by mike
At one point my friend needed the toilet. A minute after going in, he came back out again, with a face as white as a sheet.
I arrived at Dhaka in 1994 with my wife,my friend and his wife. We were due to stay at a hotel until the next morning to catch a connecting flight, but were told we could not leave the airport as there had been several murders just outside (no joke). anyway the “authorities” at the airport took all our passports off us,and we “settled” down for the night.
The place was a sess pit, with dirty floors and peeling paint on the filthy walls, and scraggy cats roaming about..I decided to have a look at the goodies they had for sale in the airport shop. I say shop, but infact it was a 10ft by 4ft glass case, consisting of milk and cigarettes and nothing else.
The stand up ashtrays dotted about the place were not being used for cigarette ends as you might think, NO, they were being used to collect spit,from around 40 men (I stopped counting after that) who everytime that they walked by, oinked and coughed up flem and then spat it in the ashtrays. It wasn’t too bad though, because every now and again a “cleaner walked by and emptied the flem/spit from the ashtray into a bucket.
At one point my friend needed the toilet. A minute after going in, he came back out again, with a face as white as a sheet. He told me that he went in the first of the two cubicles and found that not only had someone shit on the seat, but right up, and I mean right up the wall, and smothered it everywhere. the second cubicle was just as bad, and it had no loo roll.
Anyway as dawn broke an airport worker asked me to get him some cigarettes if he gave me the money (I found out later that cigarettes are worth more than the local currency). I told him no because I was about to board my flight anytime soon. With that, he introduced me to his wife (the flem cleaner) who he said would have sex with me if I purchased the cigarettes for him. I declined, as (A) I didn’t fancy her, and (B) my wife sat next to me. As all the passengers stood in line to get on the flight another one of the airport workers started screaming at a young British lad who had also refused to buy any cigarettes for him, that the death of a thousand skies would fall down on him. It was, as you can imagine, quite a relief to board the plane.