John’s Crawlspace

I woke up on December 8th at around 5 am or so, and couldn’t get back to sleep because of all of the noise outside. I knew that in a few hours we would be leaving for Cape Coast (to check out Cape Coast castle and the nearby Kakum National Park) but an hour or two more of sleep would have been nice, since I was still feeling pretty sick. I went to take a shower (since I puked before I went to bed the night before) but the water wouldn’t work. I’m not saying that the hot water wouldn’t work – trust me, I was used to cold showers at this point. The water wouldn’t turn on at all. I went down to the lobby and the guy told me it’d be working in an hour.

Two and a half hours later, the water still wasn’t working, and the “free breakfast” was nowhere to be found either. We checked out of the hotel around 9:30 and grabbed a taxi to Tema Station. and after wandering around there for awhile, we realized we couldn’t get a tro-tro from there to Cape Coast, so we grabbed another taxi to Kaneshi station. From there, we got on an “STC” bus.

As soon as I sat down, a huge fat lady took the seat next to me and smothered me. The bus ride (which I initially thought would be more comfortable than a tro) was one of the worst yet. No fire extinguishers blasted me in the eye this time, but the roads had so many sets of speed bumps (literally, at least one every 2-3 minutes) that the driver didn’t slow down for at all, it was like a joke. So that felt amazing considering the condition I was in.

At one of the stops, the fat lady next to me got off the bus and walked to the curb. She scooted over to pee right in front of everyone, and then got right back on the bus with a huge grin on her face. I had seen people pooping on the side of the road as well, so this sight wasn’t at all shocking to me, but it’s still worth mentioning.

When we finally arrived in Cape Coast (after about a 3 hour ride) we were swarmed by taxi drivers. We got one to take us to “Sammo’s Guest House” (for 1 cedi) which was where we planned on staying. On the way, he told me that he meant he wanted 1 cedi from each of us. I was at the end of my rope at this point and told him to stop and let us out, and I started to open the door while the tro was still moving. He knew I wasn’t going to take any of his crap, so he lowered the price and took us where we needed to go.

We checked into Sammo’s Guest House and the price was right – 9.50 (cedi) a night. The room had no tv/air/fridge, but we didn’t need that stuff anyway. The bed was a little small (and had no sheets on it), but the room had a shower with a shower head, so I was happy. In retrospect, I wish I would have taken more pictures near the end of the trip. I do remember what the room looked like, but I think because I was feeling sick, I wasn’t using the camera nearly as much.

We took showers and then took a short taxi ride to Cape Coast castle. I thought that the sign outside was rather humorous… “Museum, slave dungeons, gift shop”. The guided tour lasted for about half an hour, and it was pretty interesting. The conditions that the slaves who were kept in Cape Coast Castle (it was a major hub in the slave trade of the 1800s) endured were pretty awful… They were kept in dank basement rooms with no sunlight, they were pretty much just straight up caves. The architecture of the castle was interesting, and I thought that the numerous cannons facing the sea were pretty cool. The castle was right on the beach, so the view was nice. I almost feel like I’m doing something wrong by talking about the nice view of the sea from a place where so many people were treated so horribly (or killed) for so long.

When the tour was over, I was taking pictures from up on one of the towers. I was using the “stich assist” feature on my camera to try and get a panoramic shot of the marketplace below me – I had never used the feature before, so I was looking at the screen on my camera for a few minutes while pointing it towards the marketplace. The area I was shooting was very packed and bustling with activity, and I thought I heard someone yell “hey, white!” but I was used to hearing things like this anyway, so I thought nothing of it. Then I spotted someone waving his arms at me, I guess he was telling me not to take pictures of him… But I wasn’t. A few seconds later, he started throwing rocks at me. I was pretty high up, so he missed me on all 3 or 4 throws, but he was definitely whipping them hard and trying his best to nail me with them. I thought that was pretty ridiculous. We decided it was best to get away from there, so we checked out the gift shop (picked up a few souvenirs) and then left.

We stopped at an internet cafe on the way back to the hotel. I sent a happy birthday email to Sunny, and an email to my mom asking her to make a doctor’s appointment for when I got back – At this point I was convinced that I definitely had Malaria, and wasn’t properly diagnosed at the hospital I went to a few days earlier. We ate dinner on the roof of our hotel which was pretty cool… The view from up there was nice. I decided that it was probably in my best interest not to drink anything with dinner that night.

