One of the papers I picked up at the FAOOC earlier this week was a list of resources - official and unofficial websites to put you in touch with the embassy and expat community worldwide. Some of them were more helpful than others. One in particular - www.talesmag.com - was awesome (well, kind of). It was definitely a good news/bad news thing. Good news was there were several post reports for Dhaka from within the past year. Bad news... Well, pretty much everything in the reports was bad news. It's not that we hadn't heard most of it before, but to see the same hard facts from different people over and over again was a bit depressing.
In our favor, everyone seems to agree that families with young children enjoy Dhaka more than any other group (families with older children, families with no children, and singles). I'm willing to take a wild stab in the dark here. One of the biggest reported "downsides" of Dhaka is that there's really nothing to do there. No malls, no movie theaters, not a lot of restaurants. And let's face it, parents of small children really have pretty low expectations. You're stuck in the house so much of the time anyway, that it's not really a huge lifestyle change to spend lots of time at home. I'm going to choose to see this in a positive light (because that's always a choice - right?) and go with it.
Of the people who completed post reports, no one said they would consider returning to the post voluntarily for another tour, and they tended to agree that the best part about working there was that it was very close (by plane) to nice destinations in Asia. Really? You can't even think of anything good about actually BEING in the country? The high point is leaving? <sigh> Make that double <sigh>.
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