Vaca

A few weeks ago I went on vacation with some other PCVs for the Easter holiday. A group of 7 of us went to Tamatave and Foulpointe, two beach towns north of my site. The great thing about vacation (aside from being with friends) is that you don't have to feel guilty about not working. When I'm sitting in my house reading all day, I feel guilty for not doing something more 'productive'...but that feeling is gone the minute you're on vaca.

Vacation got off to a frustrating start when my friend had the brousse he was on pick me up at my house. That was a nice convenience. However, what we didn't know was that is was a regional brousse which meant it stopped every 5 minutes. What should have been a 4 hour drive lasted 7+hours. We spent the first few days in Tamatave doing touristy things...eating ice cream and milkshakes, eating pizza, fripping and hanging out on the beach. The new group of trainees were also in Tamatave so we got to meet the new environment volunteers (and finally give up our name as the new stage!). We continued northward and went up to Foulpointe where we somehow ended up at the nicest hotel in town. We got a bungalow right on the beach, and since we crammed a few extra people in, it turned out to be pretty cheap. The hotel had a pool, flat screen TVs, a bathroom with a door, and customer service (a rare find in this country). The next few days we lived in paradise, playing in the pool, eating fresh oysters on the beach, drinking coconuts and pretending we made dollars instead of ariary. Our final night we hired some guys to cook us a lobster dinner on the beach. It was delicious and cost only $5. After renting out a brousse for a little extra money and the promise not to pick up other passengers, we went back to Tamatave where we set out to find hamburgers for lunch. Of the three of four places all advertising burgers, zero actually had them. So we settled at a different restaurant where we saw someone eating delicious looking fried chicken. So four of us ordered 'akoho frite' (fried chicken) and we specifically told the waitress that we wanted what the other guy was eating. However, something always goes wrong and when they brought us our food, they brought 4 entire chickens. And the guy who ordered steak ended up with the mea the four of us with full chickens had wanted. You just can't win.

Not wanting vaca to end, we all went to Moramanga for one last night before dispersing to our sites. I should have known it was going to be a bad transportation day because we woke up to a massive storm which turned Tamatave into a very liquidy trash pile. Gross. We found a brousse though, and took off. An hour into our trip we got a flat tire. And two hours later, the same tire bloew out. We sat on the side of the road (conveniently at a house that sold stools) and watched our driver disappear and reappear with tires and tools. We did make it to Moramanga, but about three hours after we expected. Oh well.

I got back to my site on Easter day, just in time for the day after easter festivities. The Monday after Easter, everyone goes on a picnic to celebrate. So I went with the mayor's family to 'manao picnic.' I thought it was odd that we were carrying speakers and a generator to the picnic...but I should have learned by now not to ask questions. It was fun though. We ate a lot and the men all got really drunk, and I somehow became the event photographer. People were lined up to have their pictures taken. And by the end of the day the village president was walking me around advertising 'Easter souveneirs 600Ar'. But now I'm responsible for printing 80 pictures and I have a constant stream of people coming to my house either to pick up their pictures, or have more pictures taken. I'm the new Tsarasambo mpaka sary.

Giardia. So gross. I had dinner at my friends' house after getting back from vaca. It was delicious, but 6 hours later I felt like I was going to throw up my insides. Maybe it was just food poisoning, but I self-diagnosed giardia. I spent 24 hours in my bed not really moving. Interestingly, its as if the mayor's wife has a detector for when I'm sick. Seriously 20 seconds after throwing up she was at my door asking what the news was at my house. It was 2:30am.