Got up early (as usual) the next morning, couldn’t sleep in because of some loud parade that was going up and down the street. I’m pretty sure it was part of a traditional Ghanaian funeral. We decided to go get some breakfast… Cortney went to the restaurant first to order and I took a quick shower. When I caught up with her, naturally there was some random guy sitting at the table with her. He introduced himself to me, and he seemed pretty strange. After his brief introduction, he started singing… Loudly. It was obnoxious. So Cortney and I are just sitting at the table with this guy, looking at each other as he continues to sing at a ridiculous volume (about God, naturally).

The tea that she ordered me showed up. I poured the hot water over the teabag, and a bunch of dead ants floated up to the surface – lots of them, out of nowhere – so I poured it off the side of the building. I didn’t hear any agonizing screams, so I’m assuming it didn’t hit anyone on the way down. I tried again with teabag #2, no ants this time. I think that if this had hapened when I first arrived in Ghana, I wouldn’t have even wanted tea anymore, or I would have asked for a new cup at the very least. But I was accustomed to this sort of thing by now, so it didn’t even phase me. I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way either. When you spend a few weeks taking ice cold showers and squatting over holes to go to the bathroom, little things like bugs don’t seem to be much of a big deal.

The toast arrived and the butter was full of ants too. Oh well. We headed back to our room and packed up, and grabbed a taxi to “Hans Cottage Botel“, which was 8 km to Cape Coast, on the road to Kakum National Park. The place was actually pretty big, and it definitely had potential. Unfortunately, most of it was dilapidated and run-down looking. We got a self-contained “double” with a fan, tv, and shower for 45 cedi. After we checked in, we went to the restaurant, which was on top of a man-made lake that had crocodiles in it. Then we headed to Kakum National Park.

When we got there, we got tickets for the canopy walk, but decided not to do the optional hike because I still felt awful. In retrospect I definitely regret this decision, but considering the way I felt at the time it’s a miracle that I was up for anything requiring physical activity. Walking through the park to get to the canopy walk was cool, and I’m sure an extended hike would have been much cooler, but I just wasn’t up for it.

Anyway, the canopy walk (video here) was definitely as cool as I was hoping it would be. The bridges were pretty shakey, and if you’re afraid of heights, you’d probably hate it. It wasn’t just one bridge – It was a series of six (I think). It took about half an hour to cross, but that’s because we were all taking our time and snapping pictures the whole time (there was around 10 of us in the group).

Afterwards, the rest of the group headed into the jungle for the hike, and Cortney and I headed back into the park. We walked back down to the main road, where the tro-tro had dropped us. A taxi drove by, but he wanted to charge us 10 ghana cedi to get back to Hans Cottage, which was ridiculous (the tro-tro from Hans Cottage to the park was less than 1 ghana cedi). A little girl saw us waiting by the road so she brought us a bench to sit on. She tried to sell us palm wine, but it was way too hot for that, and the last time I tried that stuff it was gross – Apparently it’s only good when it’s fresh.

Soon after, some guy came over and started shouting at us, telling us that it would cost us no less than 10 ghana cedi to get to Hans Cottage, and that no tro-tros would come at this time… I don’t know if that was true or not, but it was like 2 in the afternoon. He told us he knew this because he was “a driver”. I’m assuming he meant that he was a taxi driver. He was pretty rude and extremely aggressive, and since we’d already been sitting there waiting for about half an hour, we decided to start walking – A tro-tro was bound to stop next to us eventually.

After about 30 seconds, the guy started running and caught up with this, and just then a truck drove by, which he flagged down. He told us to give him 4 ghana cedi. I have no idea how he knew that the truck driver would take us, as it was a commercial truck. He talked to the guy for about 30 seconds and then told us to get in. He gave the driver 3 cedi and kept one for himself, which was lame because the guy was rude/pushy, but I wasn’t about to complain, as I still felt pretty awful and was tired of waiting… And sitting up front in a big truck was much more comfortable than being stuffed into a hot, crowded tro-tro.

