Election Weekend

Gae, Miora, Tony

 

View from the house of the man below

 

 

Happy on voting day

 The man: Tovo

 Toaka gasy warms the belly

Learning to flow

Below is the hostess, whose wedding we went to in Ambositra

 

AFter party

quirks

On thing that everyone must know is that there is some tea that smells and tastes like a fruity pebbles with milk: verimanitra/

Another thing: this is such a poor country. There is trash everywhere, the streets are use as toilets, most of the buildings are severely damaged, and the cars were made before catalytic converters. What gets me is how ridiculous people look when they get rich. They spend their money on a new car, flashy clothes, and a nice place. But when everyone is wearing dirty clothes, you just look like a chump getting out of your Range in a suit.

Another thing that is important: the different between loaka and a vegetable dish in the US or Europe is not in the ingredients. Rather, since loaka is made to be eaten with rice, it should be that a small morsel flavors a spoonful of rice, so it needs a lot more flavor than a side dish.

Google loses searchers to Facebook, because when people watch a video that is posted on fb, they do not search on Google for the video. What may have been outweighing this fact is that Google gains searchers via the gain in number of people using the internet caused by Facebook.

I was asked by three guys who smoke and drink at the market near my place my opinion is on how to improve Madagascar. I was surprised, but I talked, even though I am sure they have ideas of their own that they wanted to tell me. But you know, the French abused the Malagasy, and the Malagasy still want to be like foreigners. In fact, the only foreigners the Malagasy people know well were abusive. The people that are in power are those who are willing to be as abusive as the French, so it is pretty amazing the is no civil war; I mean, it shows how the Malagasy understand without imitating, all except for those in power. What matters is that the Malagasy thought the French were abusive. I don't know whether the French were actually abusive; I don't know whether they tried to be abusive. They might have thought they were doing a lot of good by bringing cars here. Cars are a lot less useful when you cannot use them to travel to other countries. Plus, they brought dirty, old cars here. Anyway, I told them they should not rely on another country.

Another weird thing about this country is that potholes are not always covered. So, once in while there is a hole on the curb. Most of the time its only a few feet deep and full of trash. But sometimes the drop is about fifteen feet down a narrow passage. So, pedestrians and drivers have to look out for these. This is another danger of traveling at night.

There are some streets that have bumper to bumper traffic all day long. One such street is home to the school where I teach. Despite the fumes from all these cars, there is a huge tree across the street from the school that has managed to produce blue flowers.

I recently finished reading The Pillars of the Earth by Keith Follet. It was fun to read, but it was a bit shallow. The best part was how the book covered such a long time period without dwelling on boring events. That is to say, the pace was good and the distance was also good. But the book was written by a good observer, not a great inventor. It is a long book, and sometimes he used the same words to describe one of the villains. That was one way I picked up on his weaknesses. But the lack of depth was mostly in the commentary on the relationship between secular magic and Christian magic.

Two people have told me that one reason there are so many forest fires here is that people like to see them. As a volunteer, we were told that the practice, tavy, is to fertilize the soil, but that its effect was short lived.