hmmm

So, I accidently had tongue for lunch today.

I went to Chez Niani, a café down the street that I often go to for lunch. Malagasy food consists of a) vary (rice), and b) laoka (stuff that goes with rice – i.e. veggies or meat, usually not sauce). Chez Niani has Malagsy food as well as a vazaha menu (chicken, meat, eggs, fries etc). I wanted Malagasy food, so I asked what the laokas of the day were. My waitress spoke super quietly, so I heard mostly unintelligible mumbling, possibly mostly in Malagasy, and then petit pois (peas) jumped out. I said I’d have the petit pois thing with rice. I’ve had rice dishes there before, and often just ask for whatever doesn’t have meat (usually lima beans and tomatoes – quite good actually). Today I figured that I wouldn’t mind some meat, so even though I didn’t hear her say ‘langue’ as she was describing the specials, I figured that I would wind up with peas and some sort of meat with my rice.

Indeed, a big bowl of rice and a plate full of peas with some slices of meat on top arrived. I cut up the meat a little and started putting the meat and peas over my rice. The meat was a little like the beef that goes in beef stew only quite a bit softer. I didn’t mind it. I’m still getting used to meat (chicken is easier, but there’s not much good chicken here – most of the chickens are running around eating garbage, so they’re pretty thin), so I didn’t exactly love it, but it was ok. When I went back to the plate to cut up a little more meat to put into the mix, I noticed one of the pieces. It had what really really looked like tastebuds on the skin on one side. After closer examination, I decided that it was indeed tongue. I ate a little more of it (just not the tastebuds part), and most of the peas. When I went up to pay, the woman repeated what was on my bill to make sure it was mine, and she said, “un café, du riz, et de la langue et des petits pois”. Yup, it was tongue. Good news: the tongue meal plus a packet of vanilla wafer like cookies cost about 2 dollars and 10 cents.

Church choir fun

Since I got back on Friday night, that left Saturday free for me to go to choir rehearsal with Nani (instead of waiting for next week). We walked down together, and the rehearsal was at someone’s house right near where I work. It was just in his living room, and there were about 20 people there, almost none of whose names I remember. Nani had warned me that the music they read is solfa instead of solfege, so I wasn’t sure if I’d do too well. Turns out, solfa is Malagasy French for English solfege, and Malagasy French solfege means the 5 lined staff that most of us are used to reading. I’ll have to take a picture at some point, but a line of their music will have 4 lines (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) that each have letters on them, with words underneath everything. A line will look like this :
S s | d m s| l. s m| r d _| etc
There are whole hymnals full of it in the church! I’m going to see if I can get ahold of one to bring home.

It’s just like ear training class ! Just the do re mi scale with only first letters. A dot means it’s held longer but the next note is shorter, a dash means the note is carried until the dot ends. The vertical lines are measures. So, we can 100% speak the same language even though I don’t understand much of what the director is saying ! It was like feeling instantly comfortable and fitting in. The choir is going to Mananjary to give some concerts in a few weeks, and I think I’m invited. It’d be leaving on a Thursday, so I don’t know if I can really leave, but it’s nice that they want to include me.

On Sunday, I went to church and sang with them there too. The choir is actually really good – they all sing out, but still blend pretty well, and have a great sense of pitch. The girl I sit by, Lydia, has an awesome voice – very powerful. On Sunday afternoon most of the choir members were getting together to make koba, so they invited me along for that too. Koba (pronounced koo-bah) is a banana/rice kind of dessert wrapped in banana leaves. First, you hold the banana leaves over coals to melt them a little and make them pliable.

Then, you make the rice flour. Yes, make it. A picture explains better :

Once the rice is pounded, we sift it, and keep doing so till everything has been crushed.

Meanwhile, inside others were making a mixture of bananas, rice flour, and sugar. You slop a little of the banana mixture on a banana leaf, sprinkle some crushed peanuts on top of it, and fold the banana leaf around it.

After that it gets cooked. Double boiled maybe ? We left before it got to that point. Almost all of the conversation was in Malagasy, but a lot of people asked me things in French. Yanitra, the woman whose house it was at invited me over on Wednesday night for dinner/prayers I think. One of the guys crushing the rice, Nar, kept saying, ‘Ça va, Callista ?’, because it was about all he knew in French. He seemed to make people laugh a lot.

Anyway, all in all I think that this church choir connection is going to provide some lovely opportunites to get to know people, and Nani said that they often sing classical music too, so before I leave we should be doing some Mozart or Handel.

In other Malagasy social news, I really like living below Sophie and Zoë. They invited me up for lunch on Sunday again, and Sophie said she’d like to pretty much plan on that every weekend that we’re all there. They are really sweet girls, and it’s nice to have people my age living here too.

Also, I got some peanut butter from the Peace Corps house. They commission someone to make it, and the proceeds go to put a poor girl through college or something benevolent like that.