The driver asked us if we were going to Accra. We told him no, we were heading to Hans Cottage Botel, which was about 20 kilometers down the road. I asked him if he was driving to Accra, and he said yes. We needed to get to Accra the following day for our flight home anyway, and catching a ride with this guy would be so much easier than taking taxis and tro-tros back. I asked if we could catch a ride the whole way there with him if we paid him some more, and he agreed. He was really nice, and most likely would have said yes even if we didn’t offer more money, since he was driving there anyway. The only problem was that we had already checked into Hans Cottage… We told him we just needed to stop in really quick and pick up our things, and that it shouldn’t take more than five minutes.

When we got to Hans Cottage, we told the guy at the desk that we couldn’t stay the night because we wouldn’t be able to stick around until 12-1 in the afternoon the following day to pay via credit card – They had told us earlier that the credit processing machines wouldn’t be working until then. At first, the guy told me he wanted to charge us half for the room… We had literally been in the room for about 10 minutes. I told him that we weren’t paying half. He wasn’t too happy about this, and he went to get the manager. About 10 minutes (and some serious arguing) later, I convinced him to let us off by only paying for the bar of soap that we opened in the room.

The ride to Accra was so much more comfortable than the bus that we took to Cape Coast. The truck driver dropped us off alongside Kaneshie Market, and from there we got a taxi to Aqua J field. We decided not to go back to lake Bosumtwi Hotel again, and instead went to Kyn’s Hotel, which was right nextdoor. The showers in this place didn’t work, so we had to revert back to bucket showers again, but this was no big deal since we’d been doing it for the vast majority of the past month.

We headed to Sacred Tree for one last meal. I got some kind of tofu and eggplant wrap which was alright. It was nice to see the owners again to thank them for being so helpful last time I was there, when I got sick as hell in their restaurant. After dinner we decided to stop and grab a beer at a “nightclub”. The place was setup like a strip club inside, with leather couches everywhere and very dim lighting. We didn’t stay too long, since we were the only people there and they were playing country music, which was pretty odd… We called it a night after like 2 beers.

The next day we got breakfast from a street vendor and then took a taxi to the National Cultural Center in Accra, which is basically just a huge art market. Vendors set up stands and sell stuff, and there are probably over 100 stands there. It was still early when we got there, so none of the vendors were being overly aggressive yet. I met one particular vendor who introduced himself as “Colin Powell”. He asked me what state I was from. When I told him Pennsylvania, he rambled off a bunch of random facts about the state, where the capital is, the biggest cities, famous people from PA, etc. It was pretty impressive. When Cortney told him she was from New Jersey he did the same thing. Probably a pretty good way to get people visiting from the US to buy some of your stuff, but impressive nonetheless.

We took a taxi back to Kyn’s, and the taxi driver had a stutter. I’m not sure why, but that made me pretty sad. I grabbed a quick shower back at the hotel and we checked out right on time at noon. We stopped at a “fast food” place called Papaye. It was the only place I saw that was even remotely similar to a McDonalds, and it really didn’t interest me at all until my last day. All of the employees wore the same uniform, and the food was actually better than most of the fast food I’ve had in the US. The setup of the place was pretty nice too… Two floors, air conditioned, etc.

Since we had nowhere else to go and our flight wasn’t leaving until 2am, we decided to find a bar. We followed some signs to Ryan’s Irish Pub, which was actually really nice. It was around 1:30 when we got there. Happy hour started at 5, and we joked about staying there until then, but didn’t think we actually would. I had the world’s smallest margarita, a few beers, some tequila shots, and various other fruity drinks. This was one of the first places that actually accepted Mastercard, so I was more than happy to spend money since I had been borrowing from Cortney for the majority of the trip.

We decided to go back to the Sacred Tree restaurant one more time for dinner, and oddly enough, we ran into Sunny there. We weren’t expecting to see her again before we left, so that was cool. We had dinner with Sunny, said our goodbyes, and caught a taxi to the airport.

Nothing noteworthy really happened at the airport… They didn’t have x-ray machines there, so they searched every single person’s bags by hand. This took just as long as it sounds like it would take. If I remember correctly, we got searched again a few hours later. We finally got on the plane around 1:45, and it didn’t actually leave until around 2:15. They served goat meat for dinner. On the airplane. I was fine with that, but it was amusing to eat goat on an airplane. I was exhausted by that point though so I probably would have been amused by anything.

