Liver, Fish Fins, and Bananas

Malagasy food is good. It's really not so different from anything I've had before, but there have been a few......new.....experiences I've had with food, some funny, some interesting, some terrifying.

1. When a fellow YAGM and I were at a restaurant and decided to be adventurous and order by which item had the longest name in Malagasy. The waitress looked at us like we were nuts, but we insisted. When our food came, we quickly found out the reason for the strange looks- turns out we had ordered cow tongue. It had a good taste, but the whole thing was a mind game of trying to trick your brain into not thinking about the fact that your tongue was touching tongue. 

2. Ampalibe is the weirdest looking darn fruit ever. It's close to the size of a large watermelon, oval in size, greenish-yellowish-brownish, and covered in bumps. Odd looking fruit, on the inside as well as the outside. A friend and I bought a bag of the flesh of the ampalibe, and wow. What a strange fruit. They're a bunch of segments, pale yellowish flesh in a shape that looks suspiciously like garlic. The flesh isn't that thick, but it's wrapped around a massive pit. The texture of the fruit itself I can only compare to bamboo shoots. It's the closest comparison I've found. It was sweet, but not pleasantly so. It had a very strange, kind of bitterish aftertaste.

^not my picture, but the best I could find online. 

3. I have eaten so much liver here now. More than I ever planned on. If I had gone my entire life without ever once eating liver, I don't think I'd've been too upset. 

4. Ronono soja is delicious. I literally have no idea what it is. None whatsoever. Ronono means milk, but milk means something different than we're used to in the U.S. Soja, as far as I can tell, is something akin to soybean powder stuff. But there's a hotely right outside the church who sells little mini mugs of ronono soja for 200Ariary a piece, and I'm telling you, it's magical. It's hot and vaguely milk-like and overly sweet. We usually get mofogasy with it, which are little sweet, sticky, dense breads made out of rice. If only I could live off ronono soja and mofogasy.....

5. Salad doesn't mean salad here. Salad, to me, is lettuce with some veggies or something. Salad, here, is a.... Kind of like a small veggie tray with various cold cuts of bologna and salami on top. 

6. The first day I was in my new family's house, they asked me what I ate for breakfast. I panicked. All of my Malagasy vocabulary (limited to begin with) fled my brain instantly. I remembered 'kafe' (coffee) and was struggling to find other food words... The only thing coming to mind was 'akondro' (banana). So I told my family I eat coffee and bananas for breakfast every morning. Confession time: I don't like bananas. Well, that's not true. I don't dislike bananas-they're actually kind of pleasant. I've always wanted to enjoy them. But for whatever reason... Any time I take a bite of banana, I automatically feel like I'm going to puke and start gagging. It's bad. As for coffee, well I drink it occasionally and I enjoy it, but it's not really a staple in my diet. But now, since those were the two Malagasy words I remembered, I get an entire teapot of coffee every morning for breakfast as well as being ambushed with bananas at random times: after dinner, at lunch, one time my mom came up to my room in the middle of the day with a plate full of bananas. A plate. Full. Of. Bananas. 

7. You know how everyone has that one irrational phobia? Mine is fish. I am petrified of fish. If it looks anything like a fish, I'm out. We were served a massive, fancy fish at orientation in Antsirabe (complete with head, fins, tail, the whole 9 yards) and I quite literally had a panic attack at the table because the fish was looking at me with its bugling eyes and gaping mouth and ugh *shivers* It makes no sense, but that's why it's an irrational fear. At any rate, my family's served fish 3 times now, and each time it was a damn struggle to keep my cool and not flip out. I've been very proud of my efforts- there's been minimal panicking, and I have managed to eat some of my fish. But lord, my family are pro fish eaters. My dad plucks off the fins and pops them right in his mouth. You can hear them crunching, like some kind of obscene potato chips. My brother, Francio, leaned over the other night and eyed my leftover fish and asked "you gonna eat the head?" He picked that sucker up and just went to town on it, getting every last bit of edible meat from the skull- and probably even some parts that weren't edible. 

8. Do we have musk melon in the U.S.? I don't think I've had it before now, but there is a word for it in English, so maybe. Here, it's called voatongo (I believe), but I call it the potato fruit. I swear, the inside flesh of that melon, when you chew it, has the exact consistency of mashed potatoes. It's vaguely sweet, but mostly tasteless. It's exactly like eating a bunch of mashed up potatoes with nothing else on them.