Mad Science: The Skinny on Madagascar

Madagascar is a lot more than a movie. It is a wonderful place with marvelous people, but it is very different from Princeton (or everywhere else in the United States for that matter). The facts below will give you basics of the country, but please poke around the rest of the blog to get a real feel for the people, plants and animals of this fantastic island:

Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world. (Can you name the top three?)
About 20 million people call the island home.
Look around and will find something new. About 80 percent of plants and animals cannot be found anywhere else in the world (the fancy science word for that is endemic.) That includes lemurs, but also strange bats, insects, lizards and trees too.
Madagascar has a lot of nicknames but the Red Island and the Bleeding island are the two big ones.
It is one of the 15 poorest countries in the world. Most people live on less than $2 a day.
Everyone speaks Malagasy. Most people speak French. And a tiny handful of people speak English.
The island split away from Africa about 160 million years ago, but it was still stuck to India. Then about 90 million years ago, it broke off from India too, so that makes it the oldest island on Earth.
People have only been living on the island for about 2,5oo years, so it is also one of the youngest islands on Earth too (New Zealand is the youngest).
Malagasy eat a lot of things, but it is almost always eaten on top of, beside or mixed with rice. They even eat it for breakfast.
They used to have kings and queens, but about 120 years ago the French came and kicked out the last queen. Then about 50 years ago, the Malagasy kicked out the French and now they have presidents.
The money is called ariary. One of your George Washington dollars is worth 2000 ariary here.
The capital is Antananarivo (that's where I live).
It is a tropical island, so snow is a pretty strange and rare thing. It does rain a lot though. There is a dry season and a wet season for most of the country.