Today we thought we had better get out of the air-conditioned 4x4 and go for a walk. The weekend here is Friday-Saturday and on Friday there is about 10% of the normal traffic so it seemed a good day for our first real venture. There is a lake/sewer near the house with a path around it so we took the path up our side (Gulshan, the financial district, ie. 'posh') and up to where the embassies are ('posh' also). It was ok, there was lots of rubbish in the lake and slums on the other side built out over the water. I was dressed in a long skirt and had a scarf wrapped around me as it is Prayer Day and I didn't want to attract too much attention...I did. Marc seemed to be ok on this walk but I got stared at quite a lot. The combined features of being white, a woman, chatting to my husband, and having bad shoes (not little sandals) probably.

So we came back for lunch and then went out again. I felt I had been stared at quite a bit so I changed into a local outfit that I bought this week. We wandered around and all was good until a small boy about 5 years old came up to us and said hello. Being westerns we said hello back then he asked Marc for money. We said no and carried on, but he started hugging Marc around the middle...we carried on but he wrapped himself completely around Marc's leg and wouldn't let go! We didn't really know what to do, there wasn't much we could do really, we couldn't really carry on but we didn't want to stop either. It looked pretty funny and soon a crowd surrounded us. After a while it stopped being funny, but we still didn't know what to do. Luckily after a while one of the men in the crowd pulled the boy off and we made a hasty retreat down a side street and hid in a shop for a while until we felt brave enough to go back onto the street.

It was quite distressing as it was our first experience with such persistence and we didn't know what to do. Unfortunately, I think that the only way to avoid it is not to slow down and say the first 'hello'.

We are planning on going out to Old Dhaka tomorrow so will try to fend off the limpets a bit better then!