Fianar After Hours: Vazaha Night Life!!!

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!

Independence Day, Malagasy Style: Celebrating 50 Years (6/25-6)

This year Madagascar celebrated 50 years of independence from French colonial rule – no small milestone. With this in mind, across the country, Malagasies partied accordingly. From an American perspective, coming from a country that’s already celebrated its bicentennial, it was really interesting to watch as well, and to compare the differences between le 26 juin and the 4th of July.
For one thing, the celebration began not on the 26th, but the day before. Most people had the day off from work, and many people took this as an opportunity to get completely wasted by midday. There was a carnival of sorts in the middle Fianar, with a little Ferris wheel and games like shoot-the-bottle and bingo. Children sometimes set off firecrackers, just as the French do for Bastille Day, keeping me on edge all day (have I mentioned that I HATE firecrackers?!).
Saturday the 26th I woke up late (tired from our return trip home from Ambohimahamasina the day before), and when I stumbled down to the kitchen I found that Ambinina had stopped by to visit and was chatting with Francesca. The three of us continued to drink tea and talk about cultural differences, world politics, and religion – what a way to start a day!
Sometime later our landlady, Madame Lulle (sp?) stopped by with “a favor” to ask. She wanted to invite us to have Independence Day lunch at her house as her guests. “Favor”? Hardly! Our pleasure!
I thought it rude to go over to their house without bringing something, so I grabbed the pineapple I had bought the day before and brought it along when we went over at around 12:30. Mme. Lulle led us to her living room, which took me by surprise: she had a large leather couch and huge wooden cabinet unit in the corner, filled with dishes and glass objects. I was impressed: despite the exterior of the house, it seemed like by Malagasy standards Mme. Lulle was quite well-off. She unlocked one of the cabinets to get out a pitcher and plates, and served us orange juice and cookies.
She was the utmost in welcoming, but seemed sad. She explained that her two sons were away, one studying in Tana, the other in Switzerland. “Je suis seule,” (“I am alone”) she said. En plus, she had always wanted daughters, so she was very happy to have us over. We talked a bit about what we were doing for Ny Tanintsika, what we were studying in the US, etc.
Soon (but not before I had eaten many, many cookies!) it was time to sit down to lunch. There were about ten of us total, if I remember correctly. One of the guests was the patissier and saucier from Tsara Guest House, a well-known restaurant in town; I’m pretty sure he brought some of the food, and it was indeed delicious.
Mme. Lulle explained that the meal was typically Malagasy. We started with some salad dishes: a lettuce salad, a dish of potatoes and green beans in some sort of creamy sauce, surrounded by grated carrots, garnished with tomatoes. And of course, bread! More orange juice, along with pineapple juice, Coca-cola, Bonbon Anglais (literally, “English Candy,” found only in Madagascar; actually a disgusting soda that most describe as tasting like Red Bull; I thought it smelled like cotton candy, not in a good way), and the strongest rum I have ever encountered. It burned my nostrils just sitting across from me at the table! But the Tsara Guest house patissier downed glass after glass throughout the meal! He takes his liquor like a Princetonian!
Next came the main course. I had warned them that I was a vegetarian, so a special dish of potatoes in a delicious orange sauce with onions had been prepared for me. Then, of course, there was rice a-plenty: two huge serving dishes full! Impossible to finish. Then, the main attraction: the turkey! The turkey from our yard, the one that’s been waking me up every morning! I may be vegetarian, but I’ll admit, I was glad to see him go. Francesca said he was delicious. He was cut into large pieces and served along with huge pieces of pork; I couldn’t tell which was which. Definitely not kosher!
One of the guests at the meal was a computer science student who lived in our little walled area. He’s seen us teaching English classes in the little room attached to our house, which is what prompted the most hilariously awkward comment from him (he speaks some English): “I’ve noticed you have a very beautiful laptop, I’d like to touch it sometime.” Priceless!
We were so stuffed by the end of the meal, we could hardly move. We thanked Mme. Lulle profusely and returned to our house to digest.
~
Later, unfortunately, we had to go out to the bank; Gaia had called us to ask if we wanted to go to Ranomafana National Park with her tomorrow, and we needed money for the trip. We knew we didn’t want to be out in the streets that day because of all the drunkenness, but we had to make the quick trip.
It was a weird feeling: we were stared at even more than usual. The men hissed at us, called out to us. One punched Francesca in the arm in passing. Every child we passed laughed and pointed at us and yelled “Vasa! Vasa!” Why all the laughing? What’s so funny? Do you not think I know that I’m a foreigner?
It was very disconcerting. I realize that this was the day they were celebrating their independence from the vasas, from the French, but still – WE weren’t French! Strange to see how old animosity dies hard when it comes to national independence. I wonder if Americans were rude to Englishmen visiting the US 50 years after the Revolutionary War.
~
That night there were fireworks. Francesca went over to the office to use the internet, but came back because she said the night guard at the office was completely trashed – he could barely speak and walked into a wall three times! Later, he disappeared – no one was there to guard the office!
Francesca and I cracked open a THB over dinner, safe at home – no need to go out. Let the Malagasies have their fun, we’ll stay here safe and wait for our own Independence Day!

Ambohimahamasina, Part 2 ADDENDUM: The Beer of Madagascar - le THB!

That night at Romain and Gaia's we also tried an iconic Malagasy beverage: THB (“Three Horses Beer”). I believe it is actually owned by the Coca-Cola Company, which is why the name is in English, but it’s produced and only found here in Madagascar. You see advertisements for it everywhere! I don’t actually like beer at all, but I was willing to give it a try. I was surprised by how light it was – it didn’t have a major, heavy, beer-y flavor to it. I’ve had it several times since when out with friends in Fianar (although my mother is probably cringing as she reads this!); the bottles are big, and are best shared with one or two other people – I highly recommend it while watching a World Cup soccer match!