It’s been over a year now since I arrived back in the US, but I still remember it pretty well. It was freezing cold in New York, and I wasn’t dressed for the weather at all. Cortney’s dad picked us up and drove us back to NJ. He had a lot of questions for us, but we both slept in the car. When my Mom picked me up from Cortney’s a few hours later, she had a lot of questions as well, but all I wanted to do was take a shower and sleep for a week. Don’t get me wrong, I love talking about my trip, but overall it was pretty tiring, and sleeping in a comfortable bed for a good 24 hours was much higher on my priority list then having a press conference about my trip with my family.

It’s not too often that a day will go by that I don’t think about my trip. I think about the kids in the orphanage, our many trips to Hohoe, the family we stayed with in Togo, the other volunteers/people we met along the way, the basic communication skills that I picked up on (spanning several languages), the foods I tried, the music I was exposed to, and pretty much every major aspect of the trip and the culture that I was lucky/privileged enough to experience and become familiar with. Looking back, I’m glad I lost my job and got dumped right around the same time, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have pushed myself and gone on this trip at all. It ignited a passion for traveling and seeing the world that is definitely still going strong. I don’t want to travel to some spring break destination, Amsterdam or Hawaii, I want to go places where I can be immersed in completely new cultures, and also be in a position to give something back. I’m kind of rambling right now since it’s late, but I hope it’s safe to say that Ghana was just the beginning of my travels, and that plenty more lie in my future.

I doubt anyone is at all surprised by the fact that I missed my own deadline for the Ghana post – I said I’d have it up by Christmas. For whatever reason I didn’t take into consideration the fact that the 10 days or so surrounding Christmas are always hectic as hell. Plus, I wrecked my car (again).

A friend of mine was in town (visiting from California) for the holidays. On the 23rd, I went out to meet up with him (and some other people) for a drink in Conshohocken. When I walked from my car to the bar, there was no ice on the ground, and it wasn’t raining or anything.

I was in the bar for about two and a half hours. I didn’t drink much at all because I had to drive, and I left around 1 am because I had to be up for work around 6:30 that morning. I didn’t notice any ice when I was walking back to my car either. I started driving, and as I was approaching a bridge I noticed two cars (one in my lane, and one in the lane to the right of me) facing me. They had clearly spun out and hit each other/the wall, as they weren’t moving. I hit my brakes, but my car didn’t respond at all. It was then that I realized that the ground below me (and the entire bridge in front of me) was covered in ice. Had this not been the case, I would have had more than enough time to safely stop my car. My car continued to slide for a good 10 seconds, and it became clear to me that there was no way I could avoid the impending collision. I would say that this actually made it worse, because I just sat there and waited for it to happen, to the best of my knowledge there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Anyway, I smacked into the front of one of the cars that was facing me, and I hit her pretty hard. No one was injured, and it was clear that this really wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it still sucked. My sense is that the ice had only been there for a few minutes before I left the bar, because countless other cars approached the bridge at a normal speed, and started to slide out as soon as they realized that the road beneath them was a solid sheet of ice. I witnessed several accidents occur very close to me as I waited for the police to show up. It was actually pretty scary – The accident must have knocked my car battery out of place, because I couldn’t even get my hazard lights on. I’m pretty lucky that no one hit my car while it was sitting in the middle of the road. About half a mile away on 476, there was a 10 car pileup, and accidents were literally happening every few minutes. It was like something out of a movie. The air was full of the sounds of ambulances and police sirens. As the cop assessed the situation, cars were still spinning out on the bridge and slamming into the retaining walls.

Anyway, my car was towed to a nearby lot, and I had to call my Mom and ask her to come pick me up. Because of all the accidents, 476 was closed off completely, so we had to take some other ridiculous route home, and I didn’t get to bed until around 4 or so. My car is somewhere in Springfield now, but I have yet to hear anything about a damage estimate.

Not that my promises mean much on here, but if all goes as planned, I’ll be making a Ghana post tomorrow… Unless a plane crashes into my face or I get eaten by dragons or something. The only way for me to get around to making these posts is to shut myself off completely from anything social. This was a lot easier to do with a laptop, but I don’t currently have one – Excuse #417 for not making the post on time.

