Dhaneesha’s Diary

As usual, I get nice surprises !

I was informed that I will have to go to Madagascar for 1 week to work at Air Madagascar, a travel agency there. So we, my manager and myself, took the air madagascar plane on Monday 08.02.2010 at 11 am. I have never been to any other country before, apart from Rodrigues …

So everything went so well on the first day. We had been offered a nice hotel, the palm hotel to stay. It was well equiped, clean and the people there were really nice. For breakfast, lunch and dinner, we had to search for food in restaurants. Hopefully, my manager already knew the best restaurants there as he had been to mad for more than 10 times for work. Our office was 2 mins far from the hotel and this reduced the amount of time we had to spend in travelling.

My hotel : the PALM HOTEL

The office at air madagascar, in TANA, where we worked:

Life is really hard there for eveyone, no food, money, health…it took me some time to adjust there. Even they are poor, the people in mad are really nice.  We normally started working at 08:00 am and finished at around 06 – 07 pm, getting 1 – 2 hours of lunch as this is the rule there.

After work, we went directly to the hotel and get ready for dinner. The first day, I went to a restaurant named Piment Rouge. The food was delicious, took chicken in a sauce i don’t remember and some vegetables. We had the occasion also to go to some of their nice restos : “Chez Sucette”, “La Boussole”, “Hotel du Louvre”, ice cream at “Blance Neige”, pizza at “Gastro pizza” (after eating it, I felt ill :S, but my manager didn’t get any health complications).

The worst thing that happened to me, was on my second day in Madagascar,  I almost fell down and had a severe ankle sprain! fufff….. had a real pain for 3 days…until friday, my last day in Mad :s. So didn’t get the courage to go out for shopping or visit the country. On my last day, meaning friday 12/02/2010, felt like going out. So I asked my manager to take me to the “Bazar”, market where I could get some cute decorations and gifts.

On that particular day, I discovered something very interesting, “Chateau de La Reine“…

The story behind this palace was that  there were 4 queens, but the first one was the worst! People hated her as whenever she felt like having sexual relationship with a man, she did so and after that, she just killed him. She did that to many people. When justice had to be done, she had a particular place infront of the palace, known as ” Palais de Justice” where the culprits had their head cut off infront of all people.

Palais de Justice :

As soon as we reached the ” Chateau de la reine”, a guide came voluntarily to us to show us the place all around. He even tried to charge us a lot of money lol , but my manager was already aware of that action and gave the guide some money only to pay him for his effort.

One last thing about Mad, there are lots of children who are uneducated and live in the streets, begging every single minute, many prostitutes, many people eating things that you won’t dare eat :S …all these due to poverty!

I will like to thank Mr Thierry Ramiandrasoa for all his help and patience, and all users at Air Madagascar, Tana, for their politeness and generosity.

It was my first outdoor job, but had a superb experience! Learnt how to live without my mum , without my love, yashvin and my whole family and friends!