Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Blah.

This week has been very uninteresting. Classes are settling down and everything has a routine. I no longer get lost around campus, I know where my favorite eating places are and getting around Accra is much less frightening. Monday I gave a presentation in my English class with a few others. It went well... seeing as we only met once and didn't really get anything finished. Tuesday, though, Kelly and I went into town to get our Cerebral-Spinal Meningitis shots. We left at 10:15 and took a tro tro all the way to the center of town and then taxied to a clinic. Well, it turned out to be the wrong clinic, so we walked ten minutes to the larger polyclinic. There, the lady at the reception desk said that they were out, and to go to another clinic at the other side of town. So we grabbed another taxi. This driver seemed to have a death wish, weaving in and out of traffic! But we got there a good five minutes faster! the Akai clinic, next to the American Embassy, actually had the shot we were looking for. We waited in line and got the shot (Northern regions, watch out!) we needed to get before going to Mole National Park (why we didn't go a couple weekends ago). Then, Kelly wanted to get a package from one of the post offices. We went to one, which turned out to be the right one, but were told to go to the main office, 15 minutes away. When we found out the first post office was right, we got kind of pissed, but went back to get the package. It takes SO much to recieve a package here! you have to have a photocopy of your ID, then pay import fees, not to mention wait in line. We finally left at about 3:50 and got lunch. After eating, it was rush hour so we had no chance of getting a tro back to campus so we taxied back. Later in the evening it rained again! Going to sleep while it's raining is so nice because it means it's not 80 degrees outside. I actually needed a blanket!! Hipefully it stays this nice all week. Friday it can be dry though, we're heading for Kumasi, the second biggest city in Ghana, up in the central region! Should be a great time! Tell you about it soon :)

The Volta Region

Time seems to fly in Ghana, despite it's slow pace. Saturday we left for the Volta region, in eastern Ghana which creates the border with Togo. It took FOREVER to get there (which is probably a bad sign, seeing as we're going twice the distance this weekend) because of bad traffic and sucky roads. Our first stop was Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary! We walked down a path, through the jungle to get to a little area where monkeys were known to hang out. And then we got to FEED THEEEM! They ate bananas straight from our hands! ...well... one stole a banana straight from my hand, luckily I had another half :) But it was sooo cool! We had to tear ourselves away from them after a while so we could make it on time to the waterfall. Apparently the gates closed early... but I don't believe it. So we got back on the bus, drove another hour and a half, and pulled onto another dirt road. We stopped at a little rest stop, but there was no waterfall in sight. Ahh yeah, like everywhere else awesome in Ghana, you have to hike to get there. But it was so worth it!
Wli waterfall is the highest in West Africa. there were a bunch of tour groups wading in and out of the water and after our hike, we didn't hesitate to join them. The water was definitely colder than they made it seem! we went all the way under the falls and messed around, climbing on the back wall and taking a million pictures.
When we got out, the hike back didn't seem so bad, but we were all hungry for dinner. Little did we know it would be another five hours before we could eat. We left the falls en route to Hohoe, one of the largest towns in the Volta Region. we found a restaurant for dinner around 7 and settled in, starving. After half an hour, I wondered what was taking so long. After an hour, I was looking at the table cloth, wondering how good it would taste with a bit of salt. After an hour and a half, I got crabby really fast. An hour and a half may not seem like a long time, but after a day of hiking and swimming with a couple crackers as a snack, I was HUNGRY. Finally the food came, and it was like.. half a regular portion!! I was like, what is this? The appetizer? So after I shoveled that in, we drove to our hotel. It wasn't a hotel really, but a guest house behind a giant church. I showered, turned on my alarm and crashed.
Sunday was a day of relaxation, kind of. We left later than usual, at 9 am, and decided not to stop for lunch, but at a gas station to get snacks. We drove back to Accra, the return trip always seems shorter, and pulled into our hostel at 3:30. After we settled back in, people were drawn to the living room, like every night. We sat, chilled, looked through each others pictures and called it a night!

