The first week was spent going back and forth between the Peace Corps house and Mika's house, and waiting for Eliko to get to Tana while exchanging 2 or 3 text messages a day with her in which we bounced back and forth between potential vacation locales, debating likelihood of rain versus likelihood of heatstroke, how many hours/days we were willing to spend in a taxibrousse, etc. During this time I was having a completely different type of Tana experience than the usual (hanging out doing big city things with Peace Corps volunteers). Instead I was doing all these "normal," hanging out with americans-type things, but with Gasy people. Gasy people with money and access to newspapers, the greater world, etc. Big city folk.
I'll insert this picture to remind you of who my friends are at site:
I love my life and the people at my site, and the ambanivolo lifestyle is what I've grown totally used to. I just want to show you this picture and the next one to give you an idea of what a trip it was to be living the big city life for a couple weeks.
The above picture is Davis, Ninah, me and Mika. Things to note: juice in a box, remote control, painted cement wall, camera on table, decorative dried flower arrangement in corner, painting on wall, ashtray, I am clean and wearing a cordoroy jacket and dangly earrings. We're at Davis' house, where we went to hang out and talk. About politics and work and what we've been up to, which was different yesterday from the day before. Ninah is super awesome and took me out to the Tana countryside to bathe in a sacred waterfall while people played the accordion and drummed and sang.So it was a super fun week in Tana, highlights (other than the sacred waterfall) being two Mika&Davis concerts, meeting my other favorite Gasy musician, playing pool, singing all of the Paul Simon album Graceland with a guy who works at Mika's studio (he knows a few words from all the songs, I have known every word in the manner that we know the pledge of allegiance since a very young age) while I waited for Mika to get home (after a transportation miscommunication), and finally, helping Mika move from his room below the studio to a couple rooms at the back of the studio so that the person who owned the land could destroy just the half of the building that he owned (something about a fight with his brother who owned the other half), but not completely destroyed, so that Mika now lives in a building that looks like this:
Yes that is the sky you see at the top of the photo. His rooms are back behind what you see here, but those doors lead to the bathroom and showers that we have to use. This picture is what used to be the big reception room of the studio, and off to the right were the actual recording rooms with all the equipment. It sucks, to be sure, that the studio and his house were destroyed, but with no roof and all the windows knocked open and a few days of great weather, it was actually kindof beautiful and I took a ton of pictures. But it was a bit of a shock the first night I saw it and had to enter the studio up these stairs:
It was like coming home to find your house had been bombed. 
We were supposed to leave Tana to go to Tamatave (another big city in Madagascar, on the east coast, Mika's hometown), but the night after Christmas we got mugged on our way to a restaurant and I lost my bag with my wallet, phone, mp3 player, identity everything, and a patch of Bruce Springsteen that I'd drawn and embroidered myself. That was a friday night so we had to wait until monday to cancel bank cards and file a report with Peace Corps. We did go to the police on saturday which was an interesting experience. When we arrived we walked past a room where a bunch of officers were sorting through tables overflowing with confiscated pirated cds, and someone called out to Mika that there were a bunch of Mika&Davis cds in the pile, so we had to stop and talk about why Gasy musicians can't make any money. Then I had to go to a shop down the street to buy three sheets of white paper so I could handwrite in triplicate my Declaration of lost or stolen stuff, which meant copying the template that was taped to the wall and then having Mika dictate to me in Malagasy Officiale what happened to us on friday night. Then some police guy typed up a report on an old typewriter and we finally got out of there after a few hours. Which I'm told is fabulously speedy and I should be very grateful.On tuesday we left for Tamatave.
Tamatave was beautiful- very hot, but a very cool city. It's big. I hadn't realized that. I was expecting something more like Mananjary. The climate and the landscape are similar, but Tamatave is an economic capitol of Madagascar and there's loads of stuff going on there. We stayed with Mika's family and I got to see a couple of PCVs too. It was a good trip.
Here's Mika at this party we went to where he got "forced" to play an impromptu mini concert and a very drunk woman got on a microphone and started talking in English about how it was all for me. And everybody was dancing and it was a bajillion degrees and I had to dance with all these people who kept winking at Mika while they were dancing at me which was uncomfortable but I was still happy because his music is so good. Plus everyone was really surprised that I could sing along.
There's more to say. But it will have to wait till tomorrow because I have to go pick up some pictures before the photo place closes. I hope you all had wonderful holidays.
1 comments:
great pictures! i miss you!
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