11/26/2011: Ghana Time

Today was the first day we were completely on our own foodwise. I had a fresh mango for breakfast, taaaasty! Of course, the fresh mango juice was all over though. After breakfast we had to make our way across campus without our guides. We made it! I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the campus is starting to feel smaller. My feet definitely don’t agree, but I’m finally getting the layout down. For our last day of formal orientation we talked with a lady from Tennessee about culture shock. It was muuuuuuch more interesting than listening to the professors ramble on (one even read all of the student guidelines straight from the handbook). For lunch today, I tried a traditional plate called Red Red. It was really good for being so spicy! It’s made of black eyed peas and some sort of sauce

After lunch, Kelly, Hannah, and I walked around and signed up for our courses. I should really say we attempted to sign up for them! At the university, registration is much different than at home. We have to go to each department we want to study in, put our names on a list of people that also want to take the course, show them our id, and then we may need to go further by giving them a passport photo or fill out a form. Because they have so freaking many students on campus, 34,000 including grad students, each student is limited to taking three subjects a semester. Our first stop was the Religious Studies department, where I signed up for a class on Islamic practices. We went from there to the English department, and while they have the list of courses they’re offering posted, they didn’t have the timetable. This was the same story with the history department! Classes start on Monday, four days away, and the office said that class times should be posted by then! So I’m going into my first week of classes signed up for one, single course.

A lot of us call this Ghana time. As long as whatever needs to be done gets done, it doesn’t really matter when. If you’re meeting friends, expect them to be 10-20 minutes late. We aren’t in our permanent rooms because they weren’t cleaned by the time we got here. It’s definitely something we’ll have to get used to, but since I’m always five minutes late anyway, I feel like I have a head start!

At five o’clock, Kelly and I took our first Tro tro alone to the mall. As soon as I get the map of the town burned into my brain, I’ll be more comfortable on them. Right now I’m still scared I’ll get off at the wrong stop or I’ll get out to let someone off and then get left behind! We shopped around a bit before looking into our real mission: watching a movie. We paid 10 Cedi ($7), to get into Gulliver’s Travels, and 3 more on popcorn. The best part about the popcorn in Ghana, besides it being $2, is that it comes in sweet and salty! Either way you get both; they mix together really easily, not that I minded! The ads before the movie started were super interesting. One played to Spice Girls music, another was a Coca Cola Santa commercial, but the best part was the intense air conditioning! The movie was ok, but I was shivering by the end. I guess some things are the same in multiple countries J

11/24/2011: Impatience

I’m getting bored of orientation very quickly. Each day we have basically the same schedule of various information assaults punctuated by meals. Today the University’s orientation program started, which repeats a lot of what we’ve already learned from ISEP. All foreign students studying here met in a lecture hall to be briefed by the heads of the university about a number of things. The first few were ok, but I slept entirely through the last speaker! I think she was talking about counseling, but I couldn’t tell you anything she said on the topic. The heat in the room and the snacks provided lulled us into an uneasy naptime while we waited to be dismissed. At the end of today’s orientation, there’s another tomorrow, we were finally given the course catalogue book for this semester so we can pick our classes. This will give me something to do during tomorrow’s lectures! Surely we’ll be told how important our malaria medication is at least one more time before classes start.

My patience is wearing very thin as I don’t even have my permanent room yet. They claim that some of the rooms aren’t ready to be moved into yet, so we’re being forced to stay in temporary rooms and live out of our suitcases. It isn’t very comfortable and I feel like I’m losing things! Hopefully we’ll get our real rooms tomorrow so we can unpack before more students get here this weekend.

1/23/2011: Salt Overload

Breakfast today was pretty nasty. Someone must have mixed up the salt and the sugar when they made the oatmeal! Everyone resorted back to the omlettes and hot dogs. It was our first Sunday, and it was interesting to see how many people actually went to church regularly. Over half our number attended some kind of service, but the only things I could think of were my bed and my fan! By the time I woke up from my nap it was time to hit the beach! It was our first time taking the tro-tros, the main public transportation, which were kind of like gazelles in Russia. They’re 15-seater vans that drive insanely to get you anywhere around town. Each ride costs 60 pesewas, Ghanaian coins, equal to around 35 cents.

The ride to the beach was confusing and crazy, but the beach was definitely crazier. The girls in bikinis were definitely hassled more than those more appropriately clothed, not everyone got the message. There were horses to ride down the beach, barbecue stands, surf lessons, fishing boats and tons of people! The water was perfect: cold enough to cool us down but nowhere near the hypothermic levels at the Great Lakes in the summertime. After all of the rivers, ponds and lakes for most of my outdoor swimming experiences, I was shocked by how salty the water was! I mean I know oceans are salty.... but I forgot to what degree! We spent a few hours bumming around the beach before we headed back to the university for dinner and bed.