Check out Gran Torino, it’s worth your time.

I don’t know how many of you have heard Riskay’s hit single, “Smell Yo Dick“… But in a tragic case of life imitating art, someone took Riskay’s words to heart, and… Well, to quote the song itself, “thats how a bitch get here eye swol’ up”. You can read the article here.

I’ve always hated romantic comedies, but I wasn’t 100% sure why. To be honest, I never gave it much thought, I just dismissed them because, as a heterosexual male, I don’t like them. Now I know why. And anyone who refers to a romantic comedy as a “rom-com” deserves to get hit by a bus. More specifically, a bus carrying shipments of Hugh Grant DVDs to Best Buy, or something along those lines.

I don’t think that much of a description is really required for the following: 2008 Mug Shots of the Year.

I didn’t really get into Jay-Z’s “American Gangster” album, but I’m sure some of you did. Someone took the liberty of remixing all of the tracks on that album with a bunch of 70′s funk tracks. I’m downloading it now to check it out, you can grab it here: American G-Funk

I told those damn teens to stay off my lawn, but do they listen? Of course not. I’m already in trouble with the law, but I don’t care… I’m staking out my lawn tonight with my night vision goggles and my trusty Super Soaker 1000 filled with fresh fox urine… I’ll make them pay.

If you only click on one link in this post… Please make it this one. That might be the greatest music video of all time.

Arson Anthem is Mike Williams on vocals (Eyehategod), Phil Anselmo on guitar (Pantera, Down, Superjoint Ritual, etc), Hank Williams III on drums (Assjack, Superjoint Ritual) and Collin Yeo on bass. I heard about them awhile ago, got excited for a minute, and then forgot about them. Anyway, the album has finally surfaced on the interwebs, and I’m here to bring it to you. You can download Arson Anthem’s self-titled debut album here. I actually haven’t even had a chance to listen to it yet, but I will be momentarily.

December 11th was my last day in Ghana. I never thought it would take me an entire year to finish writing about my experience there, but life gets in the way sometimes. Anyway, I’m attempting to finish it up here, but I still have quite a bit to cover…

I woke up on December 7th a little before 6 am. I still had some packing to do, though I got some of it done the night before. December 7th was “Farmers Day”. This is a holiday that they celebrate on the first Friday of every December. As the name would imply, it’s meant to recognize the hard work that the country’s farmers do. Anyway, there were no classes due to the holiday.

Madam cooked us chicken wings (and eggs) for breakfast. Normally I’d be all over that, especially considering what I had eaten for the majority of my meals for the past month. However, I saw the kids defeathering the chicken the previous night, so I wasn’t as enthusiastic. They were still good though.

Madam gave us thank-you cards and jewelry – A bracelet for me, and a necklace for Cortney. I finished packing and then came out to say my goodbyes to everyone. Some of the kids seemed to be in denial of the fact that we were leaving. One of the kids that I had spent the most time with (Simon) was mad that we were leaving, and wouldn’t talk to me at all. Not everyone was around, so there were some people that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to.

Isaac, Elvis, and 2 of the other teachers (names I don’t remember) took our suitcases and walked us to the Junction where we’d be catching a tro-tro. When I passed Simon for the last time, I said bye to him and he just glared at me, and then started crying… It was actually kind of sad. This is the last picture that I took at the orphanage before I left. When we arrived at the Junction, I gave Elvis the watch I had purchased when we first arrived. I bought this thing out of necessity, I never wear a watch in the US, but I usually have a phone with me or some other way of telling what time it is. It was probably worth about 25 cents, but he was pretty happy about it. The tro-tro arrived and we said our final goodbyes and hopped on the tro-tro headed to Accra.

Leaving the countryside (can you call it that?) to head for a city was usually at least somewhat exciting. I had been in Accra two other times – once when we first arrived, and one other time for a day before heading to Kokrobite. Even though it was a little sad to be leaving the orphanage for good, I was a little excited to get to Accra and do some more exploring. But my nausea was definitely outweighing my excitement.

