First I want to say that I have decided to write on this blog in English from now on. I’m not sure if I will be able to keep it up once I get to the West Bank but my hope is to do so and to keep writing in English so all my friends that doesn't understand the lovely language of the north – Swedish! Still will be able to follow what I experience there. I’m probably not going to write more than once a week or so, but I will write other texts as well there as part of my work so might also write a bit more on my blog.
But right now I’m still in Bangladesh and I have had a great time here. I got to do a lot of cool things like spend Christmas in a village called Keshapure where I lived in as a child and I got even got to try fishing Bangla style…
…and to eat a lot of mishty again! I really, really wish I knew how to make mishty so I can do it back home as well. Even if I know that part of the reason I like it so much is that I can’t get it in Sweden.. But once all the bedeshi (foreigners in Bengali) left here for a meeting in India I was left with a lot of nice evenings to my self. And as it is winter here it get really cold in the evening. Not - 25 Celsius as back in Sweden but still it feels cold when it’s the same temperature inside as outside of the house. So for the last month I have spent a lot of time in bed under a warm blanket reading books, or rather listen to audio books. One of the best inventions of the last century for sure!!
So finally the books. I started by watching movies, but once I had seen all other movies that Nathan and Phil had left me I finally gave in and watched the Harry Potter movies as well. Or at least the first five movies. No 1 and 2 isn’t so good so I kind of jumped through them but I liked no 3, 4 and 5. After finishing them I didn’t remember if I had read book 6 and 7 before so I ended up finding them online and reading them instead of looking for the movie. After that I went on to reading book 22 and 23 in the Swedish version of Wheel of Time series of Robert Jordan again, then reading Enders Game of Orson Scott Card, as well as Enders Shadow of the same author. I also got through a book named “A poor family's home take only five minutes to tear down” by Swedish author Pernilla Ahlsén as well as “The lost land” by Göran Rosenberg both regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but written in very different ways.
After these books I ended up starting to read a book by war correspondent Robert Fisk (by the way Fisk means Fish in Swedish) called “The great war for humanity – the fight for the Middle East” again but that is a truly long story so I’m not finished with it even if it’s really interesting. All in all I have read 8 books and started 4 more (except the one by Robert Fisk also reading three books about the Koran and Islam as preparation for living in the West Bank) and on my computer I have The kite runner, two more books by O. S. Card as well as one SiFi book I haven’t read before and three books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so if I finish them all before leaving here I will have read more books in this three months then I have done out side of studies for the last three years! A really great feeling =) I realize that I really love it.
To describe that I can shortly tell you how it was when I was reading Enders Game. Internet is really slow here and in Nondokul (where I work on my project as well as sleep every night) internet is non existing. This mean that I need to take my bike in to Bogra (about 30 min one way) every time I want to check my email or download a audio book. So I had the same day been in Bogra and finally found Enders Game online (Enders Game isn’t available in the Swedish library for talking books and brail where I otherwise have a online account wish is great! – Gives me the right to download any book they have straight to my computer =). So I had been staying in Bogra to late waiting for the book to get downloaded and managed to download half the book. I listening to it all the way home and I kept going until 2 am when I forced my self to fall asleep. Waking up next morning at 7.30 am first thing I do is to start listen to the book again but when I realize I have finished listen to all I managed to download before I was so close to get on my bike and go in to Bogra again the same morning to set my computer up to download the rest. But that would take me one hour back and forth for just that so I finally decided not to. The interesting thing for me is not that I wanted to waste an hour doing that, but how strongly I wanted to do it. I really can’t remember wanting to do anything that much in years – but it didn’t fit my schedule so I didn’t go. I managed to get the rest of the book by the next day though so all good in the end, but I must admit that I had forgot just how much I love to loose my self in a good story. Something I really shouldn’t let go again.
(Even if I must admit that I know why I gave it up – I do get just a bit asocial when I’m stuck in a story… But I think I’m starting to get a balance to it by now.)
/// m
