September 26, 2010

• Cafe de La Gare

  Yesterday was my birthday. Only the second one i’ve celebrated in Madagascar… i think. Since we’ve moved here we seem to always take furlough over the month of September, which suites me just fine, but i reckon Josh is a bit jealous that he never gets to celebrate his birthday in Canada.

  On friday my girl friends took me out for lunch at La Combava, a new and very quaint little restaurant on our side of town. I originally wanted to go to the Cafe de La Gare downtown, but in the end i texted Josh on his overnight to ask if that was perchance the place he wanted to take me on my actual birthday for a surprise… and it was. Shame. I always seem to spoil his surprises. (i did tell him that surprises for my birthday arent really unexpected, but… ) Anyway, so we had a lovely luncheon on the terrace at Combava and then in the evening we went to our South African friend’s place for dinner to eat roast lamb. He’d been talking about doing this for ages already and we finally pressured him into doing it.   It was divine! I made peanut butter cheese cake for us and that was also divine, if i do say so myself. I made a 1.5 recipe so that i could give a cake to share amongst the workers in our compound, my two ladies and the lady who works next door and the guard at the compound gate. and then the gardener the next day and the guard working Sunday afternoon. They were all quite delighted with it as they had never tasted anything like it before.
  

  
  Saturday was pretty normal. We spent the day picking up bricks for the back yard, weeding the new grass, josh and judah went to another MAF family’s house to do some woodworking – repairing 2 of the 4 deck chairs. In the evening my good friend Heather came over to babysit and Josh and i went downtown to Le Cafe de la Gare for dinner. This ‘cafe’ is so totally different in atmosphere than anything you can find in Madagascar… i cant really explain why. Whatever the case, it’s lovely there and at night there is live piano music. We had caramelized pork, which was so nice and came in 10 minutes (we were prepared to wait an hour like at most french restaurants) and then i had what they called on the English menu “half baked chocolate…” something or other. It was lovely. We couldnt remember the last time we were downtown after dark, it felt quite novel indeed. I think the last time we went was a few months before we left for Nairobi, probably in 2008! Tana really is a different city after dark, the streets arent as clogged with street vendors, there’s a fraction of the traffic (it takes 15 minutes to get from our house to downtown rather than 1 hour!) but it is really dark. It reminded me that so many people in this country dont have electricity in their homes and why so many go to bed by 7pm. there’s really not much you can do if you cant see anything in the pitch blackness.
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  • 9:32 am
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