March 2

It’s already March which feels crazy. The semester is going so fast and we only have about 75 days or something.

Last week the power went out for a few days. It went out sometime on Monday, I think, and came back on Wednesday. It’s really not that much trouble though. To shower, I can either fill my bucket up on the first floor and take a sponge bath (or what they call here, a bucket shower) or I can walk over to the other International Hostel and take a shower (because they’re lucky enough to have a generator for when the power goes out). It’s pretty much only a minor convenience but it’s weird to think how crazy people would get if this happened to dorms in the US. It just wouldn’t happen. Today the power went out again just as I was waking up. I don’t know how long it will be out. I immediately ran to the shower so I could use the water while there was still pressure.

Last week was pretty normal. My classes are going well and I have the readings for most of them. I have one professor that no one enjoys though. He’s the professor for my Strategies of Development in Africa class. That class would be really cool but the professor is… a jerk. He likes to single people out who haven’t read and bully students that ask questions. No one agrees with his opinions because he takes the position that culture only hinders development in Africa and he uses anecdotes to prove points about development. Anecdotes are great but you cannot use them to explain trends in development or the economy or whatever else… My least favorite thing is that he doesn’t think critically about topics and doesn’t challenge us to either. He just uses cliché arguments and dismisses questions that challenge those. Ugh. You’d have to be there. He’s bad. But he’s just a one off. The rest of my professors, however longwinded and sometimes boring, are pretty cool.

I don’t think anything else significant happened last week. On Friday, Emily, Jon, and I left to go to Green Turtle Lodge in the Western Region. We left around 2:30 to get a tro in Accra that would take us to Takoradi. We first went to a tro station in a place in Accra called Circle. We waited there for a while but no tro showed up so we found out that we could also go to Kaneshie Station to get a tro to Takoradi. We got one there and then it was a long ride to Takoradi. I’m not exactly sure when we left Accra but we got to Takoradi at 9:30pm. Traffic getting out of Accra was really bad and then our tro had to keep stopping because the engine was over heating. We were worried that we’d get to Takoradi too late and would have to stay there for the night so I even called a few hotels there. Luckily we were able to get a tro from Takoradi to Agona though. Staying in Takoradi for the night would have been no fun and it would have been expensive.

When we got to Agona, we had to walk around for a while to find a taxi. Agona is little more than a village. We found one taxi but he was going to charge us too much. We knew we should be able to get from Agona to Green Turtle for 15 ghana cedis. After we refused that taxi, we had to walk around some more to find another, and we started getting a little worried because we weren’t even seeing another taxi, it was about 10:30pm, and we were pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Luckily we found another taxi and the guy was nice enough to take us for 15ghc even though we probably would have payed 20 or 25 at that point.

We got to Green Turtle at about 11:45pm. Thankfully people were still around to check us in (you never know in Ghana). I didn’t have high expectations for Green Turtle after our stay in Larabanga, but Green Turtle was actually pretty ritzy in my opinion. We slept in tents that were under a small shelter right on the beach. The whole place was right on the beach actually. They even had a sink with running water and a shower. Right after we got there we went to sleep.

We got up early around 7am just because the sun was up. Pretty much all Saturday we hung out on the beach and swam. The waves were pretty intense and knocked me down quite a few times. I had finished the book Confessions of a Shopaholic, which Ginny sent me, on the tro, so I started reading What is the What. The food at Green Turtle was awesome too and not overpriced. It was so nice and relaxing. On Saturday night we took a walk along to beach to try to see some turtles but we didn’t come across any. 

On Sunday we did about more of the same. We left a little after noon to go back to campus. The journey back went a lot smoother and our transfers between tros were really fast. We probably got back to campus around 6pm and we were all pretty tired.

Yesterday I just had some of my classes… same old, same old. Last night I got dinner at the night market like usual. My favorite is mixing red red (a traditional Ghanaian dish of beans) with white rice and lime. All the Ghanaians think I’m weird for mixing those but it’s delicious. After dinner, Emily, Jenna, and I went to the mall to see a movie. On Mondays they have a special deal where you can get a movie ticket, popcorn, and a soda for 12ghc. The best thing about the movie theater is they have kettle corn and salted popcorn. Why don’t theaters in the US have kettle corn?! We went to see Wolfman, which I personally liked. It’s probably not the best movie but it’s about werewolves who are awesome by themselves and it brings out the dork in me.

This weekend I might go to another beach called Adafoa (I don’t really know how it’s spelled) but we’ll see. I like taking advantage of my time to travel and get out of Accra. Right now I’m going to post some pictures from this weekend, although there are only a few because we didn’t do much besides hang around the beach. Also, I’m going to try to upload some videos from when I went to Mole that I haven’t gotten a chance to post.