Right after the vehicle started moving, I started feeling really nauseous, and I was convinced that I was gonna throw up, but there really wasn’t much I could do about it. At one of the checkpoints, we had to stop the vehicle and get out (usually the cops just peek in the vehicle and then send you on your way). A police officer told me to go to the immigration booth. I was trying to ask him if I needed my passport, which was in my bookbag in the “boot” of the tro-tro, but he was yelling over me and not listening to me at all. I was feeling pretty terrible at this point, and standing in the hot sun being yelled at by a cop wasn’t very cool. Eventually the situation resolved itself.

We paid the money collector (they call them “mates”) 5 ghana cedi each – The last time we took a tro-tro to Accra, it was 4.50. People were visibly unhappy about this change. The “mate” got into a screaming match with a female passenger (presumably over the fare increase) and within a minute or two, almost everyone in the vehicle was yelling. Most of this was in another language, so I couldn’t really follow what was going on, but people were pretty angry. Eventually they pulled the tro-tro over to the side of the road, and I think they were threatening to kick people off.

As we got closer to Accra, the tro-tro started to empty out. 3 or 4 stops later, we were the only people left on the tro-tro (other than the driver and the mate). This is when things started to get interesting. They mate asked me how much I would pay for my luggage. I was really at the end of my rope at this point because I felt absolutely awful. I told him we wouldn’t be paying him anything, because we had never paid extra for luggage before, and if he was going to charge us extra, he should have told us this before we boarded the tro-tro, not two and a half hours into the trip and ten minutes from our destination. In addition to this, he hadn’t charged any of the Ghanains for their luggage.

Things remained calm at first. The first time I told him “we’ll pay nothing” he sort of laughed. He waited a minute or two and then asked me again, “so, how much will you pay?” This happened two or three times, and I started to get aggravated. I was very blunt with him, and I said flat out that we were not going to pay him any more money.

We got off at our stop and he continued to ask me. I felt extremely sick at this point – I was shaking and thought for sure that I was gonna throw up at any minute. At this point I started yelling, and I remember asking him if he was retarded and some other things along those lines. He wouldn’t let go of Cortney’s luggage, and I was literally trying to pry the handle to her suitcase out of his hand while the argument continued. We were really yelling now, and a crowd started to gather around us. He told me that if we didn’t pay, he would take our luggage to the police station and settle it there. In retrospect, at this point I probably should have just thrown a couple cedi on the ground and cut my losses, but at that point I was determined to stand my ground for some reason, even though the odds were clearly not in my favor. Talk about being out of your element.

I noticed Cortney started to take money out of her purse, and I was pretty aggravated by that because it undermined everything I was saying – I think I might have snapped at her a little. Suddenly some guy stepped in “to mediate”. I put that in quotation marks because as he made his way into the center of the small crowd that gathered, he was yelling “I am here to mediate!” over and over. He allowed me to explain myself, and after I told him what was going on he started yelling at the mate in Ewe (or Ga, whatever). After about 5 minutes of these guys yelling back and forth, he got Cortney’s luggage from the mate and told us to get out of there. I was still pretty angry and shook up – That was definitely the most serious altercation I’d had since we arrived in the country. When we were walking away, I was really tempted to turn around and give the mate guy the “I shit in your mouth” (thumbs up) sign, but I restrained myself.

It took us about half an hour to get a taxi to the airport because people kept trying to charge us ridiculous prices because we’re white. We experienced this the whole time we were there, but this was the first time that it actually bothered me. We ended up paying 4 cedi.

The reason we were going to the airport was to see if we could leave our luggage there, since our flight didn’t leave until the 10th. We planned on doing some traveling and didn’t want to have to carry around all that extra weight. When we arrived, I asked some security guys where I needed to go to check my luggage in, and they said to look for “left luggage”, and told us to where it was. So we started walking in that direction. On the way there, some random guy hissed at us to get our attention. He told us we were going in the wrong direction, and said to follow him to left luggage. As we walked back up the ramp that we had just walked down, I asked a security guy if we were going the right way, and he said yes, continue following the guy who is leading you. So we did. Eventually we passed the security guards who I had originally asked about left luggage, and they started yelling at the guy who was leading us. I think they were yelling at him for not leading us in the right direction, and because he apparently wasn’t an airport employee. This situation quickly escalated, it was as if the guy posed some kind of threat. I stood there in disbelief and watched the second shouting match that we had caused within one hour. They kicked him out of the airport and told us the correct way to left luggage.

