Tratrin’ny Krismasy

Joyeux Noël

Merry Christmas

It is now Christmas, and as expected, we have no snow!  Actually, I don’t think Madagascar as ever seen snow.  Today we are going to Tsiry’s uncle’s house for a family gathering of about 60 people for lunch and partying.  I will get to see how the Malagasy celebrate Christmas.

Before heading over, we decided to check for an update on the cyclone, which is now hitting the north of Madagascar.  I found the map below tracking the path of Tropical Cyclone Bondo.  I added a green dot to the map at the city of Antsiranana in the extreme north of Madagascar, where we were due to go tomorrow.  The cyclone has already passed through, and is moving southwest.  If it continues this path, it should be well into the south by the time we are there, and we will hopefully have fair weather up there.  However, they have sometimes been known to reverse direction, so we’ll keep watching.

Here is a radar image of Bondo’s current position.

Anyway, enough about tomorrow.

I was wondering how they were going to get 60 people in a house, but Tsiry’s uncle has a very large house.  His living room, which was cleared out to make a dance floor, was about 1,000 square feet.  Below are some photos of the party.

There were lots of kids…

Here’s the food!

Theses people just love to dance and party!

Later in the afternoon, we drove around a bit to see the east side of Tana before heading back to the hotel for the evening.  Back at the hotel, we packed and went to bed early, as our flight to Antsiranana was at 9 AM the next morning and we would have to get up early to get to the airport.