Underground on the 2nd Floor

If you’ve read any of Robert Kaplan’s political-travelogues or even Tim Cahill’s often hilarious interpretations of the places to which he travels, a picture will appear in your head when I mention the phrase ‘underground third-world bar’. This will resonate particularly acutely if you’ve had the opportunity to visit one yourself. Mine’s called the Nightingale.

Working off a discrete suggestion offered to Marc by a hotel staff member, whom we’ve nicknamed ‘Troublemaker’ because of his short stature and mischievous nature that leaves you with the impression that he’s got something up his sleeve, we ventured three blocks down the road the night we had moved into the guest house to track down the mysterious underground bar we’d been told about. In a predominantly Muslim country, this is an onerous task that requires fifty percent local know-how and fifty percent foreign audacity. Spotting the bright yellow sign for the Nightingale Restaurant across the street only five minutes away from our office, we crossed the busy intersection.

We weren’t quite sure whether the restaurant we were visiting was actually selling beer, wine or liquor for take-out or whether they were simply serving it to your table or from the bar. It took a carefully worded inquiry on my part to the man at the front desk, surrounded by four or five waiters as per the usual in restaurants catering to foreigners or moneyed locals in this city, to find out the answer to our question. As soon as I mentioned ‘beer’ he knew exactly what I was referring to and signalled to the guard outside the door to take us across the lot to the stairs on the opposite side of the building. As he lead us up the dark passageway the thought passed through my mind that I wasn’t quite sure what we were getting ourselves into, but that soon passed at the sight of a large Tiger Beer poster directly outside the door and behind yet another guard who gladly opened the door for the two of us.

Inside was something straight out of a Quentin Tarantino film: minimal lighting, in fact, so little that one can only see half way across the room when standing at the entrance; a dozen sets of four retro looking white chairs, each tightly grouped together around a single circular table and only one which was occupied; two shady looking local characters smoking cigarettes at the bar; and a fine selection of imported and domestic liquor to round off the picture. Despite the dark atmosphere, I didn’t once feel anxious or insecure about being there – the bartender was friendly, and a veteran negotiator, while the ubiquitous guard outside the door served his purpose of assuaging any (misplaced) fears of something going wrong. After laying the same carefully worded question down on the table, the bartender assured us that we had come to the right place and the negotiating began. In stock that night were a handful of different types of liquor and canned Heineken (and most likely Tiger Beer as well, but he’d prefer to make a real profit and sell his foreign beer to the eager foreigners). He initially offered up bottles of whiskey, Beefeater Gin and what I think was Eastern European Vodka, but after showing our concern over the price of the brand name gin (1600 taka) and Marc (the more experienced of the two of us in this department) insisting that the vodka and whiskey were more fit for Molotov Cocktails than they were for human consumption (not in those words, exactly), we settled on a bottle of Bangladesh-produced vodka at less than half the price of the foreign version and six cans of Heineken for a decent price after a little tough negotiating. Once again I played the honest Canadian card and was rewarded in spades. I did mean it, though, when I said we’d be seeing him again soon; some of the directors from RCT Copenhagen, our Danish partner and primary donor, are coming in the first week of October on a project appraisal mission and we’ll be taking them out for drinks. It can’t be compared to a seedy bar in Canada or the United States at all, though. In fact, that would be more of an insult to the establishment than an accurate description of its appearance. It’s dark, quiet and hard to find only because of the cultural environment in which it is located, and since it’s supposed to be open only to foreigners (so we were told, but the obvious presence of a few locals indicated that you could also get in if you had the right connections) it has to be decently clean and comfortable as well. In any event, we’ve found our local watering hole.