I hope everyone is doing well; I’m also doing great. Due to being busy for a long time, I couldn’t share any posts with you all. I traveled to many places, but sharing them wasn’t possible. I’m thinking of becoming regular with you all from now on and seeking everyone’s love and support.
Today, the travel story I’m going to share with you is about going to see Bangladesh’s dream Padma Bridge. This is a dream bridge for the people of Bangladesh. After a long wait and much anticipation, it was inaugurated in 2022. A lot of time has passed since then, yet I couldn’t visit due to my busy schedule. My friend had been asking me to go since that time, but due to thousands of commitments studies and many other things, it never happened.
Anyway, overcoming all the busyness, this time I finally took that friend to see the Padma Bridge - our dream Padma Bridge. I want to divide this into two parts because it won’t be possible to share everything with you through just one travel post. And I don’t want to write short travel posts for you; I always prefer detailed discussions.
That day was November 13. It was lightly cold, the beginning of the first winter season, but the sun was quite strong. We had discussed and decided everything the previous day, when and how we would leave and what we would do. The next morning, after waking up, having breakfast, we set off around 10 o’clock to my friend’s place to pick him up. Let me mention that I live in Uttara and he lives in Mirpur. Our plan was to pick him up from Mirpur and go directly to Gulshan, because from there buses go straight to Mawa Ghat. So, as planned, we boarded a bus from Gulshan toward Mawa Ghat. Another noteworthy thing is that our purpose of going to see the Padma Bridge was about 60%, while the remaining 40% was to eat the famous and delicious Hilsa fish at Mawa Ghat.
We reached the place around 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The first impression upon arriving was seeing the Padma River. Let me tell you, I had never seen such a big river before. To put it simply, I had never seen a river at all, let alone one this huge. It looked as beautiful as it was a bit frightening. And on top of that, since I don’t know how to swim, it’s natural to feel scared of such a large river. After that, for our main purpose eating Hilsa fish - we saw many restaurants around. At first, we couldn’t imagine there would be so many restaurants. If I had to guess, there were more than 30 restaurants. We couldn’t decide which one to choose and where we would get good fish. So we walked around the entire area to see which one looked good. And almost every restaurant was calling us as we passed by. We became even more confused. I told my friend, “You’ll see, if the people eating at a restaurant are smiling, that means they are satisfied with the food.” Though it was just a spontaneous idea of mine and I know it wasn’t that practical.
After checking all the restaurants, we finally chose one where we saw many people going in. Then came the fish selection phase, they would cut and cook the fish right in front of us. One by one, we started looking at the fish, and they showed us several. Let me mention that both of us were completely inexperienced in these matters, but we were pretending to be experts. Then we selected one fish, and they properly cut it, prepared it for cooking, fried it in oil, and made a chutney out of the fish tail. Let me add that everyone here loves the tail chutney. I had never eaten it before, but I had heard from everyone that it is supposed to be very tasty.
After everything was fried and cooked, our selected fish and food were sent to our table. We freshened up and sat down at the table to eat. Everything looked nice together, and it seemed like it would be delicious. But who knew reality would be a bit different, I’ll come to that later. Then I took some fried eggplant, and my friend took some light dal. After that, we finished the fried fish and the fish tail chutney one by one. I forgot to mention one thing: our fish had a few eggs in it. They say fish with eggs in the middle don’t taste as good, but ours had some anyway. They had said they would give us one without eggs, yet it still had some nothing we could do. I liked the fried fish eggs and the tail chutney. My friend didn’t like anything except the fish eggs a little. To be honest, neither of us was satisfied, because the Hilsa fish cooked at our homes tastes much better than this. And that was the truth.
And that was our experience of eating Hilsa fish at Mawa Ghat. In the next part, I will talk about when we went onto the Padma Bridge, how the experience was, and also about riding a boat on the Padma River. I hope you will wait for the next part and enjoy it. For today, goodbye - we’ll meet in the next part.
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Translated by Grok
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