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Osu

Last week I decided to drop my Tuesday class, so yesterday I had to walk around campus trying to figure out exactly how to do that. I started in the religions department, had to walk a few blocks to the deans office, back to the religions department and then BACK to the deans office. That was enough exercise for the day. But that meant that I had today free until 5:30! Kelly and I decided to do some exploring downtown in a part of the city called Osu. We took a taxi, too lazy to wait for a trotro, and it turned out to be an interesting ride. There was a huge traffic jam and as we were trying to cut through traffic, our taxi was side-swiped by another car! Taxi driver was not having a good day. They got out and yelled at each other until a truckload of policemen pulled up behind us to see what new traffic jam was holding up the other one. One police man climbed into the passenger's seat and we drove down the road, out of the way. They kept yelling for a bit, then our driver got back in and drove away... he wasn't very happy. He didn't respond to anything we said either.
On the plus side, we made it all the way to Osu without getting in another accident! Osu is basically a big touristy shopping street with nice restaurants (the Indian one we went to is there) and shops. There are annoying street vendors everywhere too selling anything from bracelets and drums to paintings and soccer jerseys. We were there for a fair trade store that specialized in batik fabrics and handmade clothing. The shop was pretty cool. It had a bunch of weird stuff too, like those bags made of plastic drink packets (except these were made of water sachets and ice cream wrappers), ornaments, purses and bags; anything you can dye, they had it. We also stopped by an arts store to buy some paints for a guy in our group. It took us about 20 minutes to find the freaking place! We must have asked twenty people and the first ten said just get a taxi and the second said it's only a few blocks away. Some said down the street, others said up, down a few dirt roads, past the yellow building, left, then right... I'm surprised we found it at all! In case you were wondering, it was down the road, four blocks, turn at the yellow building, three doors down from there.
We got back just in time to rest a bit before heading back out for our Twi class at 5:30. Today's lesson was killer. The professor introduced pairs of letters that make whistling sounds when they come next to each other in a word. Pairs like dw, tw and hw all whistle and I can't figure out how to do it! It rained again while we were in class and stopped right before we were released. It seems like the rainy season's going to start early this year, but all Ghanaians have different opinions. Looks like I'm breaking out the umbrella.
In other news, I'm sorry I have no pictures! I have to walk 40 minutes onto campus to get fast enough internet to upload anything or skype at all. There is an option of paying 50 bucks and getting the wireless from the hostel, but after shelling out 50 bucks for this stupid modem, I'm hesitant. Stupid money!

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Weekend Wanderings

What a weekend of relaxation! Friday, freedom came early! Psychology of Religion ended and we set out to complete a list of errands. The bookstore on campus is great! They have a used book area with books for a dollar or less. We picked up some leisure reading and some notebooks and textbooks for courses, had lunch, stopped at the ATM and bought a bag of water. I’ve finally moved on to cheap water! The past three weeks we’ve been buying 1.5 liter bottles of water in bulk, but they’re pretty expensive. A box of 12 costs 12-14 cedi, about 10 dollars. On the other hand, you can buy water in half liter little plastic bags, one for 5 pesewa, 3 cents. So, buying a bag of 30 bags of water costs 1.30 cedi… a little bit over the cost of one bottle. Friday afternoon was dedicated to laundry. Hand washing has gotten a lot less stressful with more experience. I gave up on using detergent in powder form and was ridiculously surprised at how much easier using detergent in bar soap form is!

The laundry washing area has two giant cisterns that store water and provide a nice workspace to scrub in. There’s a large rectangle of grass, between the two inner walls of the complex and the outside wall that the tanks are seated next to, that is full of huge laundry lines to hang dry clothing. So as I was scrubbing away Friday afternoon, two of the guys in ISEP sat on a bench outside, in a little patio area just off the laundry block. I walked past them, said hi and retreated to my room for what turned into a three hour nap. I finally went back down to check on my laundry at about 5 and passed the same two boys, and an additional two in the same place I had seen them last. After another hour, three girls added themselves to the boys group and they pulled a couch over with them. By 8pm, the patio by the laundry lines became the new hangout for all of ISEP. There were bottles of wine and whiskey, mosquito repelling incense and four candles. We’ve dubbed our new hangout “The Living Room,” and it’s already being used in casual conversation.

