2007 October 15-In Praise of Tana

Hi,

This week, we went to "The Place of Much Salt" ( "Antsirabe") which is about 3 hours south of "The City of a Thousand" ( "Antananarivo".) This is the farthest away I have ever traveled from Tana. Antsirabe is vaguely reminiscent of a low-income neighborhood in Florida - perhaps a little more shabby. That said, it kicks Antananarivo's trash (and there's a lot of trash to kick there) in almost every way. Modern Antsirabe was planned and built by Norwegians. Modern Antananarivo was.... ignored and neglected by the French. The contrast today is striking. It made me proud to be Scandinavian.

I have to admit though, I love Antananarivo. It's dirty, it smells, it's chaotic, the traffic is terrible, the roads don't make any sense, the housing placements make even less sense, and a whole lotta other stuff I could mention, BUT I love it. This place is beautiful in spite of itself, and I enjoy that. Every so often, I still have to stop my companion so we can step back and enjoy the view for a bit.

I'm suffering from severe writer's block right now, a severe lack of time, and a severe lack of anything interesting to say , so you'll have to forgive me. But I thought I'd try to write something anyway.

Thanks for the letters. Thank you Thomas for all the details. To answer your question about spiders, Thomas: When I lived in Ankadindramamy, on the third floor, outside on the clothes-rack there was a HUGE spider with the biggest web I have ever seen. We caught flies everyday and fed them to it. Once, I caught a small lizard and threw it on the web, and the spider completely destroyed it. It was intense.

I'm really excited for you. You sound very ambitious about doing lots of cool things. You'll have to let me in on some of it when I get back. I can teach you guitar - I'll have to get better at it again, but maybe you can help me with that too.

OK then, I love you all. I'll try to write something good next week. Veloma!

Elder Draper