Friday Night Fun

Over the course of the last 2 years one of the truly wonderful things about being a PCV are those moments where you get to relax and cut loose with other volunteers after spending weeks working and speaking gasy day in and day out. But as time goes on, even the way we do that has progressively changed. Our bars of choice have become more and more 'gasy' to the point where my favorite bar in diego is not one of the cute, european places but a little place called 'bar brasil' (or as we like to call it, the ambiance bar) which can hardly even be classified as a bar. On the weekends this little hole-in-the-wall place, blocks off the street and scatters plastic tables and chairs around with a projection screen and large speakers playing the best clipys (music videos) the malagasy have to offer. Add in some rotating blue and green lights and you have a place we can hardly resist. We discovered it from atop the rooftop bar at a hotel, and needless to say despite the beauty of la terrasse, we've never made it back up there.

Similarly, while I now have an assortment of other vazaha friends in town, from France, Britain, India ect, I will always pass up hanging with them to go out with my malagasy co-workers. So this past weekend when some of my favorite people at work invited me to participate in their 'friday night program' I immediately agreed and promised to bring my friend Kelly along. Now when other volunteers arrive from the bush, going to the bar with Malagasy people is not on the top of their list of priorities for town, but I convinced Kelly that this would be worth it. PSI knows how to have a good time. And a good time we did have. It was probably one of my favorite nights since moving to Diego.

They brought us to a little bar with a live band and dance floor and about 25 of my malagasy co-workers were impatiently waiting for the party to start and an epic dance party ensued. Highlights definitely include MANY dance circles, my supervisor leading the entire staff in an interesting version of the Macarena, and ending the night slow dancing, middle-school-dance style. And perhaps the best part were the exchanges between my malagasy friends and kelly and I. Doing the malagasy swan bow to formally invite them to dance, explaining to them that carrying around 2 drinks is called 'double fisting' in English and teaching them that the panicked look, means "save me from dancing with this man!"

And then as the night sped on and we decided to migrate downtown to hang with some of our other vazaha friends, we said goodnight to all my co-workers and found ourselves and two of our british friends at a foam party at the 'black box' (too ridiculous to even explain) and getting 'caught' by the very same co-workers we just left and proceeding to dance with them in our new location.

Im not sure when the switch over happened, but spending time on the weekend with my gasy friends has definitely gone from, a once in a while obligation, to something i look forward to and then reminisce about for weeks.