It is to wait. If it is possible to perform a task without waiting, it is either a banal task not worth mentioning, or so critical to the everyday functioning of the vast majority of people that the laws of supply and demand have actually become manifest, even in a place where demand cannot always be followed by payment. Buying rice is the only task I can think of which falls into this latter category in Madagascar. Brown rice, with the husk still on, increasingly a rice of choice in the developed world, is low class, not pure, somehow sullied. If you have to ask about the differences between rices, you are perhaps not fit for the job of choosing your own rice.
Rice is what one eats.
When you walk into such a place, bending down to get through the doorway, you sit at a table, and a young woman brings everyone a large plate of rice. The choices are usually described as chicken or beef, often limited to just one of the two, and the rest of the meal, the gravy with which to decorate your rice, consists of a small, grisly piece of meat in broth. The meal, the copious amounts of rice with meagre meat accompaniment, is washed down with ranopango, a hot drink made by boiling water in the rice pot, until the burnt rice on the bottom comes unstuck and enters the liquid. The result is a thin brown hot water with the taste of burnt rice, which goes surprisingly well with a plate of rice, and which, I must admit, I began to grow fond of, when drinking it every day. For everything else, you wait.