An American in Africa

New Adventure!

2010-09-14T08:45:00.001Z

If you still have me on your feed, or just check back occasionally, we have moved again and now live in Jakarta Indonesia- I would love to see old friends from all over the world at my new blog if you feel like dropping by.

Cheers!

http://andnowjakarta.blogspot.com/

To Ghana With Love...(sob!)

2007-12-14T13:10:00.000Z

Okay, move complete, boy withdrawn from school, cars and appliances disposed of, dog shipped off to the U.S. and all that remains is to stuff ourselves and our six pieces of luggage onto the plane tonight.

As an epilogue, I'll tell you what's next for our three favorite Ghanaians.

Stephen has the option of taking over the day guard job at Ted's company house, if he wants to. But we have spoken with InterCon Security and our glowing reports of him, while not the first, are apparently what they needed to offer him a better position with their company and if that happens, he will be getting a promotion which is no less than he deserves. Cross your fingers.

Mark has decided he would like to go back to school and we have helped set him up in his own place so he can do that and not have to break in the new owners of our house. He will continue to sell phone units and mow lawns to earn money and finish his education.

Duke, of course, is going to continue driving for the company, except in a better car with a more important guy. ;-)

We will miss them, and so many other people we have to leave behind, like crazy.

For all the kind people who have commented that they will miss my blog, thank you so much for hanging out with me all this time- it's been a hoot.

If you love Ghana, you can head over to Obroni Observations (there is a hot link on the right hand column at the top) and read Barb's pithy posts if you haven't already discovered her. She is one of the people I will miss the most.

And as I head to a country that does not have free range goats and chickens (in this case free range means suburban neighborhoods) I think I might miss even them more than I realized.

One of the only goats we have ever seen tied up in Ghana lives just a block from our house and we have watched him twang at the end of his rope or just wrap it tightly around the trees for so long we had almost stopped noticing him.

But we took this picture yesterday, to remind us always... and he was obligingly wrapped around three trees.

My parting shot of Ghana and a big thank you to the people here who made it such a great ride...

Bye Bye!

International Moving, Ghana Style

2007-12-11T08:30:00.000Z

As our friends and families (and their poor, abused address books) are well aware, moving is a hobby with us (this current shift will be to our 14th home since 1978) but this particular move is a new experience for us...

After our books and kitchenware were packed up in boxes, almost everything else ended up being wrapped like packages in the red and white paper you can see everywhere...

The guys doing our packing were very typically Ghanaian- polite, careful-ish, and not only willing to take direction from us, but desperately in need of it.

This was a real departure for us- our many house packers in the U.S., and even the ones in Australia, were brisk and efficient and although they always comply with our suggestions/requests, they mostly wish we would dry up and blow away.

Not so here.

We were sought out frequently to give our opinions or instructions for a million different things, which took some getting used to after years of being trained by our U.S. movers to shut up and get out of their way. ;-)

As the day progressed, the house began to look more and more like this, everywhere you looked...

We kept them from packing the things we needed this week by putting that stuff in the "Off Limits" room, which was controlled chaos...

...and Duke spent the day looking for things to do and ways to help.

Because he is Duke.

Here he is, sweeping the dog hair off our bedroom floor in his "Boss and Mom Are Moving" clothes.

The big surprise was Elliot.

We brought him on the porch to meet the movers when they first showed up and he smelled their shoes and hands (remember, strange dogs are not generally a favorite of Ghanaians, so our movers were very brave and patient to deal with this), and then let them do their work without freaking out and barking at them.

As a matter of fact, quite often as we moved through the house, we would see Elliot getting a passing pat on the head from one of his new best friends as they went about their business.

Here he is, exhausted, taking a little breather next to one of his new pals...

Finally, all our stuff was boxed and bagged, wrapped and taped, and the container showed up.

Things were loaded into this container and will be taken to the port where they will be crated in plywood boxes and put into a Maersk sea container for shipment back to America.

Unless it falls overboard.

Which apparently happens with alarming frequency. Cross your fingers...

Here's the truck backing the container into our driveway (that's Stephen on the left and Mark on the right)...

and just a few minutes later, completely onto the property...

This was a sharp contrast to the container truck that delivered the same stuff to us in the spring of 2005.

