Airports, Poop Tea, and a Familiar Place

My parents have arrived back in the place of my early childhood. I received an e-mail from Dad this morning. I feel memories about me suddenly as if someone laid a coat around my shoulders--dusty Dacca (as it was spelled when we were there almost thirty years ago), the call to prayer early in the morning, marketplaces with oddly- shaped, wonderful balloons, the sounds of afternoon--planes high in the sky outside my window, calls in the street from beggars and peddlars, the clink of tin:

We're in very dusty Dhaka-in the Baptist Guest House. We get here about 1 am this morning and were in bed just after 2. Portus, the cook and helper has worked here for 25 years, and remembers seeing us before. Water shortage for flushing the toilet but things pretty much the same except the house is now surrounded by high rises.
Off to the office shortly.
Much love,
Dad

My mother wrote to us from Bangkok, and her memories are much stronger than mine:

So, we have just come from a swim in the lovely flat pool on the roof of the hotel, swimming in bathtub water, surrounded by banana plants, looking u[p at the moon and evening star and feeling as though we were in paradise. We walked into the evening air last night 24 hours after we had left home to the familiar thick air, sauna like and layered with rich and haunting smells. Suddenly I was back 25 years ago, a young woman with our children living a great adventure. Even the fact that the person in the plane in front of us had poured his tomato juice down through the seat over my sweater and carry-on case not to be discovered until hours later when it was coagulated and clinging, even though the hotel had put us in a smoking room...it was dizzyingly happy to be here.

We are back in the land of showers that simply happen on the bathroom floor, where you need to remember to close your mouth and not drink the water. Our hotel is across the street from the Dang Lee Massage Parlour, where the ladies lounge out front, extending their lovely legs out from their sarongs to attract passersby.

The sidewalks are crowded with tables with people eating wonderful things and the cars dart in and out between the people and motorcycles, and amazingly it all seems to fit together. We walked to the office past great piles of mangos...in season!...and vegetables I couldn't identify. At lunch we walked with others to an outside shelter about the size of a football field filled with long tables and chairs, edged with dozens of food vendors. We pushed our way through to a woman who let us point to what we wanted: fish, sticky rice and spinach. For about $1.10 we had a delicious meal in the happy chaos of all the noise and comings and goings of others. On the way back to the office, Kim Ta Teet, a beautiful Thai woman in her twenties, said she was going to a shop for tea, and would I like some? Yes, definitely. The tea turned out to be a milky tea in a large plastic cup with ice. Bouncing around the bottom were a pile of black pellets...with a laugh she said that she called it "poop tea". The pellets were like gummy bears, so you sucked it up with the tea and then chewed them. The children would have loved it!

Dad and I were really fading after lunch for a while; we had had about 4 hours of sleep in the past 36 hours.

And then I received a funny e-mail from my parents from the Kuala Lupur airport, which sounds like an incredible place:

Hi dear people. We are waiting in the Kuala Lupur airport for a flight to Bangladesh. The Bangkok airport is amazing with hundreds of glitzy shops, like a sophisticated mall that happens to have airplanes coming and going. This one too. There's a stunning jungle walk in the center of this concourse where you go through a mesh that is designed to keep birds in and you actually go outside into a jungle environment with big trees and vines and calls of birds and roaring waterfalls. It is surreal.

I suspect that the Bangladesh airport may not have reached this level yet.

This e-mail, which seems to have been written in a tearing hurry (I corrected some funny errors, such as "treesn vinesn calls of birds. . .) was followed by a pithy note from my father:

Mom hit the wrong button and we need to finish our $5 bottles of water!
Love,
Dad

I love that my mother is along with my father on this two-month trip; though they're both working hard the whole time, I think my mother will take time to write us detailed accounts of places we haven't seen since we were young children. Heather was eight when we left Bangladesh; I was turning six; and my brother was a toddler. Both he and I were born in Bangladesh.

Well, my own child summons. She's trying to make a "clam shell" out of two pieces of string and a paper plate, to very little success.