A swift tour of Europe's Peninsulas: Scandinavia, Italy, Spain.

The first time I ate zebu meat was on our first night, in some tiny backstreet restaurant. It turned out to be absolutely delicious.
“You can tell that this used to be a happy cow,” I declared, “running freely on african meadows”. In less than few days I will have to reevaluate this statement after witnessing a flock of goats nibbling on a pile of ever-present rubbish next to a bus station. But now the meat seemed like the best thing I have eaten in ages. None of us has ever had zebu before, but we did hear about this hunched, indigenous cattle of Madagascar - mostly thanks to our hasty research performed something like two days ago, driven by a sense of duty rather than necessity.

We just arrived a couple of hours ago, and already the taxi-ride from the airport was something extraordinary: streets full of cars, carriages, animals and people; candle-lit shops and the sun setting over the red hills in the distance. Our driver was skillfully making his way through all this chaos, honking, praising our French and telling us about the best places to visit. None of us has ever been to Africa before. A German girl, a Brit and me, a Pole. Three white kids on a trip of a lifetime.
“How many people live there in Antananariva?”
“8 milion!” assured us our driver. This seemed like a lot for a capital of a country twice the size of Germany and populated by 20 million people altogether. Over the next few days we kept hearing the same figure over and over again until eventually we decided to double-check it with Google. The official number was 2,000,000 - most likely nothing else than a rough estimation anyway.

We checked into our hostel, had dinner and went to look for anywhere we could get some booze. It has been a while after nightfall, it was raining, the cobbled streets were empty and streetlights scarce. The local rum - ridiculously cheap. On our way back some child came up to us and asked for money. We give him some change, and five other come immediately after he disappears. We realised, already on our first day on the island, that we will have to stop having sympathy for people asking us for money. Something like two weeks later I loose my nerve and snap at a particularly annoying beggar: “I am white, but not a millionaire!”.

The next morning we would wake up with our legs covered in mosquito bites and go off to see the lemurs, baobabs and paradise beaches. Yet another tourists, here to leave some of their money to the locals.