Tana First Time Around

Hello Again,

After a couple days of adjustment and settling into the pace & lifestlye. I'm reinvigorated to bare my soul. An update: I moved out of my jazzy first-class room into an economy option with shared showers and toilets, but my own small room complete with bunkbeds (In case I feel like switching up my nightly altititude) and a phenomenal view, albeit from a window the size of a toilet seat.

I have had a couple of meetings that seem to be going quite well, although people seem to make their own differing opinions of my presence within 30 seconds.I am all at once an investor, a researcher, a corporate liason and in my usual way, an American spy. I haven't visited the US embassy yet, where I will surely add "dumb kid" to my list. But business is interesting although Madagascar infrastructure and shaky political situation pose higher barriers than I had initially anticipated. Corruption is thick amongst the Malagasy, but rarely imposes on the lives of us etrangers.

Antananarivo continues to perplex me as a dichotomy of European architecture, city planning and in many ways customs. Yet it's African flavor dominates. And hell, there are times when I might as well be in Beijing. The city is unique for me in its blend of pedestrian and transportation domain. The streets are a battleground of daring pedestrians being hunted by outrageous drivers. The sidewalks would usually serve as a safeground, but cars seem free to bound onto the sidewalk without concern for limbs or goods. The city does have one respite for the constantly hounded pedestrians: Stairs. They are everywhere, because of how hilly the city is the planners wrote in vast stairs running through the cities; like Machu-Pichu fairways running through Paris, it is weird, exhausting and if one was handicapped they would be isolated to an island within a city within an island.

Tomorrow I get up early to board my small hippie bus with 30 other passengers into the south to see some energy projects and begin my on the ground work.

The man to my right has just been scammed into saving a Nigerian princess via email,
Steven