On that day, the truck maneuvered for a good thirty minutes OUTSIDE our gate, gathering a knot of interested kibbitzers as it did.

Then it made roughly twenty attempts to back through the gate as each spectator gave advice and instructions (usually conflicting) to the accompaniment of a chorus of "Brah, brah, brah!" which is Twi for "come".

We thought, at the time, that they were saying "Blah, blah, blah." which was a great way to start our life in Ghana with a laugh.

So life in our little house in East Legon has come to an end, and we are living in a hotel this week, waiting for Cooper to finish his final exams.

It's the same hotel we lived in for six weeks waiting for the sea container to arrive from America, but in the time we have lived here it has changed ownership. With the new owners came a list of rules for the swimming pool, carefully painted on one of the signs we have come to love in this country for their clear, open instruction on so many aspects of life.

No pussyfooting language about "Intoxication"- just don't swim DRUNK, and by the way, don't spit OR BLOW YOUR NOSE into the pool.

I offer my sincere thanks for that particular instruction.

And instead of nattering about safety and liability, they point out right up front they won't be responsible for Death while using the pool. So there.

I'll post again before we make what are sure to be our tearful farewells to a swell country, and the people therein...

...in the meanwhile, be very very glad you don't have to move, and if you don't think it's so bad, please come to our house in the U.S. and help unpack. :-)

Say It Isn't So!

2007-12-01T15:00:00.000Z

Well, this is the entry I have dreaded for a long time- the one I was hoping I wouldn't have to write for quite a while.

In the middle of December, we will be moving away from Ghana. :-(

I'll pause here for you to take a moment to become as bummed as I am.

We made Duke cry, and he made Jane cry, and they lied and told the girls that they had just put medicine in their eyes and everything was fine.

The good news is that they are mostly over it.

The seven of us (Duke, Jane, Christa, Erica, Us and Coop) spent the day together last weekend and Duke went swimming!

Kind of.

And while they are sad, they accept it and Duke is even a little excited because when he doesn't have us anymore he will be driving for the Project Director whom he likes very much.

The Project Director's wife is a nice woman (with a big dog, just for Duke!), but she won't let him come into stores with her and the rolling frat house that Duke and I had will be shut down for good.

No more teasing the street vendors, no more bat harrassing, no more honking and waving and hooting and "shortcuts" to Siberia. But he'll have a nicer car to drive, and that's something.

Anyway, the project isn't finished (far from it), but we had told Cooper when we came that it would be for two years. We never expected it to be really only two years, since we have never had a project finish on time, ever, but we forgot to mention that to Coop.

The time overrun coupled with the full onset of adolescence gave him a little angst about missing "real life" and just doing things "regular".

The poor kid just wants to go to the mall with friends and see a movie in a theater and load a YouTube video in less than 10 minutes. He wants to make a phone call and not have to redial four times in the middle of the conversation because the phone disconnected, and he wants to eat fast food.

I don't blame him. I wouldn't be a teenager again for all the folding money in Las Vegas, but I wouldn't have missed the first time around either, so we are taking him back to let him be a "Real American Teenager" for the last 2.5 years of high school.

He's earned it.

We have expanded his horizons so many times in so many ways, often against his will, in the last two and a half years, and he has been a trooper ever since we dragged him out of California all those years and three moves ago, coming along without complaint- it just feels right to honor this request from him to take advantage of this last period of what could be the easy life before he has to assume the responsibilities of an adult.

So the whole family will repatriate December 15 and Ted will return to finish the project on a rotating basis- time with us, time at work- living here with other company employees in a house they will share. Not the perfect solution, but one that will work.

Next week is packing/moving week.

Yech.

This move is particularly complicated because we have things that will go with Ted to his new digs, things to ship by sea, things to ship by air, things to carry with us, things to sell, and things to give away.

Usually we just have a giant garage sale and move the rest to the new house.

I will try to see the humor in the coming week's events so I can tell you about the moving experience from here without going 'round the bend.

Meanwhile, I want to leave you today with some recommendations if you are ever lucky enough to come to Ghana.

If you are an Obroni, and want Obroni stuff, you will have no trouble finding it without me.

