Christmas has come and gone, though it doesn't feel like either actually happened. Since Malagasy people really don't get into the holiday spirit like Americans do, I was without family and in blazing hot weather, it felt more like a random day in August than December 25th.
The market here in Ambato was packed on Christmas Eve (one of the only ways you could tell it was holiday season), but the whole town has been dead ever since. I had a good time hanging out with Ava here, and got to meet my Ambato predecessor. But now, there's not much to do. School's on break, and the CISCO (like the school district office) is closed, so I can't really work on my work here. I should spend the free time cleaning my house, but that's no fun. So blogging it is!
One interesting thing about Christmas was killing and cooking my first chicken, a Peace Corps milestone. It was waaayy too expensive because everyone buys birds during the holidays. Carried it back to my house (felt really cool carrying a chicken around), boiled some water, then got the knife and did it. It only twitched around a little bit after it died. By far the worst part was gutting it. After I dunked it in boiling water and pulled all the feathers off, I started gutting it. It looked really easy in a YouTube video I watched before coming to Madagascar, but whatever trick they used in the video I could not figure out. I got the guts halfway out, but then couldn't figure out how to detach them from the inside of the body for like 10 minutes. Found out the chicken was female when I found the place where all her egg yolks were stored (kinda weird), and also found some undigested corn kernels from earlier that morning.
I finally got the guts completely detached and into the bowl when I realized I didn't know what to do with them. The same happened with the feathers, which are currently on my compost pile (might just burn them). But I read in our PC cookbook that PCVs often offer chicken guts to neighbors in return for gutting them, so I headed next door with the guts and severed head on a plate and asked my neighbor if he wanted them. He did, and appeared to be very happy to have them. Two minutes later, he came to my house with some meat in a little bowl. "Mihinana kisoa?" (Do you eat pork?), he asked. Yes, I replied, at which point he pointed to his ear, indicating that the piece of meat I had just accepted was a cooked pig's ear. Kinda wished he hadn't told me that last part, because while [parts of it] tasted good, the thought of eating an ear really took away from the pleasure of actually eating it. It reminded me of a study where different people were given identical food, but for half the food was a weird color, like blue french fries. Surprise surprise, the colored food group rated the food as tasting worse than the control group. Anyway, I ate a lot of it and fed the rest to the neighbor's dog (without telling him, of course).
I baked the chicken in my oven, but I'm probably not going to do it again. The skin got really cooked and dry and hard. But the meat still tasted good! I think I also need to use charcoal for some things I cook.
All for now, I'm going to head to the market and figure out what to cook today. My site predecessor Tom has been using my bike the last few days and is returning it today. So I think I'll go for a ride tomorrow morning. Then I'm planning on riding to Ava's site to visit after the first. Don't have new years plans yet, though there will be parties here in Ambato. Might go with some other PCVs in the area. Merry Christmas, happy new year, happy Hanukkah!
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