January 30th

We have now been here in Tana, the capital city of Madagscar, for about a day. We got here yesterday afternoon, and are staying in another hotel. It is much smaller than the last hotel that was outside of the city. The hallways are much more narrow, and the bathroom situation is a little more of a challenge that at our last hotel. Beofre, we all had our own bathrooms in our rooms, like most hotels in the US, but at this one (which is really more of a guest house than hotel I guess), we have one bathroom for all 14 of us, with two showers and two toilets. The bathroom is VERY narrow. There's a little path way in the middle, with the showers on one side and the toilets on the other, and you sort of have to turn sideways to make it down the path. Using the toilets is a bit of challenge becasue often times they don't flush, so you have to fill up a bucket of water and dump it down the toilet which flushes it. And we're not allowed to put toilet paper in the toilets because it creates problems, so we have a basket to put the toilet paper in. Definitely a new experience. When showering, it's to be expected that the water can get very hot or very cold at any given moment, so that's always great.

Today we had our first day at our program center where we will have our classes. We had breakfast there, which consisted of baguette and jam, coffee, tea, hot chocolate, eggs, and some odd sort of rice porridge that tastes sort of like what I would imagine the earth would taste like. We then talked about some different things concerning the semester, and how the academic program will work. After that, we had our Malagasy and French activites, had lunch, went for a walk, talked about hopes and fears for the upcoming semester, learned who our host families are and where they live (I have a mom, a dad, and three brothers!), and we had a reception with an Academic Dean for the programs in our region from Morocco, along with professors from the university here in Tana. It was a great day. We're getting ready to go out to dinner soon with the Academic Dean. We're eating at a malagasy/reunion type restaurant, where I'll be having coconut chicken with rice. :) So I'm off to go get ready!