1/21/2011: Accra City Tour

Breakfast starts so early. Not to mention our 20 minute walk to the café. Today I had milk and sugar with my oatmeal, giving it a whole new direction!! Deeeelightful J After breakfast we hoped on a mini bus and toured Accra. Our first stop was the mausoleum of Kwame Nkruma, the first prime minister of Ghana. He was overthrown, was forced to abandon his country, and died of cancer while in exile. The tomb is built to look like the bottom half of a tree, cut in half, signifying his wasted potential. Everyone here LOVES him. There are hundreds of places named after him: roads, buildings, businesses. I guess he’s like our George Washington, essentially.

On our way to lunch we drove past the residence of the current president. It wasn’t necessarily as impressive as the white house, but daaaang! We could definitely tell it was an important building. It’s really funny here. The city is planned so that all of the different departments and offices of the government are in the same immediate area. That’s kind of smart because if ever you needed to go to multiple offices, they’re right there. But one enemy and it wouldn’t take much to destroy the Ghanaian government. Ghana doesn’t care about this apparently, but it’s not like they have any enemies! It’s a very private country. One of our guides explained it well when he said that if a neighbor was on fire, Ghana would fill a bucket of water and pour it on itself. This way of thought has kept them out of many of the wars still going on today.

We got a huge surprise when we pulled into the restaurant we were eating lunch at. It was Chinese!. Each table was served plates with mountains of rice, noodles, vegetables and meat that we each ladled onto our own plates. It tastes just the same here as it does at home: nothing like actual Chinese food, but maybe a bit fresher. After eating we were given 30 minutes to walk around a small street market. Those thirty minutes were intense! Vendors on foot would follow you around trying to tie a bracelet to your arm before you could say no, drumming on toys they stuck in your ear, and holding up clothes they thought you would like. Another girl and I opted for a much more quiet side street and most of the hassling stopped. We were halfway down the street when she looked in a yard and saw a cute dog. I looked for the dog but it wasn’t there! Buuut there was a small goat. She’s a bit of a city girl… There was a lady with three kids in the yard who nearly fell over when she said it J We spent some time talking to her and before we could go she insisted that we give her our phone numbers so that we could meet again. When we wouldn’t give them to her she gave us her cell number instead! I couldn’t believe it was that easy! Most of the time, when someone wants your number, they won’t give you theirs and it becomes difficult to pull out excuses of why you can’t fill their demands.

After hopping back on the bus, many of us with new bracelets, we headed toward the W.E.B. DuBois center. DuBois is a revolutionary author who strongly stood for Pan-Africanism. He was born and attended multiple colleges in the US then moved to Ghana to empower others to get the educations necessary to push Africa into a new era.

After the educational part of the tour, we went shopping for essentials: forks, pillows, wash basins (because we have to hand wash our laundry…), and most of all, water. There are two forms of drinkable water available in Ghana without having to boil the crap out of it. The cleanest water is from a bottle, either .5ml or 1.5 ml. It’s really funny to see all of us walking around carrying these huuuge bottles of water! The other way is through little plastic sachets about the size of a softball. The only reason these ones aren’t a good, is the fact that the plastic on the outside of the baggie isn’t clean. With bottles, the threads under the cap are protected, but your mouth comes into direct contact with anything that’s on the sachet.

Our last stop was the mall. Hoooly cow! It was just like a mall at home! They had a lot of top brands, even an Apple store, so I think this is one of the nicer end malls in Accra! We all bought track phones and minutes so that we could call home… which everyone did directly after dinner. We also tried to buy little wifi travel drive things so we could have internet on our laptops. Unfortunately, the mob that is CIEE beat us to the punch and bought every one within a very large radius. This is why I have to post all of these entries so late!

We went straight to dinner, then back to the hostel where a few of us decided to poke around the night market. It’s only a few blocks from our hostel and sells anything from converters to key limes! I bought a coconut and had a hell of a time trying to get it open! I finally went to the lady that was working the front desk and asked her how to get the fruit inside. She took the coconut from me and slammed it on the floor as hard as she could! Needless to say, I cleaned it pretty well after that.

1/21/2011: Good Morning Africa

I’m not quite sure yet, but it seems like Ghanaians get up pretty early. It’s barely seven o’clock and someone’s been mowing the lawn for the past ten minutes. I’m very happy to report that grass here smells like grass at home!

