islands (lemurs don’t cross water) criss-crossed with…
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Off the Beaten Path in Vatomandry, Madagascar
You could live in Madagascar – for as long as three years – and have trouble getting to see all of the on the beaten path things there are to see in that country–in fact, that’s what I just did, and I can confirm this. But for one of my final posts on traveling in…
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Locust Swarm in Madagascar
Shortly after arriving in Madagascar a few years ago, we watched the BBC’s Planet Earth II episode in which a film crew found it amazingly difficult to track down a swarm containing more than a billion of the tiny, destructive creatures. Apparently, it can be surprisingly difficult to find and film them. We had also…
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Rice Harvest in Antananarivo
After three years living in Antananarivo, you gradually stop noticing the things that you found so fascinating and unique about this city as a newcomer. Antananarivo is a city of 1.5 million people. It has a downtown – an older, French-looking “haute ville” (high city) – cobblestone roads running along, over, and under the hills…
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Great News: Jerome is Learning English and Coding!
Way back in 2016 when I was still new to Madagascar, Anne and I saw an online notice that a crowdfunding initiative on the eastern coast of the country was looking for a photographer and a videographer to produce a crowdfunding video and associated imagery to support a project (at the time still unnamed) to…
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Swimming with Whale Sharks in Madagascar
Check another item off the bucket list: in November, we made it to Nosy Be to see the whale sharks – considered endangered by some – feeding on the plankton that “bloom” there the same time every year. This capped off an amazing year in Madagascar – just a month prior, we managed to get out…