What I am going to share are the places we love that are a little out of the way or where we are often the only Obronis but that have become some of our favorite places to spend time.

Start with Chez Afrique. It's in East Legon, near the French School, off Lagos Ave. a few streets. If you want it, you will find it. Good food, cold beer, music on weekends, lower prices on weekdays. We only eat "inside" if it rains (inside means a roof and some six foot walls...)- 99% of the time we eat on the patio out front. Grilled chicken, chicken kabobs, Okra stew, kelewele, RedRed and cole slaw. We've never paid more than 20 bucks for both of us, stuffed to the gills and well lubricated.

Papa's Peace Bar. A very strange and wonderful place also in East Legon. Head for Accra on Lagos and take the first left. After about a block, Papa's will be on your right.

Osekan Resort. Easy on the resort part, but you can't beat the location, right down by the beach in a place where the waves break wildly over the rocks. You can get sea food and have your hair curled (or straightened, depending on your DNA) all at the same time. Inexpensive, good service, and a unique experience.

The basket lady on 5th Circular, near Home Touch. This woman has really nice baskets in all the good "Bolgatanga" styles and she will reward you for being a faithful customer. Even your first time she will give you a "small price", and you won't need your aggressive negotiating skills.

China Palace- the one in East Legon is better than the one in Dzorwulu, but they are both reasonably priced and cheerfully staffed, just don't get the satay. The one in East Legon is near the Living Room and American House. Follow the billboards.

Big Milly's Backyard, Kokrobite. You will find a lot of Obronis (young, backpacking, free spirits) here, but it's 100% African in atmosphere and experience. Eat lunch outdoors in the shade with sand for a floor, a picnic table to sit at, and chickens wandering through the restaurant... after lunch you can stroll the fairly clean beach and watch the fishing boats and fishermen who work from the beach here.

Aylos Bay Resort on the Volta River (on the way to or from the Cedi Bead Factory). You can sit in the shade at a large table and watch the Volta slide by (along with fishermen) and eat very good food at terrific prices served by happy, kind people. Spend the night if they have room. And be sure to check out the sculptures outside the restrooms.

And finally, even though a banana is a banana is a banana, if you are in East Legon on Lagos Ave. please stop under the big shade tree about a mile past the Ange Hill Hotel. The woman there sells only bananas, so you will be able to spot her next to a plywood clothes store. She will need your business to make up for losing mine.

And if you buy apples from your car, try to do it sometimes from the guys on the Motorway at the light in front of the Fiesta Royale hotel- 1GHC for three apples. And you can point to the exact three you want.

And try to go to Accra Central. You will make as many friends as you can handle and the experience is one of a kind. :-)

Mother Nature's Little Joke

2007-11-18T14:30:00.000Z

I realize that a good portion of my blog entries have soft porn involved, somehow, even if it's not intended.

You can probably chalk that up to the basically immature nature of your Blog Writer, but sometimes I just can't help myself.

When we were on vacation recently at Axim Beach, we made ample use of our little front porch, from which we were treated to the sights and sounds of the Atlantic Ocean, and the native vegetation.

Call us potty minds (and you would be very close to the mark there!), but this plant, growing vigorously between our Rondavel and Coop's, just gave us both the giggles. Every time.

If you are puzzled, here is a closer view...

If you still wonder what the hell I'm talking about, consider yourself a mature adult, and a truly Non-Potty Minded Person (which means you aren't related to me by blood).

If, however, you are snorting and maybe even guffawing, let me know and we'll get together for a drink and to share some jokes that are really in bad taste. ;-)

Ghana has fine-tuned my baser nature.

For the better.

A Crappy Problem...

2007-11-09T13:00:00.000Z

Today's subject is a bummer.

But it's something that we keep getting smacked in the face with, and it's probably one of the biggest cultural disconnects we have encountered here.

Certainly it's bad for Ghana.

You know I love Ghana, and especially Ghanaians, and god knows America is not a world leader in environmental issues, but the problem here is bad and getting worse...

The beaches here are huge natural waste sites (both household garbage and human effluent), and littering is not considered a problem by the majority of the population. I won't point out the human waste in these pictures, but it's there. Trust me.

