I feel that I have drastically misled my audience. I was going on and on about driving in Delhi and how they are the worst drivers and so on. But I have recently determined this to not be true at all. The fact of the matter is that Bangali drivers would be significantly worse, but development has not allowed them to reach their full potential. And trust me, I know this for a fact, I easily spend a third to half my day in a car. Dhaka, is the most densely populate place in the world. I don't really care what statistics say, there is no way people can live in any closer quarters than this. I often like to spend my time (any time, not just here) thinking of ways to improve things regardless of it is cities, food, or people. I have been trying to figure out a way to improve Dhaka. The major problem here is traffic. It is impossible to get any where because there is always traffic. It takes over an hour to go 10 km. I would just walk places except there are no side walks. I considered public transport for a while but subways would flood and I don't think a monorail would just collapse. I thought about buses then realized that they have them everywhere and they are always full. There are just too many people in Dhaka and a gross lack of city planning. Then I thought about moving people out to the countryside or establishing another megacity. But there is no place for them to go. Most of Bangaldesh floods. Thus, people have built up the land for roads, buildings, and villages by digging out space for the water to go and is used for farming in between time. Basically, all of Bangladesh looks like rice fields (look at the pics if you don't believe me). There is a single lane road that winds through the country and ditches on either side. For the most part, driving in Bangladesh is a continuous game of chicken. There is barely enough space for one car to drive on the road. Yet some how I see massive tour buses regularly pass each other. I think that 32 people die a day in traffic accidents and I honestly believe that must be an underestimation. After much pondering, I finally concluded that 150 million people is just too much to fit in the state of Wisconsin and that there is no real solution.


I forgot to mention that they don't know how to read maps here and that the streets are not in order and occasionally change. Thus the main form of navigation is rolling down the window and asking the nearest passerby if they know where random location is. They inevidably say yes and start directing you there. The catch is that they really don't and are making things up. So you end up in the middle of no where. We pulled out a map once and asked our driver if he knew where we lived and he said yes (he's been going there every day for a month). We asked if he knew where we lived on the map and pointing to the competely wrong location. I think cartography/ geography should be added to the primary school curriculum.