Breakfast was homemade oatmeal, an egg omlette, a sweet bun with jam and a hot dog. I wasn’t fazed by the hot dog like many others were; it definitely brought back memories of Russia! The great part was it brought back those same memories for another girl too. Sarah, from Oregon/Australia, is a Russian minor and lived in Moscow for a few months! It’s awesome to have someone to talk about Russia with. We’d start saying something about a part of their culture and the other would start excitedly nodding before the sentence was finished. She has almost talked me into auditing a Russian course with her; if times don’t conflict I probably will. Then mom can get off my back about keeping the language.

After breakfast we went through the first day of our orientation sessions. The first speaker was the head of a health department on campus. She went in depth why exactly we should be taking our malaria medication. With it, if we catch malaria, it’s easy to get rid of. If not, we could catch complicated malaria. Symptoms for the latter range from confusion, coma, spontaneous bleeding, severe diarrhea and severe death. We also covered Cholera which can apparently kill after five minutes in the blood stream (nooot too sure about that one), and deaths caused by waves knocking you over on rocky beaches. Over all, it was a lecture about all the ways you can die in Ghana. Very reassuring. Our second lecture of the day was on taboos, basically saying don’t do anything with your left hand.

After our lectures ended, we went to lunch in a different part of campus. After struggling between Jollof rice and Fufu with goat soup, I ordered the rice and sat down with a bottle of mango juice. We’ve discovered that no matter when you order or who you’re with when you order, your food comes when it’s done, to each person separately. By the time the last girl at our table today got her meal, two of the others were already finished. I think the key is to order something easy! My taste buds rejoiced in my decision when the girl sitting next to me’s mouth burst into flames after the first bite of her Fufu. Jollof rice is awesome, like rice cooked with curry (not in a sauce) at home.

After lunch was nearly a very painful death as we toured campus. Today I wore sandals to save the integrity of my white socks. Bad idea. Before coming, I knew the campus was in a section of Accra named Legon. What I didn’t realize was that the campus made the city of Legon. Legon is campus, campus is Legon. So today we walked around campus, which happens to be maybe twice the size of Cross Plains. It’s like seriously ten times the size of campus in La Crosse! Hitting most of the major parts of campus took three and a half hours. The walk from my dorm to the center of campus, meaning only halfway through, took us 45 minutes. Unfortunately for me, many of my classes seem to be on the other side of the center roundabout. I’m very proud to have any part of my feet left! Wearing flat sandals today wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had. Tomorrow another pair of white socks will take a dirt bath.

Luckily for us the weather hasn’t been bad at all! We’re still in the Harmattan season when dry dusty winds come down to the ocean from the Sahara. The dust forms the cloudy haze that blocks us from direct sun rays and the breezes provide needed relief from the humidity. I tried to psych myself into the humidity before leaving home so it wasn’t such a shock. I think I was pretty successful; I’m not scared of looking disgusting here! Well, maybe only for pictures. I think once I’ve been here long enough I’ll get used to it…right in time for summer in WI.

1/20/2011: Red is the New White

I’ve only been off the plane for an hour and already my socks have turned from white to red. The white jacket I’ve brought along, mostly for the air conditioning on the plane, already has traces of dirt all over it and it can only be a matter of days before my white sheets fall to the same fate.

We arrived in Ghana at 2:00 GMT. Stepping off the plane, I didn’t quite understand what was going on- possibly because of the brain numbing boredom of our 10 hour flight (crappy movies, crappy service, crappy sleep), but most likely because it felt like I was at some sort of summer camp. The heat wasn’t too intense, of course I sweated straight through my jeans, but it wasn’t the oven others claimed it to be. It was probably about 85, pretty humid but there was a nice breeze coming off the ocean that I knew was somewhere close. The humidity provided a thin veil of haze that hid everything but that within a mile. But palm trees, huge flowering bushes and the red sand were all close enough to remind us where we were.

When we finally drove up to our dorm (International Student Hostel #1- ISH 1 for short), the summer camp feeling kicked in even farther. Our dorms are about the same as UWL’s, but instead of having the hallways that connect each room inside of the building, they’re on the outside, motel style. Each room has one feature that no dorm room in La Crosse gets even close to: a balcony! I’m in a temporary room on the first floor tonight but tomorrow I’ll move into a room with a balcony on the second floor. Each of the rooms has windows on the outside wall and the inside wall that can close, but really who would want to close them? A perfect breeze comes through every few minutes, and with the help of our trusty ceiling fan, hopefully the room won’t get too hot. But having all the windows open makes me feel like I’m cheating at camping. I’m in a room with electricity and a nice fan but when eyes are closed and the imagination kicks in, it could totally be a huge tent.

We moved in, slept from four until 5:45 and then walked to dinner. The main cafeteria, the Bush Canteen, is a ten minute walk down a couple streets and through a roundabout. More red sand all over, all the better to dye my socks with. They’ll never be the same againL. The coolest part about our walk to dinner was sitting in a tree on the main road to the Canteen. Nestled in the crook of a tree was a little, Pongo-sized monkey! He was just chillin’ there all day I guess. Some of the girls were saying they saw him in the same place when they went for lunch.

