Introducing KFC Chicken Strings

I met an adviser to the prime minister's cabinet today. His name is H. T. Imam. And he rolled into the butterfly park with a HUGE entourage, maybe five or six cars, police escorts, the works. He was meeting with the family of MRA, just because. Officially he was there to check out the butterfly park. Unofficially, unclear.

After that we spent the day in Chittagong touring some other businesses. First we went to a cement plant. At this point, I've been to so many random businesses that I have no interest in that I was kind of like "ok cool, you make cement, that's cool I guess, let's move on." After that, we went to a towel factory. Which I thought was also going to be more of the same but it turned out to be way more interesting than I expected (more on this in my next post).


In the evening we went to a replica park, which kind of sounds like it's out of a scifi movie, but basically it's a park with replicas of all the major monuments in Bangladesh. Who needs to tour the country when you can just come here? Dad wanted me to taste what KFC was like in Bangladesh, so that's where we ate for dinner. The chicken strips I had would have been more accurately called chicken strings. Dad claims the chicken here tastes better because it's all raised organically, etc. but I can't tell the difference. Maybe that's because we have good chicken in San Francisco too.

That night we stayed at the Agrabad Hotel, one of the best hotels in Chittagong, and owned by MHA. Something I'm coming to realize is that top-of-the-line in the 3rd world is roughly equal to "pretty good" by American standards. The rooms still don't feel quite as clean or in general as nice as you would find at home.

Bonus anecdote: Tonight, traffic was so bad that our driver literally started driving on the opposite side of the road directly into oncoming traffic. This actually happened. As in, the road has a divider between the two sides, and my driver crossed onto the wrong side of the road when there was a break in the divider. Not just in a "I'm gonna pass this car and get back onto the correct side of the road" kind of way but in a "oncoming cars, I hope you are paying attention because you need to dodge me as much as I need to dodge you" kind of way.