Witness these two excerpts:

ACCRA SEWERAGE IMPROVEMENT PROJECT November 2005

...The sanitation situation in Accra is in a very bad state. Of the twenty existing sewage treatment systems in the Accra
metropolitan area, none is in working order...

[The ailing and barely functional Achimota Water treatment plant was shut down completely in March of 2005 because it conflicted with a roadworks project along the coast. Because of that, we got a news story more than a year later...]

ACCRA, 1 August 2006 (IRIN News) -

For well over a year, more than 80 percent of the sewage generated by the two million people of Ghana’s sea-front capital of Accra has been dumped in the ocean, untreated...

... "It is not an acceptable international practice," Appiah told IRIN. "But it is a mighty ocean out there. As far as I am concerned, it doesn't do anything bad to anyone."...

====================

Yes, you read that right...an official of the government in Ghana said "it doesn't do anything bad to anyone." How do you begin to fight that kind of ignorance?

As opposed to the coastlines of developed countries, in Ghana only the poorest people live close to the beaches (especially in Accra) because all the garbage, effluent, and trash ends up at the beach or in the ocean.

At least the garbage that isn't just dropped directly on the streets and property of Accra.

Water "on the go" can be bought here in "single serving" sized plastic bags for a very small price. When emptied, these bags are simply dropped on the ground, resulting in a constant line of empty, discarded plastic bags on every street in the city, along with the sort of trash and litter that was so common in America (and sometimes still is) before the Anti-Littering campaigns of the 60s and 70s.

Having grown up with the Iron Eyes Cody crying a single tear for the littering of America's highways and rivers, I developed a horror of litter and littering that I passed on to my son.

But after almost three years in Ghana, I have to catch myself occasionally when I have "inconvenient" trash in my car- the temptation to just chuck it out the window is very real. It would be a small addition to a monstrously huge existing problem.

But I don't.

Thankfully my distaste for litter is ingrained enough to stop me from actually contributing to the problem, but how will we ever educate Ghanaians to the enormity of this issue before it overwhelms the city and country?

If I can be tempted, with my anti-litter upbringing and pampered lifestyle, how can you communicate the urgency of the problem to the average Ghanaian?

One of the community service projects at Lincoln School is to clean up the beach in La (the beach community in Accra). Cooper participated in that his second year here, and he came home sad, disillusioned and not a little grossed out.

The younger kids were prohibited from picking up some of the things on the beach, but the senior school kids (like Cooper) were confronted with more than just trash- they picked up condoms, syringes, and many many plastic bags filled with human feces.

On the beach.

Within walking distance of major international hotels that will never ever attract the guests they seek because of the condition of the local beaches.

Even a country as forward-looking as Ghana will be prohibited from becoming the modern destination the Ghanaian government constantly talks about and wishes for as long as the streets and beaches of the country are full of garbage and human waste.

The Toothmobile

2007-10-31T10:00:00.000Z

Cooper's dentist.

Remember when Coop got his braces and I told you about the dentist having his chair and equipment in a converted recreational vehicle?

Well, by popular demand, I have pictures!

Behold, the Toothmobile...

and once inside, you would never know you weren't in a regular dentist's office...

I tell you, Africa and Africans can just make stuff work. The Doc has it hooked to his generator, so there's no worries about power.

They are working on a new office in a regular building on their property, so the fun won't last long now...

but when we look back on Cooper's experience with braces we'll always have the Toothmobile.

:-)

Ghana, The Beach, and Everything

2007-10-20T10:10:00.000Z

October is fall break time at Lincoln school (can you believe they've been in school for nine weeks already????), so Ted burned some vacation time and we took off.

We wanted to stay in Ghana, but we didn't want to spend our time bouncing over dicey roads looking for badly signposted attractions, so we made a couple of reservations on a couple of beaches and headed west, toward Takoradi and the border with Cote'd'Ivoire (the former Ivory Coast).

Our first stay was at Axim Beach Resort, about a half hour past Takoradi, set on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic, with a nice beach at the bottom of the hill and really fun "rondavel" chalets. Here is one of the signs we followed for many miles back into the bush on the way to the resort...

Here is the stone from the entrance to reception...

You may remember that "Akwaaba" is Twi for

"You are welcome".

This is our chalet...

