Hotel lesson not learned
Saturday night I was on the Net thinking that I should find a hotel. David told me, he was staying in tamatave that night. It was dark and I was not going to ride the twelve K back to his site. I didn’t learn my lesson from the other night. I still didn’t make a reservation. I thought I could get a room at the Lionel, but I forgot about the wedding that was in town. I checked the hotel and of course it was full. I stopped off at a hotel close to the internet place thinking I could get lucky, but they were all booked up. They did save me a trip across town and gave me Marotia’s phone number, but yet again, they didn’t have a room. Then I turned around to the desk guy speaking French to me. After some back and forth, me telling him I don’t know French speaking in Malagasy, he finally understood that I didn’t speak French, we got on the same page. He would let me sleep in the upstairs common room if I got out by 6:00 am, for 10,000 AR (5 bucks). It sounded good to me, so he pocketed the money and I got a nice place to crash, win-win situation. I got up at 5:30am, hung out for a little bit downstairs and left. He made sure that I was gone before his boss showed up. The term he used was “Tsy ambara in-telo” meaning “don’t tell a third person”.

Death in the family
Here is a little story that happen a couple of months ago. Our pet lizard died. He was not really a pet. He ran free eating anything sweet. He particularly liked honey, but would nibble on fruit. It was a tragedy waking up and going into our “kitchen”, our other room, and finding our lizard friend in a bowl of water. It looked like he drowned, he was dead. We were saddened because he was a source of entertainment and beauty. Without effort, we provided food. Where there is food …. Sure enough another lizard moved in.
 
In other house animal news, we had a mother mouse move in. She would make a terrible rack at night. We finally found her nest in our cupboard. I reinforced the structure to discourage her return. We didn’t know at the time that she had a litter. When we found it we decided to move the younglings outside. She only moved three, the other three died. For a short while they were part of our family.