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?