After about 30 hours of travel, I landed in TNR airport on Friday around 1:00 PM. The flight was fantastic as far as long flights go. We were served amazing food every 20 minutes, offered many tiny bottles of wine and had individual screens for movie watching. Like any obvious foreigner, I also took pictures of anything and everything on the flight.
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| I kept myself busy |
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| We got gifts! |
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| This is how you keep yourself busy for 11 hours... |
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| First view of Madagascar |
There's 17 people in total in our group, so I'll be taking classes and wandering the city of Antananarivo with them for the next couple of months before our Independent Study Projects where we choose to live literally any where in the country. ...I'm daunted and overwhelmed by the prospect.
For the past week, we've been staying in a hotel about an hour outside of the city. Since I only have a few minutes before I have to leave the internet cafe, I'll be brief for now: Tana is enormous and busy. The traffic is a disaster; there aren't stop lights and drivers abide by the "Might means right" philosophy. White people are called "vasha," so we get that a lot. Everyone laughs at us and staring isn't culturally taboo, so there's also lots of that. The Malagasy eat rice with every meal and so far I've encountered chicken liver, cow tongue, zebu, entire fish with heads, bones, and eyes, and other foods that I didn't even ask about. Everyone's stomachs and digestive systems are miserable, but at least we're all in the same boat. It rains a little bit every day and the temperature is a very humid 80-ish degrees.
Tonight I'm meeting my first homestay family, with whom I'll be living for the next month. Eek. Je suis impatiente, mais pas excitee. (This was one of the first clarifications they made for us, since "excitee" means sexually aroused. Wouldn't that be fun to tell the family).
I have to go now, I'll post more later.
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| Here's a picture to finish up this post |
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