After a rough first couple of weeks here, spent simply walking back and forth between our depressing house and the office right next door, we hit a turning point with our trip to Ambohimahamasina. Ranomafana made things even better - we did finally see lemurs, after all! “Well, at least I can leave Madagascar having checked that off my list,” I thought…
But it wasn’t until our first night out on the town in Fianar that we really started to feel at home here. Romain had promised that when he came back to Fianar he would take us out and show us what it’s all about here. We had no idea what to expect, so we put on the nicest clothes we had (in my case, a V-neck shirt from Target, a black scarf, and my one pair of jeans that actually fit me – dismal, I know), put on a little makeup (the first time in 4 weeks!), and set out.
Romain met us outside the office in a cab. We drove to the same area of the town where Supermarché 3000 is (vazaha central, as we tend to think of it). We would start our night at Le Panda restaurant and bar, a vazaha institution here in Fianar.
Picture this: a restaurant painted red inside and out, red chairs, green place mats on all the tables. A slightly rounded bar with high stools around which some slightly-grungy looking Europeans from age 25 to 50 are smoking. Behind the bar, the bartender Hervé (of Chinese descent, but born and raised in Madagascar) is serving drinks out of jars filled with mysterious liquids with suspicious-looking solids floating in them. A huge old crocodile skin stretched across one of the walls. And on another wall – Le Panda’s iconic piece de résistance – a painting of two copulating pandas, one humping the other.
Take a look at the menu. Inside you will be informed that the restaurant specializes in gibier – game. Indeed, you look at the dishes offered and, alongside the usual pork, zebu, and chicken…past the slightly more exotic calamari and frogs’ legs…you will find dishes with crocodile and bat meat. That’s because Hervé is also the owner and a passionate hunter – all the meat served at Le Panda comes from his kills!
While it may not be the bar from “Cheers,” I think Le Panda would make for quite a setting for a television show. The regular crowd of vazahas, mostly French expats with a few Belgians and Swiss, is an eclectic bunch: everyone knows everyone and hangs out as old friends, regardless of age differences. The mid-twenty- and thirty-somethings are usually here working for NGOs, maybe spending a few years here. (Most people after meeting us here and chatting with us a bit are really surprised to learn that we’re only 20 years old!) There are a few much older people, in their 40s and 50s – one guy said he’s been living here for the past 30 years and now speaks fluent Malagasy!
Francesca and Romain ordered a bit of dinner at Le Panda…Romain had calamares au persil (squid in parsley sauce) and shared zebu carpaccio (the zebu equivalent of the raw meat dish usually made with beef). I marveled at Francesca’s bravery eating raw meat in a developing country, but she didn’t get sick at all! [in fact, knock on wood, we have yet to get sick from anything we’ve eaten here…keep your fingers crossed for us in these next three weeks!]
We then bar-hopped across the street to Chez Dom, which is described in the guidebooks as a “smoky backpacker café where lots of tour guides hang out.” Oh, silly guidebooks. They fail to capture any of the real essence of any of the places I’ve been here in Madagascar…
Chez Dom is very small, very smokey. There are a lot of Malagasy guides, who Adrien (Romain’s best friend since high school in France) says are the only Malagasy people he doesn’t like. They have a parasitic livelihood: leeching off of the vazahas, trying to get them to go on one of their overpriced tours, but at the same time disdainful of foreigners. [I got into an argument with one the other night: after trying to flirt with me for the longest time (asking me if I had a boyfriend, when I was getting married, etc.) he then said I was being “mean” to him when I made comparisons between here and the US; I defended myself, saying I was merely making comparative observations; he dismissed me magnanimously, saying he wouldn’t hold it against me, since I was “young” (being just 20 years old to his 26); I said I may be young, but I’ve traveled a lot in my life; he countered that he meets a lot of people from different countries, as a tour guide – ha! Gotcha! Meeting people from different countries is not the same as actually going there!] They’re all young men, trying to dress European with scarves and brand-name shirts, they’ll try to flirt with you, ask you for your number, put their number in your phone. They disgust me – they’re the epitome in slimy, trying to mix in with the vazaha crowd while simultaneously trying to leech off their money - but you can’t get rid of them, so you just have to put up with it and have a little fun with them sometimes (after all, they will sometimes buy you drinks) by giving made-up answers to the questions they ask you (I get a real kick out of this: sometimes I say I'm married, sometimes I say I have a fiancé...).
Chez Dom has both a good-size TV and an overhead projector, so during the World Cup games we spend weekends there, eating dinner (my favorite dish is their misao, Chinese noodles that I load up with lots of spicy pink chili sauce; the rest of the vazahas go crazy for Chez Dom’s American-style cheeseburger, made with zebu meat), drinking (THB and lots of rhum arrangé, the flavored rum poured from those mysterious jars with the floating fruit and vanilla beans - I'm quite a fan), and watching the game projected up on the wall.
So that first night of going out, after Le Panda and Chez Dom, we didn’t just stop there: as Chez Dom started clearing out, all the vazahas started piping up their votes on which discothèque they wanted to go to. Soafia Dance Club won out in the end over Le Moulin Rouge (yes, they have one of those here, too!), and so we piled into one vazaha’s truck an drove over.
Soafia was…well, hilarious. Francesca, Gaia, and I all got in for free, being girls. We walked down some stairs to a dark room with strobe lights flashing and twirling light effects. A mix of Malagasy pop, and US 80s music. People standing around in groups, some on the dance floor, some at the bar. If it weren’t for the fact that this was Madagascar, this would have been the lamest club ever.
But our group of vazahas took to the dance floor together as one. The Malagasy men would try to dance with us, but our fellow vazahas were always quick to rescue us before anything became awkward. If I felt a hand moving for my hip, I grabbed it and threw it aside without even looking to see who it was – we were having goofy dancing fun, and no one, Malagasy or vazaha, was going to ruin it for me!
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