My recent trip to Bangladesh was perhaps the most impactful of my life. I landed in a 2020 Dhaka which was nothing and everything like the Dhaka of my childhood.

Childhood trips had involved a one- or two- night stay in a mosquito/roach-frequented hotel, followed by a very bumpy bus or car ride 6-10 hours south to our hometown. My dad wasn’t really the kind of guy to spend on a western-style hotel or an overpriced ride to rural Bangladesh.

This trip, in my thirties, equipped with an incorrigible nature and a smartphone, I would do things I directed myself. My parents followed their typical routine and headed south, failing to convince me to do the same. I stayed back in Dhaka for a week, solo.

Solo. Female. American born. This raised so many eyebrows around me that I wondered if I had spinach in my teeth. Sure, women now do everything in Dhaka. Rich women. White women. Chalak* Bangladeshi women. Just not American born Bangladeshi women with roots in Noakhali who can’t read, write, or properly speak Bangla.

I cannot begin to describe Dhaka adequately in one post, so I won’t. Yet.

I will only say that I figured out how to get around. The answer for me was mostly Uber, and my start and stop point was the American Burger pictured above. You must take into account that almost no one I knew thought it possible that *I* would be taking Ubers around town by myself. Most of the drivers don’t seem to know how to use their phones, exactly. I imagine many cannot read. But the ones in my neighborhood all knew where the American Burger was, thank God.

I started to feel like what an American Burger must feel like. A little foreign but not completely foreign, palatable in conversation, conditionally portable, honestly pleasant overall. See American Burger walk. See American Burger run. See American Burger try to cross one of Dhaka’s highways on foot without being turned into burger meat.

So began my brief journey in Bangladesh.

*Smart/fast, and sometimes not the good kind.