...and then looking downhill to ours from Cooper's chalet...

(yes, he had his very own room, complete with TV and personal remote. He was a happy boy).

And what a surprise, considering these crazy shy Ghanaians... there was a very interesting carving on the door of our chalet...

She really skeeved Cooper out. :-)

Especially since Ted and I were so pleased to have her on our door.

Cooper's door carving was some warrior or farmer or something boring, which suited him just fine.

We, on the other hand, appreciated having a door that made us giggle every time we went through it.

The beach at Axim has a very small tidal fluctuation, and the surf pounds pretty heavily day and night- people pay a lot of money for machines that replicate that sound, and we just sat on our little porch and let it wash over us, so to speak.

Although Ted and I both admitted to thinking the occasional wave set sounded an awful lot like the ubiquitous jets that zoom over our house a couple dozen times a day...it's all relative.

The beach, looking back toward the hill on which sit the rondavels...

and a shot of the rondavels themselves, nestled in among the palms...

This is Coop making the most of the surf on a day that threatened rain, but never quite managed it until way after bedtime...

When we sat on our porch, these are the views we had...

On our third night there, they had what was billed as a "Burn Fire and Bufet" on the beach.

They set up a really nice buffet after dark and then set a bonfire on the sand for our pyromaniac enjoyment. It was pretty special and very well done.

By this time, of course, poor Coop had enough of rustic African beach living, and we headed out to our next resort- a place built to attract Obronis (although it still surprises us even after all this time how many things about "obroni" hotels still scream AFRICA).

We checked into the Busua Beach Resort, from whence these views came...

(Had we been in America, we would have suspected the Disney
Imagineers of planting this island, two perfect palms
and a grassy hummock for effect. It was just too perfect...)

It was a very nice setting, with a very clean beach.

And really boring. :-)

But Coop was happy, so we sat on the beach for a few days and read our books and swam with him and just relaxed without worrying about getting any cultural advantages.

The upside was our excursion out into the neighboring village and our subsequent discovery of the African Rainbow hotel and its fourth floor rooftop bar, in which they happily served us dinner.

We sat up high, watched the ocean, and ate some terrifically good food- first by ourselves, and then with Coop when we dragged him away from his cushy hotel room and out into Africa again.

While we were busy staying in resorts and reading on the beach, we also managed to do a little exploring.

One of the first things we did was head out the beach road west toward Cote'd'Ivoire from Axim.

This particular region of Ghana was devastated in the 70s by a blight that caused a "wilt" on the producing coconut palms and wiped out the local economy. All this time later, the stumps of the dead palms linger as a reminder...

There are living coconut palms there now, but nothing like the amount that provided them with a living wage so many years ago.

If you ever find yourself on the road to Cote'd'Ivoire, this is what it would look like...

The trick is to stop before you actually get to the border- no Mexican border town can compare to the chaos and corruption of the Ghana-Cote'd'Ivoire border.

And just to keep you from wishing we had taken you with us to sample a new country, feel free to check out any travel guide for our neighbors to the West. Its current condition is simply not conducive to casual visitors.

Or visitors. :-(

But we didn't need no stinkin' foreign countries to entertain us- we had Ghana and what Ghana has is...

Rubber Tree Plantations!

Who knew?

Here is a shot of rubber tree saplings:

and here they are all grown up:

The trees are tapped just like Maple trees in the U.S., except a sticky white rubber comes out instead of maple syrup!

We wanted to stick our fingers in the collection cups really bad, but since we were trespassing to get these shots at all, we decided not to press our luck and had to settle for imagining how odd and gooey that rubber must feel...

Finally, after a week of resort living we had to head back to real life, but we stopped at one last resort to have lunch in an outdoor restaurant set directly on the beach near Biriwa called Anumobo (feel free to rearrange the "O"s and "U"s in that name any way you like- we saw it spelled every conceivable way on signs, in guidebooks and even on their own menus and Reception desk).

They served us traditional Ghanaian lobsters, which faithful readers remember from our jaunt to Osekan Restaurant in Accra. Today however, you get to actually see them (I remembered to take a picture when I had only eaten four of them and there were still some left!).

This is some seriously good eatin'.

