Diet Cherry Makola

I'm dividing Thursday into two posts because Thursday night was one of the craziest experiences of my life. Oh, just wait ...

Thursday (daytime)

Because I was able to deploy my 40 pre-test surveys on Wednesday (to be picked up on Friday), I was able to take Thursday off (ah, the research life ...) so I decided to sleep in and then explore central Accra in the afternoon.

As I've started to become accustomed to doing, I took a tro-tro down to Tema (thank God, not the port) station and even made a few more friends on the way using my Twi. It's so awesome how people just light up when they see foreigners trying to speak their language. I'm picking up some nice phrases here and there and was even able to get the tro-tro fare in Twi: "Mate, eyesen?" Good stuff.

First stop: the Ghana National Theatre. A rather nice building built by a Chinese firm looking vaguely like our Carpenter Center. I had lunch there because my Bradt guide (read: the Ghana Bible) said that the food was decently priced and pretty good--had some chicken and plantains (ah i could live off of those), but I think the waiter charged me the "foreigner's price". Yeahhhh. I scoped the theatre out for a bit and figured out that they were having a couple of nice cultural shows over the weekend, so I might hit that up. African drumming and dancing = excellent.

Afterwards I decided to wander around the city, which sounds pleasant except when you consider the 100% humidity and the 95+deg. heat. I made my way down to the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum and Museum (Musoleum?) which was really cool...a very quiet and peaceful park with beautiful trees at various stages of development planted by all sorts of different African figures and statesmen. The mausoleum itself is this inspiring, airy granite monolith surrounded by this dark reflecting pool. Got lots of nice pictures around there.

The Museum itself was pretty cool though a bit small and dark. They had lots of things from when Nkrumah was a student in the US as well as stuff like his famous walking stick, his telephone and his favorite picture (it's him dancing with Queen Elizabeth II ... shoutout to Martin Meredith on that one...). All in all a nice historical experience.

Afterwards, I wandered northwards up to Makola markets. You know how in the movies you always picture African markets as being these noisy, supercrowded, dusty, scorching masses? Yeah, it was something like that. And it was awesome. They sell everything there: from suitcases, to knock-off watches, to fruits/vegetables/fish (really stinky), to kente cloth and shoes, etc. It's crazy and yet it's organized (yeah, spontaneous order!) so that things are all kind of grouped together according to categories (clothing in this part, food here, etc.). Maybe the only difference was that all the vendors had cell phones. Great way to check on inventory and set prices, no?

Oh, and I bought a second hat while at Makola, and I actually like it better than the first hat. It's just a simple khaki one, but for some reason it has a Royal Bank of Canada logo on it (seriously). Makes me feel kind of official. :) They also had with University of Central Florida Golden Knights logos on it ... ah, a little bit of home. I ended up paying 2 cedis (2 USD) for it, but it was a bit funny haggling with the dude because he initially said 25. I was basically like, "WTF? No, 7." Then I realized he meant 25,000 cedis. Ghana recently redenominated their currency by dividing by 10,000. So he actually meant 2.5 cedis. I'm sure he would have been quite surprised if I'd given him like 25 or even 7 for that matter. Could have been possible under the water vs. diamonds scenario? Or something like that.

Then I tro-troed it back up to Legon. And so began the night ...