It ended up costing us 8 cedi a day (per person) to store our stuff, which sucked, but there was no way we were gonna lug all that stuff around with us our last 3 days, especially since we wanted to do some traveling. We grabbed a taxi to Lake Bosomtwi hotel (we had stayed there before) and on the way we saw this dude walking down the street in his underwear. Also, you’ll notice in the Lake Bosomtwi Hotel picture that the hotel is spelled two different ways, one right next to the other. You see stuff like that a lot in Ghana.

When we checked into the hotel, they had raised the room price another 7 cedi since the last time we were there. Cortney went down to the lobby to pay, and I went up to the room because I felt extremely sick. Maybe you’re noticing a pattern here? I remember I was lying down in the room, and “All About The Benjamins” was on TV, so I watched some of that… I thought that was funny, because it was the pretty much the first time I had watched any TV while I was there, and I wasn’t expecting to see something like that.

We decided to go walk around for a bit. Cantonments Road was about a half mile walk from our hotel (we had been there before) and there are a good amount of stores/restaurants there. It is probably the most similar place to a US city that I saw while in Ghana. There was a grocery store there (called Koala) that was air conditioned, and if you were to somehow warp from the US into the middle of that store, you probably wouldn’t even guess you were in a 3rd world country. The prices reflected that, though. Anyway, we stopped in Koala and I grabbed a Red Bull (I don’t even drink these in the US, but for some reason I wanted one). Checked out some of the vendors wares, I bought 3 more masks. Then we walked back down the road, and decided to stop for a drink. We relaxed for a bit and had a Club beer. While we were sitting there, 3 kids (2 guys and a girl that looked like a dude, all probably about 15 years old) came and sat down at the table right behind us. One of them pulled out a cell phone and starting blatantly taking pictures of us. Didn’t really bother me, but then the girl starting swatting at Cortney’s hair. Each time either one of us turned around, they acted like they were just sitting there, minding their own business. They were acting like we were the first white people they’d ever seen.

We walked back to the hotel and relaxed for a little more, and then decided to go to this Vegan place (“Sacred Tree“, we had gone there once before) for dinner. The menu was pretty limited, so I just ordered something random… An eggplant and tofu salad. I started to feel ridiculously sick, probablt the worst I had felt so far, so I got up and walked into the restaurant to cancel my order – There was no way I was gonna be able to eat anything while feeling like this. I walked back to the table and sat down, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way in my entire life – I was super lightheaded and sweating profously (my shirt was soaked), and I was getting rapid hot and cold flashed. I put my head down on the table and thought I was about to blackout or vomit, or both. Within 1 minute or so, there was a puddle of sweat under me on the table, and my head almost slid off.

Cortney said that I really didn’t look good, and that we should go – I definitely wasn’t in a position to argue. The rasta owner guy came out to try and help. He brought a straw mat for me to lay down on. He was really nice, but he kept touching me and it definitely made me feel worse. The rasta’s wife (an Australian lady who we had met before) felt my forehead, and said that I didn’t feel feverish. She suggested we get a thermometer and told Cortney where a 24 hour pharmacy was. The rasta hailed a taxi for us… Even though our hotel was less than 5 minutes away by foot, there was no way in hell I would have been able to walk that far feeling the way I did. The taxi driver charged Cortney 2 cedi which is ridiculous considering we were in the cab for about 2 minutes, but I couldn’t care less at that point. I went up to the room to lay down, and she went back out to find this pharmacy. This was really nice of her, but in retrospect, I wouldn’t have let her go alone (it was probably around 8 pm) had I been thinking clearly.

I don’t remember much after she left, I think I was just drifting in and out of some kind of feverish sleep. At one point I knew I had to puke immediately, so I grabbed a small trash can that had been sitting in the corner of the room. I took it back to the bed with me and got down to business. As luck would have it, there was a big crack in the bottom of the trash can. By the time I noticed that, my pants (and the bed) were covered in vomit. Perfect.

When she got back, I took my temperature and determined that I didn’t have a flu. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing at that point. I made a weak attempt to clean up the vomit and then went to sleep.

I’m gonna cut this off here because I’m falling asleep, and I think my current state is probably affecting my writing. I will definitely make my last Ghana post(s) before Christmas.