And a lovely finish to our relaxing "All Ghana, All Lazy" vacation.

Kente 101

2007-10-08T16:50:00.000Z

Ghana is (or it should be!) famous as the home of Kente cloth. It is woven by hand in sharp, bright colors by men of the Ashanti tribe.

The "usual" Kente comes in strips about 4-6 inches wide and five or six feet long. If you want a garment, many strips are sewn together to make a large cloth.

There are tons of patterns and each one means something, e.g. "the extended family is a strong force" or "God's Eyebrow" (the ashanti description of a rainbow).

Once again, because my sister Judy came to visit, I finally managed to take some (seriously bad) photos of a Kente weaver doing his thing.

In this badly exposed, poorly framed, confusing picture, you can see

a) the long threads used to weave the cloth lengthwise (this goes on for 25 or 30 feet),

b) the weaver waaa-aaay at the back of the pic, and

c) a finished strip on the far right side in front of Ted.

Heading back to where the weaving guy actually sits, for a marginally better picture you can see the "pedals" for his feet.

This is a complicated set of thingamajigs that the guy manipulates with his feet and toes to keep tension, switch layers, and who knows what kind of cool stuff that one could only understand after much practice and many botched practice cloths.

You can just barely make out the pattern of the cloth he is weaving if you click it bigger and look between his hands.

For the 50th Anniversary celebration, we bought this Kente strip from the guy down the street...

It's at least twice this long, but I couldn't get the whole thing in the picture and still let you see the details.

The fabric is good sturdy cotton-type cloth. Fairly tightly woven so you can't see through it.

When we were in the forest up north to visit the sacred monkeys last spring, our Park Ranger Guide had some kente cloth bookmarks available for purchase.

I couldn't decide on one, so I bought seven. ;-)

Here's a few of them close up...

and here's the whole collection...

And that's your crash course in Kente cloth.

Need for Speed

2007-10-01T13:30:00.000Z

After more than two years without a mall, a movie theater, or a crappy fast food restaurant, and more than a year since they took away his sad little neighborhood half pipe, you probably think Cooper never gets to have any teen-aged boy fun.

Never fear.

Accra has a Go-Kart track.

I kid you not.

¢70,000 (about $7.50) will get you 15 minutes on the track in a Go-Kart held together with spit and baling wire at the La Raceway.

La is the neighborhood the track is in, near the beach. And this is what it looks like...

Not bad at all. It's a fairly long course and the turns are sharp enough and the guys hit the tires often enough to thrill themselves a little.

Because when you are 15, it's all about risk and skidding and passing your friends.

And when you go to the Go-Kart track outside America, you don't have to worry about all those pesky safety rules and liability disclaimers.

Not that they don't care. This sign for instance...

If you click it bigger you will get the full flavor of the serious nature of the danger of motor sport. :-)

And they did have this sign in the pit area...

Of course, they didn't have any flags or even a flag man. Just a few guys with a watch. When your fifteen minutes are up, one of the guys walks out to the track and points at the pit when you drive by.

Works the same.

Here's Coop and two of the three friends who went Saturday just after their first fifteen minute session. They spent the next twenty minutes dumping adrenalin and discussing how much drift they got (as in Tokyo Drift) and debating the merits of their particular Go-Kart.

Then they got ready to start their second session...

which included the track guys gassing up each Go-Kart with a little jug of gas and a Flintstones funnel.

Nana's ride needed a little help, and as one of the kids said when we were all through-

the track guys go "Oh! It's not working? Let me fix it with this paper clip."

and off they went.

It's just like home.

And nothing like home.

All at the same time.

But at least Cooper gets to be a big high school dork with his friends sometimes.

Chili Peppers!

2007-09-24T10:00:00.000Z

On our very first road trip we saw tons of Ghanaian Red Chili peppers drying on the roadsides and at the time I thought to myself, "I'll have to get a picture of those sometime."

Cut to now, more than two years later and I finally got my picture.

Dopey me was thinking those peppers would just hang out waiting for me and my camera, because, hey! this is the equator and everything blooms 365, right? D'oh!

Luckily, when my sister was here, we were covering some of the same ground, at the same time of year, and VOILA! lots of roadside peppers, drying in the sun.

