A day of Vistas and Visas

I'm here! And I just spent the last 5 minutes trying to find the exclamation mark on this keyboard! (got it now, but i tell ya these keys are in all the wrong places... i have become a hunt and pecker and for some bloody reason I have to hold the shiftkey down for a period????) Just another twist on the complications of very foreign travel i guess.

So New Years was a dud (with a lowercase d). Taneth, my lovely South African seat neighbor, and I were determined to have a glass of champagne... but in reality we woke up a few hours after the GMT Newyears... said our thing...and then drifted off into another uncomfortable verticle snooze. Actually, I lucked out on companions on the planes... the flight to London was swallowed up immediatly in great conversation with Jan (omg I hope that was his name) from the Netherlands. We gossiped on love, life, the universe, and everything and he realy solidified my belief in loveing life's unexpected twists and the neccisary admiration of the opposite sex. Thank you.

Antananarivo (Tana for short) is sureal! The streets are hillier than i could ever hope, and they twist and turn along with endless dillapidated, narrow stairways that lead you through peoples backyards (like our catwalks I suppose), around palaces, and a Melina church where Christians where hurled off the cliff by the 19th century phycopathic queen (an easy way out by her standards) . It seemed like a labyrinth of cobbled delirious streets, but getting lost would be hard (with my sense of direction) because there were frequent an expansive viewpoints, and at every corner you were presented with another winding option. Ahh...my heaven! The buildings are fantastic and just as patchwork as everything else in this city. Ancient tiled rooves, Italian grottos, ironwork balconies, colourful shutters, corogated iron shacks with boulders to hold the roof on and cactuses and bougainvillea the size of houses twisting around much of it.

Yesterday afternoon I wandered down an incredibly long and steep flight of stairs to le Avenue de Independance, usually the central market place. It swarmed with chains of hand-holding children celebrating the New Year. There were activities everywhere but the focus seemed to be the 50 or so booths set up like cheesy Christmas livingrooms for family pictures...each with the prerequsite Santa, Christmas tree, ghettoblaster and motorbike (insert odd decoration here). I've seen two backpackers in two days, and I explained to Hassin (a helpful boy with great english, that invited me to a lively game of twilight ringtoss), our very lame (i discovered in the explanation) saying of standing out like a sore thumb. It should be converted to..like a western woman in Tana :)

Today I made another older friend, Dave, who calmingly lead me through searching for and attempting to cancel my inexplicably lost Visa card. Thank you Visa for creating 100 numbers for 100 other countries where people may loose their visa card but none for Madagascar. They did helpfully give my mom the same "toll free" number that very deffinatly does not work from here, luckily I am assured that no one here knows how to use a visa card???

After our card adventure we wandered the streets and attempted, but failed to get lost in the wondorous higglty piggtly of it all. We then sat down in a cozy cafe where I ate a whole fried fish (head and all) and we enjoyed far too many THB (Three Horse Beer, Malagasy speciality! 1us dollor for a big bottle).

I think I'm going to be spending the next week in this incredible city, (absolutely nothing to do with an immediate loss of access to funds) practicing my french and Malagasy, exploring the winding streets, beautiful, friendly people, and fantastic views of an ancient city surrounded by flooded rice fields that glint in the wavering wet-season sun. I can't wait!!!!!!!! (i know where it is now).