Saturday, Monica, my roommate, and I went to Medina to get some new shoes and ingredients for the main sauce in Ghanaian dishes. Even though Medina is on the smaller side of the markets in Accra, it’s easy for me to get lost! Monica easily navigated through the stalls and sellers to find a HUGE pile of shoes. She found a pair easily, but I’m too picky to settle for the first stall. We must have walked past each shoe seller in the market by the time I had finally given up. Along the way, Monica picked up tomatoes and onions, tomato paste, mackerel in tomato juice, small peppers that looked too spicy for me to handle and some stock cubes. I ran into a cup, some laundry pins and a very juicy looking pineapple. As we were heading toward the tro-tro station, I spotted a pair of knockoff Teva’s! Ten cedi (7 dollars) later, they were mine and we headed back to campus. As exhausted as we were for spending three hours in the market, we still had to walk a mile across campus from the university bus stop to our dorm. We sludged into ISH, passed the living room, ten people there now, and fell into bed. Monica taught me how to make the sauce and told me that Jollof is just rice cooked in the sauce instead of water. So now I can make Jollof! And keep it not so spicy!

Seven o’clock came and a few of us left to celebrate an ISEP birthday! We were stoked to go to a restaurant downtown that serves wild game. I was planning on having Zebra for dinner! Others were talking about ostrich and camel cheeks. It took us a long time to find the place, it was behind a large fence and there wasn’t a sign for the restaurant…because it had closed a few months before. We settled for a nice Indian restaurant a few blocks down. As long as we don’t think of how much we missed, the Indian food was great!

As for Sunday, the entire day was spent looking through homework and laughing in the living room. The boys built a table Saturday, allowing more room for congregation. We’re looking for more seating, but the floor is always available to those late comers.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Just Kidding...

Turns out we need another vaccine before we can venture to the north. SUCKY. But I suppose we aren’t dead…

So, instead of leaving at 5:30, I went to class at 7:30, Shakespeare. Unfortunately, it’s not only in America that students fall asleep during extremely boring classes. The professor was long-winded and spoke softly: the perfect recipe for a disaster class. Next week I’ll bring my pillow and it’ll be like I never got out of bed. After class I came back to my dorm and slept for a decade. It was probably closer to three hours, but it felt soooo gooood.

I went downstairs for lunch and the minute I said it looked like rain, someone turned on the shower, full blast! We’re talking cats, dogs, guinea pigs, fish, hamsters and probably a cow or two! I figured it would only rain for twenty minutes like that, as long as a heavy rainstorm at home. NO. It was a torrential downpour for a good hour and even after that it probably took thirty more minutes to drop to a heavy mist.

Our second Twi class was this evening at 5:30. The ground was completely mud. After the thirty minute walk to class, our legs were covered in mud spots flung up from our shoes, cars driving by and people walking past. More than once I slid on a mud patch covering a hard surface, like walking on soapy floors in flip flops. At one point, I had to sacrifice my bag to keep my butt dry. Next time: real shoes.

Bring it on, rainy season.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

You’re welcome to my breakfast

Each morning this week I’ve woken up to the smell of eggs. I fall out of bed, most likely tangled up in my mosquito net, tell my roommate good morning, and then she welcomes me to her breakfast. In Ghana, you’re welcome to everything. The first week, when we were eating at Tasty Treats, they would always say “You’re welcome” when the buffet was ready. We’d always say thank you back, not realizing that here, it means you are welcome to come and eat. You’re welcome can also mean ‘welcome to Ghana,’ ‘you can have some of this if you want,’ or ‘you can use this anytime.’

In new news: I’m leaving in 6 and a half hours for an extremely spontaneous trip to the North of Ghana. A small group decided yesterday that they wanted to go up to the national park and to a hippo sanctuary from tomorrow, Thursday, until Monday. Two hours ago, Kelly and I decided we wanted to go with!! Keep us in your thoughts this weekend, as travel here isn’t exactly ideal (but it’s nothing to worry about, mother…). Talk to you Monday!

Monday, February 7, 2011

The Week: In Review

WHOA! That week went fast! I’ve fallen into a nice routine, but somehow I lost essential blog writing time. Classes this week were hit or miss. No one really takes the first week seriously. My roommate didn’t even show up until the week was over!

Amazingly enough, I actually made it to all of my classes! But, I can’t say the same for my professors. I actually made it, on time, to my 7:30 class, just to have a girl walk in to tell us the professor wasn’t coming. Thursday we didn’t have that luxury and we were forced to wait 45 minutes before hesitantly leaving. My Tuesday class did meet, but the professor was thirty minutes late. As soon as he walked through the door he started lecturing too, as if he knew he was late, he just didn’t want to admit it. We learned about the differences between the two main branches of Islam, which is waaaay too much information to be handed in two hours. The professor for my psychology of religion class also showed up, but he was much trickier. He sat in a desk, like a student, until class was supposed to start. I think he was trying to make some sort of point, but it was lost on me!

After class, we spend thirty minutes walking back to the hostel and looking for as many short cuts as we can find! A guy from Ohio and I hit the jackpot on Thursday! We cut off a good ten minutes from our walk just by following random dirt paths through campus. Of course I’m not a very good short cut finder. Paths I find tend to be more of a long cut than a short one.

This weekend wasn’t really interesting though. Saturday morning a girl from Louisiana, another from Tennessee, and I did laundry together in the courtyard. There is a service in another dorm across the parking lot that will do it for you. It’s relatively cheap unless you do it often. Because we’d much rather spend our money cooling down with ice cream, we do all of it by hand. We’ve been trying to figure out how to get all of the dirt out of our clothes, but it’s not looking good.

After doing laundry all morning, we took showers and started to get ready for the welcome party the university hosts for international students! Buses shuttled us halfway across campus and up a giant hill to where we were having dinner and the party. Dinner was a buffet from tasty treats! While we were eating there were both student performances and cultural dancers and drummers. The students that preformed were awesome, especially one that looked like a skinnier version of Robert freaking Patterson! The Ghanaian dancers were awesome. They danced like crazy! They even had bowls of fire balanced on top of their heads for one dance!

Sunday morning was mostly spent scratching my mosquito bites. Mosquitoes here don’t make small bites that’s for sure. The red bump where they actually bit is small, but it’s surrounded by a huge pinkinsh red circle about the size of a quarter! After lunch, a group of us headed to the mall to find something to do. We went into multiple stores looking for something we couldn’t quite explain, only to realize what we actually wanted was ice cream again. We got back to the hostel and I got into the shower. When I got out, the light in my room was on! I walked in, dripping and in my towel, to find my new roommate had finally come. Great timing. Her name is Monica, and she’s pretty cool! She’s a senior, majoring in social work and geography. Her family lives in Accra so hopefully if she goes home she’ll take me with her! She doesn’t have a mosquito net, so sometimes I feel pretty stupid; like a tourist, you know? But I woke up this morning and she said she couldn’t sleep! There were too many bugs! So maybe it’s a good thing after all.

Then at about ten o’clock we went to an American sports bar to watch the SUPER BOOOOWL! I, of course, knew the Packers would win. I tried to convince the only five Steelers fans to go home so they could cry in peace, but they insisted on watching… it was 3am before the game finally ended!! The best part of the whole night was even before the game started. Three of us sat with some girls from CIEE and were talking about where in Wisconsin we came from. I asked one girl and she said, oh, just outside of Madison. So I pushed farther and she said she was from MIDDLETON! I was like WHAAAT?? Then she proceeded to tell me that one of the boys in our group, one that was sitting at the table with us, was also from Middleton! Turns out the three of us went to MHS at the same time and didn’t even realize it! The other two were in the same class and knew someone from MHS was also on the trip, but no one realized there was a third, me! I hadn’t recognized the other two, and they hadn’t recognized me because we graduated two years apart.

Small world, huh?

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

1/31/2011: Classes

Today is the first day of classes! I’m not sure if I should be happy about that… having so much free time is nice, but reeeeally boring. Now I actually have to do something. We had breakfast at 9:30 and left the hostel to check the departments that hadn’t put up class timetables. If they weren’t up today, that meant no class! Our first stop was the history, English and sociology block. All three buildings are joined by a courtyard so we don’t have to walk as far! I signed up for The History of Ghana in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and then moved on to see the English timetable. It was up to, that meant I’d have to go to all of my classes this week. Shakespeare and His Age, is on Thursdays (at 7:30am… hopefully the professor can make it interesting otherwise I might as well bring my pillow) and should fulfill a required course at home. Then I looked at the poetry class I wanted to take. Turns out it was a Monday class, so I actually had to go to it today. But when I looked at the timeslot, I was doomed. Class started at 11:30 and it was already 11:15! I didn’t even know where the building it was in was. I asked a few people and it turned out that the class was just in the next building over J I was definitely on time, not that it mattered, the professor took full advantage of Ghana time and was ten minutes late.

Class here isn’t very different than class at home. The only main difference is that each class only meets once a week, for two hours. Poetry actually lasted the entire period and was pretty interesting. We’ll be studying some poems I’ve already read for other classes, so it should be easy J.

After class I grabbed lunch and headed back to the hostel. I finally got to check my email on my own computer! After a week, I had 81 emails on AOL and 15 on my school account! I caught up on Kenzie’s blog and all of the happenings on facebook. By then, it was dinner time! After dinner we watched a movie. I fell asleep multiple times while it was running, so immediately after it was bedtime. Tomorrow I’ve only got one class, The Faith and Practice of Islam, which starts at 1:30. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep in. The sun rises at like 5am here so I’ve been waking up at like 8 every time I want to sleep in. Not cool.

I finished uploading!! Now I can actually do posts on the right days haha. That is...if i remember.

1/29/2011: Sunday Sun

I was talked into getting up today, on our day off, at 7:30. I went with Virginia, the girl that arrived late, to the Catholic Church on campus. We left at 8, thinking an hour to find the building was plenty. We got there within half an hour to find that mass had started at 8 today! Apparently it was family weekend and the church was having a huge picnic to celebrate the swearing in of a new set of officials. The ceremony took about an hour so they extended mass by an hour! Even though we got there late, we still sat in mass for 2 and a half hours! I’m not sure I can handle sitting anywhere for two hours straight again. The choir was the best I’ve ever heard! They had bongos and everything! Actually, the entire church could have been in the choir, everyone sings so well!

Lunch afterwards was great too! They had all of the national foods that we’re used to and drinks. I felt like I was at home, going to clubs just for the free food! Except this was a little more legit because we didn’t know there was going to be food afterwards. It was like a reward :). We sat with a few grad students who told us a bit more about campus and Ghana in general.

When we got back to the hostel I decided not to wait any longer for the guy that was supposed to fix our internet. We went to the mall on a tro tro and went to the main store. They fixed it within minutes! On our way back we ran into problems. We took the wrong tro tro and ended up having to walk a mile home in the dark.

When we got back we went to the night market for our new favorite food: fried egg sandwiches! A hilarious 14 year old girl named Vivian makes them. We spent two hours sitting outside her stall joking around! Her stand is pretty popular. There’s usually a bunch of people sitting in chairs around the stall waiting for an order to be filled.

I hoped in the shower when we returned and only then found out how much sun I got today. I suppose I should have realized it! We walked to the church and back, to the tro tro station, and then from the next station to the mall! It hasn't been too sunny since we've been here. There are always clouds, but today was pretty sunny. I hear that as soon as the Harmattan is done the sun will be out more often. At least I have a base coat now I guess!

11/29/2011: The Rainforest… Welcome back, Allergies.