This is very much along the lines of the pumpkin patches in Mississippi that so astonished us (and provided our friends with no end of mirth and merriment)- where hundreds of Hallowe'en pumpkins were left on an empty lot on Brookway Blvd., unattended at night, and no one thought (or saw fit) to steal, smash, or otherwise annoy them.

In Ghana, if you didn't chop and stack that pile of wood on the roadside- don't even think about picking it up and taking it home to your cooking fire.

If you didn't build that furniture on the roadside, "locked" up for the night by being tied inside a plastic tarp- don't consider taking it home for the family room.

And if you didn't PICK those chilis, don't pick those chilis UP.

They aren't yours, and no Ghanaian would consider taking them.

So there they were, on the side of the road.

Or more accurately, in the middle of the road- drying in the sun, unattended.

I'm sure there were people keeping an eye on me from somewhere not too far off- even if they weren't the chili owners.

"What on Earth is that Obroni doing NOW?" ;-)

These chilis will be used to make "Ghanaian Gravy". Not shito (that's got fish and stuff in it), but the basic oil/onion/chili paste that is served in small bowls with small spoons with every Ghanaian meal whether you are in a Chinese restaurant or a neighborhood chop bar.

It's thick, it's dark and dangerous looking, and it's lethal.

Whenever we eat with Duke, he always mixes chili gravy into his rice.

And we always moan and congratulate him on his asbestos constitution, because even though we can eat a lot spicier food that we did when we were less well-travelled, we still can't manage about 60% of Ghanaian heat.

Interestingly, these chili peppers are also used as Elephant Deterrents. Seriously.

Apparently elephants don't like chili peppers, so cloths are smeared or soaked with a paste of them, and hung near crops in the north part of Ghana- instant elephant repellant.

If only you could smear it on yourself and get them to stop and lick you before deciding whether or not to kill and eat you, it could be a lifesaver. Although your skin might never recover.

Ghana, Meet My Sister

2007-09-17T10:00:00.000Z

My sister Judy was here this past week, and she got a whirlwind tour of Ghana. Or at least the parts of it we could get to in a week.

And that meant, of course, that I got another crack at the the Kpandu Pottery works and the Cedi Bead Factory.

More pottery!

More beads!

And both places had all kinds of new stuff. Color me happy.

If you've been reading since the beginning (the last pictures of Kpandu were sometime around October of 2005) you will be pleasantly surprised by the tidy new "showroom" of pottery.

Here's Judy trying to decide if she wanted a bowl with bumps on it (she ultimately chose a different bowl).

Everyone here was so happy to meet her- Duke has had the whole week marked on his calendar as he looked forward to driving her around Ghana.

And we had a lot of fun seeing Ghana through her "new" eyes, having forgotten how things looked to us long ago when it was all so strange and different.

The passing parade didn't disappoint, either. We followed a truck full of thatch for some village's roofs...

and a tro tro overloaded with people and smoked fish...

and yesterday, as a parting gift, we were lucky enough to run across two enterprising young men and their cart...

Judy took the picture- I was so excited I forgot I had a camera too!

These four wheeled carts are very common here and young men and boys pull them all over Accra with a variety of salvageable goods on them.

A long time ago we saw the hulk of an entire burned out car on one and never hoped to have the good luck to spot something like that again when we had a camera with us.

Go ahead and spend a little time wondering how they got the car onto the cart at all... :-)

We spent a good chunk of Wednesday afternoon with Duke, Jane, and the girls- we went to a local play ground with a bunch of fun kid stuff to play in and on, and then piled onto the porch for pictures...

As we wandered through the Tetteh Quarshie Arts and Crafts Market for the second time Friday morning, searching out the perfect gifts for her family, Judy (with Duke's enthusiastic help) used her newly acquired savvy about negotiating the cost of items and almost gave the poor woodcarver a stroke trying to settle on the price for a small carving she wanted.

It was a hoot watching her and Duke tag team this poor man who had been pleased to see us return.

I know we overwhelmed Judy a little, and she will never complain about Illinois potholes again, but I hope when she got on the plane Sunday morning she wished she could return to our little corner of Africa and all the smiling people.

Mark, Small Business Owner

2007-09-04T17:00:00.000Z

Whew! