Bill Murray's Blog, page 58
June 11, 2018
African Vignette 6: Madagascar’s Zoma
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The Zoma
Zoma means Friday and it’s also the name for the positively teeming Friday market in Madagascar’s capital city, Antananarivo.
It’s strange to prepare for theft, but that’s what they admonish. Fix your bag to minimize what they get if they slash it open. The Bradt Guide to Madagascar: “The Zoma is notorious for thieves. It is safest to bring only a small amount of money in a money belt or neck pouch. Enticingly bulging pockets will be slashed.”
From a hill above Independence Avenue, a sea of white umbrellas washed out ahead in every direction, swallowing up the main square, flowing into busy little eddies beside stairways, up the hills as far as the eyes could see. Up one hill, down the next.
We paused. This was big, sprawling, daunting and dramatic. We clasped hands and dove in. Flowers first, down on the right. Then a jumble of sundries, the multitudes and the advertised danger, rarefied by the dry hot sun.
Someone reached out and tugged at Mirja’s skirt. Beware the “voleurs,” she warned.
Buy whatever you will. Locks and hinges. Grenadine drinks. Bright plastic jugs. Chicago Bulls caps. Greasy food rolls. Major motor parts. Michael Jackson T-shirts. A vast selection of wicker. Bon Bon Anglais Limonad. We bought a “Madagascar” ink-pad stamp that actually printed “Madagascap.”
Must’ve been three or four hundred meters down one side. Too tight to turn, too close to walk two abreast, too tense to relax. Still, smiles from the stalls. Dignity, not desperation. Some smiles, and lots of open looks of wonder.
All the way down and halfway back we didn’t spy anyone from our part of the world, probably for an hour.
Baby clothes. The tiniest shoes you’ve ever seen. Embroidery. Crocheting – napkins and table covers embroidered with lemurs and scenes from traditional life.
The Malagasy are a little smaller than me in general and I was forever bumping my head on the edges of their big white umbrellas, knocking my sunglasses off my head.
Mirja tried on mesh vests.
Down by the train station, the varnished wooden trunk section. Turning back, furniture. Circuit boards. Tiny piles of tacks. Stacks of feed bags.
There is a classic trap: there is a Malagasy 5000 Franc note. Then there is another that says 5000 also in numbers, but instead of reading merely “arivo ariary,” it reads “dimy arivo ariary,” which I believe means five times five thousand and in any event definitely means 25000 Malagasy Francs, even though in numbers it says 5000.
The feed bag guy wanted 1100 (27.5 cents) for a multicolored “Madagascar” bag. Realizing it just as the bill left my hand, I gave him not a proper 5000 but one of the 5000’s that are really 25000. After a lot of consultation with a lot of people, I got the correct 23900 in change.
We walked up each side of the Zoma – past the train station, bureaux travel, the Library of Madagascar, and made it to the top of an adjoining hill unrobbed.
Here at the top of the hill stood the country’s symbols of power: the Central Bank, High Court, Ministry du Promotion de l’Industry. A band was set up to play on a flatbed but never did. There was hubbub, amplified music and lots and lots of people. Up here the kid beggars that you usually tolerate because objectively, their circumstance ain’t like yours, swarmed so that they might have carried us away, so we turned aggressive and swatted ’em back.
By midday, unscathed and self-satisfied, we sat with our backs to the wall like in any good western, at the Hotel Colbert’s terrace bar, already having seen a week’s worth in one morning. Hotel Colbert had a dubious five star rating, apparently not from any organization in particular.
It was a gorgeous day and the city was so picturesque, completely foreign. We ordered Heinekens in the haze. At Hotel Colbert smoking was still as big as it ever was. Yellow Benson and Hedges ashtrays as big as your head took up a quarter of each table, and flaccid, bibulous Frenchmen sat nursing their Three Horses Beers, and hacked and smoked too much.
•••••
See photos from Madagascar in the Madagascar Gallery at Earthphotos.com.
Africa Vignettes is a weekly series most Mondays this summer on CS&W.
June 10, 2018
Quotes: What’s Right?
When I was a Member of Parliament I opposed torture being used against Irish terrorists to force them to give information that could save innocent lives, and I would do it again, but I found my position impossible to justify to the relatives of some of the innocent people who had been murdered by terrorists.
Whenever, like this, I have held to a moral conviction against rational considerations, the conviction has always been a negative one: I have felt that a certain course of action was wrong. I have never, with the same degree of conviction, thought I knew what was right.
– Bryan Magee in Ultimate Questions
June 9, 2018
Here it Comes
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Pyongyang via Wikimedia
Air Force One bears down on Singapore at this hour. Time for us to bone up on learning this stuff. Betcha more than he has.
The definitive book to read on the Korean War for my money is The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam. A wicked, evil, brutal and ungodly affair.
North Korea Confidential by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, a 2015 book that seeks to cast a rather more realistic light on the reality of North Korean life than the popular media stereotype.
Only Beautiful, Please a memoir by British diplomat John Evrard, a thirty year, four continent British ambassador to un-Commonwealth lands like North Korea, Belarus and Uruguay.
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick, Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader by Bradley K. Martin. Portraits of the first two leaders of the only Communist dynasty, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il.
French Canadian graphic artist Guy DeLisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea
And the scariest of all, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by escapee Chol-hwan Kang.
Free Cakes
Here is a billboard from Riga, maybe three, four years ago. How about some bread?
A reminder that there are places that are happy to find strength in numbers.
Mauritania Travel Video
I can’t recommend this thirteen-minute video highly enough for those who really like far-away places. Very nicely done:
June 8, 2018
Weekend Reading
Next week is one to watch, with the Trump/Kim summit in prime time on Monday night in the east of the United States, just as President Trump would have it, then Thursday’s kickoff of the World Cup in Moscow.
This morning the president said that “he wants to meet with NFL players and athletes who kneel during the National Anthem so they can recommend people they think should be pardoned because they were treated unfairly by the justice system.”
President Trump is not taking the country seriously, but rather playing it as a television show in which he is the star, with teases and cliffhangers, time-worn entertainment industry tactics to keep us tuning in. Trouble is, neither are much of the broadcast media playing their traditional role on either side of the partisan divide. Rather they are capitalizing, literally, on our fraught national moment in a frenzy of profit-making.
This year the United States has become a cartoon country, with either the complicity or inattention of much of its population. So perhaps it’s time for a month of World Cup diversion.
Eh. Besides all that, here are a few absorbing reads for your weekend:
500-year-old Leaning Tower of Pisa mystery unveiled by engineers at Phys.org. Why the Leaning Tower doesn’t fall down.
Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America by Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. This is just frightening.
Own Goal: The Inside Story of How the USMNT Missed the 2018 World Cup by Andrew Helms and Matt Pentz at theringer.com
All life on Earth, in one staggering chart by Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina at Vox.com.
And it’s that time of year again. From Mumbai’s weekend forecast: the worst rains since 2005 by Maria Thomas at qz.com:
He explained that this year’s heavy rains are the result of a low pressure system expected to develop over the Bay of Bengal, which will combine with cyclonic circulations over the Konkan coast, Goa, and Andhra Pradesh.
Every year, the monsoon rains bring Mumbai to a standstill…. Because of this, thousands are usually left stranded when it rains heavily, turning railway stations and even arterial roads into filthy swimming pools. The death toll often mounts by the day as residents risk being washed away or losing their lives in landslides.
Monday we’ll continue with this summer’s series of African vignettes with a tiny story from Madagascar (Its capital, Antananarivo, is pictured above). See you then.
June 7, 2018
Faroe Islands Photo Essay
New this month, bbc.co.uk has a really nice exploration of the Faroe Islands by author/photographer Christian Petersen, premised on the far-flung islands’ postmen. Check it out. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Then come back and read an excerpt from my book Out in the Cold, about a visit to the Faroese village of Saksun (below).
Click to enlarge. There are more photos in the Faroe Islands Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, and you can buy Out in the Cold from Amazon.com by clicking the cover, or from your home country’s Amazon.
June 6, 2018
June 5, 2018
Quotes: On European Populism
I think this quote, from Will Italy’s Populists Upend Europe? by Mark Leonard today at Project Syndicate, makes the salient point with an economy of words:
“An Italian government combining two very different strands of populism will pose a serious threat to the European project, because it could form the core of a new federation of populists and Euroskeptics that have hitherto operated separately. No longer would Euroskeptics be fragmented into different tribes of anti-immigrant politicians on the right and anti-austerity politicians on the left.”
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Seems to me this is the key to making an effective (if potentially frightening) populism adhere. Can opposite poles hold together?
I’m with the less austerity camp, and I find some level of “common currency abuse” on the part of “German fiscal hawks,” as Leonard calls them. I’m less inclined toward the xenophobes and God-and-country nationalists at the other pole. Perhaps they feel the same in reverse?
Can this coalition hold together?
Italy is the European spot to watch this summer. That is, unless the May government falls.
Anybody?
June 4, 2018
Africa Vignette 5: Everlasting in Malawi
When we met, our driver told us, “I am Everlasting.” We sort of looked away, until we realized that was his name.
Everlasting was a slow, deliberate speaker, easy enough to understand once you got acclimated. His “S’s” kind of trailed off.
The Lilongwe River lolled by the market, near the old city administration building “from when Lilongwe was a small town.” The new city hall, beacon of progress, had a “Ready Print” shop sign in a window on the second floor.
Everlasting showed us the flame tree, its red flower. What he called a tube tree at the central outdoor market, where a smiling little boy saw my camera and excitedly grabbed his friend’s arm.
The mosque.
A few kilometers out of town, people along the roadside carried everything you could imagine. A stack of firewood, one guy with a dozen bright crimson pin wheels twirling in each hand.
“These people are coming back from the market. They have been selling.”
They’re Chewa, originally from Congo via Zambia, and among the longest settled Malawian tribes. Portuguese contact with the Chewa came as early as 1608, with evidence of the first Chewa kingdom just before the 1492 voyage of Columbus.
Everlasting began a lecture on goats: They should be tied so as not to eat the maize. Sometimes you cannot see where the goat is tied because the rope is so long. But sometimes the rope is gone away.
If you see a forest, Everlasting said, it is probably a cemetery. Village people cannot use cemetery land for growing, so, sensibly, they choose stands of forest for their burial grounds.
On a flagpole the national flag hung limp.
“The wind is not blowing so it is closed,” Everlasting explained. Across the flag a red sun rose from the top of three bands, and Everlasting said that represents fire.
“The national team when they have done well we call them the Flames. When they have not, well, then it is silent.”
When Everlasting got particularly involved in his stories, he’d punctuate his remarks with the car horn. Talkin’ and tappin’ and tootin’.
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See photos from Malawi in the Malawi Gallery at Earthphotos.com.
Africa Vignettes is a weekly series most Mondays this summer on CS&W.
