4th of July Lives on in Madagascar

Well, maybe they don't celebrate the 4th of July here, but we certainly do!  Our team went to Fianarantsoa (often just called Fi-Uh-Nar) because we had the day off.  Toget there, we took an hour and a half Taxi-Brousse ride, which is basically a 22 person van that in the states would hold 14 people.  Since I'm definitely in the top 10% of tall people in this country, my knees were not too happy by then end of the ride.  On top of that, a woman asked me to put her bag in between my legs because she had a baby on her lap, whose head ended up on my lap also. Once in Fianar, we went to the best pizza place in town, and also one of the more expensive restaurants there, and ended up spending about $10 USD per person (most meals here cost about 2-5 USD for a mozzarella/tomato appetizer, drinks, and an amazing oven-cooked pizza per person.  After that, we visited an ice-cream parlor (I haven't had ice-cream in over 5 weeeks!) and I got coconut and banana and Madagascar Vanilla and it was amazing.  After ice-cream we continued our wandering until we happened upon the photography studio of Pierrot Men, Madagascar's most famous photographer.  After wandering into the gallery and buying some of the postcards and photographs, he walks in and has a 20 minute conversation with us, which was pretty cool.  After making it back to the Centre, we told the kitchen staff here that it was someone's birthday, so they made us a cake, which was really a great way to end the 4th of July.

The inauguration of the new building, which I promised to write about last week was a blast!  People came from everywhere to come to the inauguration. A few people include: the president of Stony Brook, the president of University of Pennsylvania, California, Miss Madagascar, the president of Air Madagascar, The American Embassy of Madagascar, plus tons of local people from around here and also people from the capital.  The party was huge (there must have been about 500 people) and it was really great.  It started off at 6:00am with the slaughter of two Zebus (cows), which was a pretty amazing cultural experience.  Pat Wright got a 21 gun salute by the military, which I think is a pretty big honor.  A world famous musician came and played, her name is TarikaBe and she apparently has won a grammy, and is on some famous top 10 current musician's list.  I talked to her for a while at the party and she's really out-there but in a good kind of way.  She had this really cool necklace on and I was talking to her about it and I asked her where she got it and she was like "o, I made it!"  She's done a lot of tours in the US also, apparently. During her concert and then after, there was tons of dancing (I danced with miss Madagascar kind of, which was pretty cool).  The party went on until about 5am, but I went to bed at around 2am.  I got to sleep in the new building last night, which was enjoyable, especially because it was pouring yesterday and our tents are at the top of a long path on a slippery hill.

Hope everyone else is having such a great time!  I'll attach some photo's for the next post.  I am, however, going to be going on a 10 day expedition, so it's going to be a little while before I have internet again.  I'll tell you all about it when I return

Ian