A Lot of Fun and a Little Culture Shock

Maaha!

(Good afternoon!) I am currently hanging out at the Busy Internet cafe on ring road near the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, where I will soon be heading to face the throngs of people and try to buy some new shoes.

Last weekend we went on a field trip to Cape Coast and it was awesome. We started with an NGO fair, like the one in Accra, and there were a lot of cool presentations. After that we had some time to do our own thing, and Sarah and I went on an epic adventure around the city. We got thoroughly lost, and made friends with every single child in one neighbourhood, because we stopped to talk to a man outside a little resto-bar. He introduced himself as "Justice Capee" which was pretty funny, because we were walking along Capee street. He sent me an e-mail later, which said his name was Yaroo, so I think that's what he's actually called, but I'm still not sure.

 We took pictures with him and the kids. They really seemed to enjoy the cameras. We eventually found our way back to our guest house, after stopping to watch some football (soccer) on the beach, and making friends with the coach of the football team at the local Senior High School. I find it astounding the really awesome people that you can meet just walking down the street here.

Everyone talks to us when we walk around here. As obrunis, we stand out quite a bit, and mostly people are really nice. They are curious about us, and why we are here, or they want to make sure we're not lost. Part of that concern for foreigners comes from the heavy reliance on extended family groups for support here. Since they see us here alone, clearly far away from our family support groups, a lot of people feel compelled to make sure that we're okay. It's very sweet.

Sometimes standing out can be disadvantageous though. I can't count the number of times I've been proposed to just walking down the street. People ask me for money, or gifts, or food. People are always trying to sell me things. People ask me to take them to Canada if I tell them where I'm from, or America more often than not. People hiss at me all the time. Hissing and kissing noises are the usual practice for getting someone's attention, especially a woman, a customer, or a taxi. People grab my arms and put their arms around me, especially in crowded markets. It's hard sometimes to remember that it's not a big deal here, even though it sometimes feels rather aggressive. Still, I've been doing pretty well, and the easiest way to deal with it is usually just to laugh it off. Sometimes I've had to be firm with people to get them to let me go or leave me alone, but for the most part, people are just trying to get my attention.

Anyways, on Saturday we went to Kakum National Park, and it seems that the internet will be fast enough for me to upload a video or two of that. (I'll see if I can embed it, or link to it. In fact, I may go back and edit a bunch of old posts and put in some videos, if I can get them to upload. I'll let you know how that goes.) We did a canopy walk, which was awesome, and I'm very proud of myself for doing it because I'm usually terrified of heights. It was high, but I got used to it, and then it was so much fun.

We also toured the Slave Castle, which was beautiful and horrifying. The tour was really good, if a little long. There's not too much to say about it though... the building was lovely and the stories were sad.

We went out to a little bar and club on the beach. It was attached to a resort of some kind, so there were a lot of expats. The music was good, and I got to know a bunch of the other students on the trip a little better. That was pretty much our weekend; after that we just came home and did homework.

I actually got to hang out with the host family a little more this week. I went with my host mother to the "Saloon" to get her hair done, which I found absolutely hilarious. So did she, once I explained that in Canada when we say "Salon" we mean a hair place, and when we say "Saloon" we mean a bar with swinging doors and cowboys.

The lady who was doing her hair tried to teach me how to twist the little braids that she was doing, but I was incompetent at it. She also tried to teach me more Twi. She taught me some new foods, which was fun. She asked me what Canadian food was like. I always find that question difficult to answer, because there isn't a lot of really "Canadian" food that I eat on a regular basis. Mostly we eat pseudo-Italian food, and things like that. The other thing is, we don't have the kind of staple-food diet that people have here. For the most part, people rotate through banku with fish, noodles, and either rice balls or fufu with one of three or four soups. Yams or plantains with the same kinds of stews also get rotated through, but there isn't as much variety as I might see at home. They change things up by changing the kind of meat that they put in their soups and stews, but a lot of the flavours are the same. I told her the most Canadian thing I could think of was maple syrup, and she insisted that I make some for her.

I wasn't sure how to tell her that you can't just "make" maple syrup, so I just smiled and nodded.

Katie and I also made spaghetti for my host family on Friday night. We went to the Western style mall to get ingredients (and ice cream) and then came home and cooked. Our host mother helped us chop the onions, because both Katie and I are huge wusses about chopping onions, but we did the rest.

Interestingly, oregano and basil are impossible to find here. I found parsley, sage, rosemary, and black pepper, so it still mostly tasted like spaghetti at home, but no basil or oregano. I used a mix of tomato paste and tomato "puree" because I couldn't find crushed tomatoes, and it amounted to the same thing. Ground beef was easy to procure, as were the noodles themselves. Onions and garlic were a little more expensive than at home, but readily available, so that was good.

It was really funny watching the family trying to eat spaghetti. I'm pretty sure it was about as funny as it was for them watching us try to eat fufu. I taught my host mother how to twirl the noodles around a fork with a spoon, and she was very good at it, but eventually she gave up and ate it with her hands like she's used to. Despite the difficulties in eating it, the spaghetti seemed to be a big hit. It felt nice to kind of share something from home with them.

I guess the last little update I have to share is about yesterday's beach adventure. My roommate Katie, and another of our friends from the program, Nora, and I all decided that we were going to go to the beach. The beaches right near the city are typically pretty dirty, and you really can't swim at them, so we decided we'd try to go to a little resort called Bojo Beach. The entrance cost was only ten cidies, so it really wasn't too bad. The adventure was getting across the city to where the beach was.

We walked to campus, which took the usual 30 minutes, and picked a tro tro at the main gate. Tro tros are kind of like buses here. They're privately owned vans that run regular routes across the city. A trip usually costs between 50 peshwas and 1 cidi, so from about 27-53 cents give or take. We took one from campus to Circle, and then another to Kaneshi, and we were going to take another to Aplaku, the little town where Bojo Beach is, but it started to rain. It was actually quite a thing to witness. We were walking down Kaneshi, the biggest market in Accra, on a market day, and the sky started to look pretty grey. Within the span of four minutes, the street literally emptied. People were puttering all around us, rushing to get things inside or covered. After five minutes, it started to smell like rain, and a woman who was almost running past us said, "The rain is coming!" In the most dramatic voice you can imagine. Literally thirty seconds later, we saw a sheet of rain coming towards us, and we promptly picked a taxi.

Unfortunately, because of the rain, we had to ignore the rule that says "Don't get into a taxi before you've negotiated the price." So when we finally got to the beach, we got royally ripped off. I was pretty annoyed about it, but there was not much we could do, and in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that much money. He charged us forty cidies for what should have been about fifteen, but it was still only about twenty dollars Canadian. It was still better than being soaking wet and muddy.

The worst thing about rain here is definitely the mud. It's so  dusty when it's dry, and it's so muddy when it's wet. It's slippery and dangerous and red. I can see how disease and things can be exacerbated by the rainy season. The open gutters that run along all the roads get full and sometimes overflow, and puddles form on every street and sidewalk, because they're not very well drained. The puddles are still around today, despite the heat, especially in bushier areas, and they're breeding grounds for bacteria and mosquitoes. I'm really glad that we're mostly here for the dry season.

That's pretty much all I've got to report for now. Stay tuned for videos as I'm able to upload them. It may take a while, because the internet is really slow, and I need to set aside like three hours for some of them. More adventures to come. I'll keep you posted.