We woke up early, like we do every day, and took off for Kankum National Park, a rainforest reserve. It must have been 85% humidity because I was wet the instant we walked off the bus. It was soooo different than the landscape in Accra! Remember, Accra is mostly a sandy strip of dry, temperate, savannah basically. Kankum was full on bugs, moisture, trees, plants, vines: think Tarzan style. We took a small hike, maybe 15 minutes, up to the first platform of the park’s main attraction: Africa’s only canopy walkway. It was a rope bridge that was strung between seven platforms that straddled a big valley. Walking across the bridges, we were at the same height as many of the treetops but many were even higher. The platforms were attached to big trees, so there were ants everywhere. It was cool to see the way they followed each other and what they were carrying! But those were the only animals we saw, it didn’t really matter though! The variety of pants and the view of the hills in the distance was enough to make us all happy!

We hiked back down, dripping by now, got back in the bus and drove again to Elmina. We ate lunch in an awesome restaurant that was on the beach. When I mean on the beach, I mean you look out the window and there’s sand, water is 100 feet away. It was at this point that I discovered that I had been sneezing more than average. something in the forest must have triggered my allergies back :( I hadn't had any problems before this...annoying nose. After lunch we drove back to Accra, but somehow it took MUCH longer to get back than it took to get to Cape Coast in the first place. We left lunch at about 1:30 and didn’t pull into the hostel until about 6:30! Needless to say, we ate dinner and crashed for the night.

1/28/2011: Cape Coast

We got up extremely early today and left for an overnight in Cape Coast, a town on the coast about three hours from Accra. The last girl to arrive in Ghana showed up last night, just in time for the trip! Unfortunately though, she took her malaria pills without eating first and ended up just like I did, sick. After half an hour she was feeling better and we took off for the weekend! We had to drive all the way though Accra’s crazy traffic, which in itself is a completely different story, before we could start heading in the right direction. It was fun to see places we were starting to recognize and buy foods and little things from vendors out the window. People walk up and down the aisles of cars trying to sell anything from posters or food to handkerchiefs and gum. We all got plantain chips and fried doughnut things for the trip. As we creeped out of the city, we saw more and more houses surrounded by huge walls. All of the walls were topped with barbed wire or shards of glass! Many families had planted vine plants to cover the awkwardness of the barbed wire so many times the thorns from roses or other flowering plants were made of metal…

We passed a ridiculously huge shanty town/suburb named Nima. The tour guide that was with us for our city tour came with as well and he said that that part of town was mainly Muslims from all over Ghana. As soon as we passed the last few houses in Accra, we drove past a HUGE lake, Weija, which supplies most of the city’s water. We also saw a bunch of really weird things. A man was sleeping in an overturned wheelbarrow in the median of the giant highway we were on. A lady was selling Pringles on the roadside; she held two in her hand and fifty cans on her head! We also drove past a refugee camp set up during the Liberian war. Some of the inhabitants have already gone back to Liberia, but many stayed because Ghana grants asylum to those who want it. What was really interesting was the conversation we had about Cote d’Ivoire. If they start a civil war because of all that’s going on over there now, that camp and many others will fill up with refugees again. Ghana prides itself in being called a haven but a lot of people that come don’t spend much money and move on quickly.

We finally got to Cape Coast, had lunch, and then toured our first castle. Cape Coast castle was primarily used for holding and transporting slaves. We toured the holding cells first, which were completely dark. The guide said that when a few archaeologists from the university came in, they excavated through about 6 inches of human waste before finally hitting the actual floor. Thank goodness it didn’t smell like it. The castle butts right up to the beach for easy boat loading through the ‘door of no return’. Overall, it was a sad tour, but very educational!

We drove down the coast a little more to another slave castle, Elmina. We didn’t tour but we were allowed to run around for a few minutes to take pictures and stretch our legs on the beach. Each castle sat right on the sand and they were beautiful beaches! Too bad the history was so ugly. After Elmina we got back on the bus and headed toward our hotel. It sat almost on top of a lagoon that had a family of ‘friendly’ crocodiles. I’m sure if they were hungry enough any crocodile could become friendly… we only saw one anyway, and he was swimming away from us. The best part of the hotel was the water heaters! Not that they would turn on…