Dinner was very, very tasty, to say the least. ISEP is providing all of our meals, including huuuge bottles of water, until our orientation is finished sometime next week. There were tables under a big tent-like awning and the food was set up buffet style. There was a steamed cabbage-veggie option, then rice with some sort of herbs, lo mein noodles (don’t ask me), boiled potatoes, a beef stew dish and some sort of chicken wings. I thought I was doomed after reading multiple travel articles on the heat Ghanaian meals pack! Lucky for me and my sensitive taste buds, the hot and extremely hot sauces were on the side! Needless to say I passed those over quickly. Everything was great to the extreme. The only reason I didn’t return for seconds like a few others was the succinct death threat my feet issued at the smallest thought of standing. Thank God dessert was passed around! My first experience with Ghanaian ice cream leaves me thinking there might not be vanilla extract here. What was supposed to be boring vanilla in a plastic packet, kind of like a ziplock without the zip, tasted like toasted marshmallow. Maybe the chocolate will taste like coffee…hopefully.

After dinner I washed off what felt like a week of grime with a quick cold shower. And by cold, I mean just a few degrees below room temperature. I definitely won’t have to worry about getting hypothermia in the middle of the tropics I guess. It’s really hard to fully understand the truth. I feel like I walked into Olbrich Gardens and in an hour I’ll have to pack myself into a huge coat, scarf, hat, gloves, and brave the winter winds. Hopefully my senses will wake up in Africa tomorrow and not a walled in rainforest in the middle of Madison.

Quick News!

WHOOO. It's kind of nice here! It's been around 85 since I've been here, but the breezes are coming in from the north so it's ok! I have to get a wifi travel drive, stick thingy, called a modem, from the mall before I can have internet on my laptop where I've been writing all of my blog entries! I promise more details are coming, but I only have 13 minutes of internet time left.

Accra is in a strip of savannah, which is kind of a bummer. I was looking forward to the forest! But I hear we'll be going there later in the semester :) Classes don't start until the monday after next so hopefully we can run around and find a modem somewhere.... other than that we've just been running around campus listening to lectures on how to be safe basically. The food is AWEsome... but only when they have the spicy sauce on the side. Otherwise it's instant death. The weather isn't too terrible when I'm in the mood to bear it and the people I'm with are all friendly!

I'm having a great time so far! Especially because I don't have to worry about shoveling, freezing to death or wearing 20 layers just to be able to feel my toes. Overall, I should be fine :)

Three for the ready, Four to go!

Carrying on with tradition, I didn't start packing until yesterday for my 11 am flight today. Usually it doesn't take me very long, and this time was no different. The only problem with packing last minute is that I pack waaaay too much. Instead of having two 35 pound bags like last night, this morning I had two 40-something pound bags (dangerously close to suitcase obesity, which would have resulted in a quick purge or a $200 fine). Just my luck, the scales were broken at the desk I checked in at, so today's weigh-in was cancelled.

Why there aren't any flights from Milwaukee to DC is beyond me. I'm sitting in Chicago after my flight from Milwaukee, which was all of 16 minutes in the air, and I'll be sitting here for a while. Karma obviously reached around and hit me in the back: I didn't have my suitcases weighed, but all of my flights are delayed. As soon as this flight takes off, I'll only have one stop left before Ghana. My layover in DC is just long enough to make me want to pay for the internet again, annoyingly enough. Then, a nice, 8 hour, relaxing flight before landing and really being warm for the first time since october.

This is what I woke up to this morning, waking up tomorrow will be completely different.

One for the Money, Two for the Show

Today was hopefully the last snowstorm I have to endure until next winter. Two days left and we get five inches of snow! You couldn't have held off another 48 hours, Mother Nature, seriously?
Somewhere between shovelfuls of snow, I realized today was supposed to be the first day of my malaria prophylaxis treatment. What a milestone! And trust me, after taking that little pill the trip definitely began. Apparently "take with food" means eat an entire meal BEFORE you take the pill. Taking it, making dinner, and then eating does not count. Consistent with many other life lessons, I learned this the hard way. Another (preferably more pleasant) side effect of this medication is beyond strange dreams. This is the one I'm looking forward to!
Unfortunately, aside from these medical experiments, I haven't done anything else to prepare for Ghana... like packing or washing clothes. I did check the weather reports! It should be low 9os and sunny until June! (ok maybe only until next week) That plus miles of coastline, rainforests, waterfalls and classes that meet only one day a week: I'm flying to paradise Wednesday morning :)