Yesterday in the Third World...

Sometimes I get whipped back to reality after a quiet week in our tidy little house.

I spent part of last week trying, unsuccessfully, to get tickets for our vacation in October to Europe. Thing is, booking online (the only way we have traveled for more than ten years) is not something you can do from here. Expedia, Orbitz, and any number of 'international' online booking sites simply won't let you begin your trip in Africa. So Tuesday morn I went to individual airlines sites- KLM and British Airways fly from Accra regularly. B.A. wouldn't deal with me unless I began my trip at a UK airport, and KLM wouldn't sell me a ticket unless I showed up at the airport with cash (and this is a buttload of cash, remember).

I decided to go to the airport and see if they would book me and take my MasterCard once they saw it was a U.S. card (it's stolen African cards/numbers they are wary of). The kind lady in the info booth at Kotoka International told me that contrary to the website claim that KLM is open at the airport from 8:30 to 3:30, they are actually there only from 2PM to 3PM- coincidentally, just when our driver has to be on the road to pick Cooper up from school. Not an insurmountable problem, but since I wasn't sure they would take my MasterCard anyway, I moved on to plan C...

Local travel agents. I found three. The first dealt only with corporate accounts, the second two booked only tours within Africa. Plan D...

Ted's admin gave me the name and number of the travel guy who handles some of their bookings. I called him, explained what I needed (in my incomprehensible American accent) and finally got him to understand, at which point he asked if I would email him the details. Sure! says I, and after he gave me his email address (a painfully slow, mistake ridden exercise in Twi/English/American accented attempts to convey individual letter sounds), I hung up and began my email to him.

Type-ity type type ty....whoops! The power's off. Oh well. We have a UPS on the computer- no problem. Save mail, power down, wait patiently. The power hasn't ever been off for more than 45 minutes.

Cut to me, four hours later. No power. Fridge warming up. Okay, time to start the generator. This is easy- go to generator, open door, push button with picture of hand on it, and voila! Except we haven't used the generator for weeks and weeks- we usually just do without for the short times we are without power- and the battery is dead. Dead deader deadest. Plan E...

[By this time, I have unconsciously started singing the Eagles "Hotel California" to myself, '...you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave...'.]

So I call the really swell people at the generator place and the technician shows up in about an hour, bless his heart. He checks my generator, changes out the battery, we fire it up- voila! Yippee! I throw the switch that moves our power supply from the city to the generator and my house is once again powered up. I sit down at the computer, turn it on, and... the internet is down. Off, offer, offest. Sigh. I am out of plans. I decide to stop fighting my environment and just quit trying to do anything. This works very well, and I finish my novel. After all, Scarlett, tomorrow is another day.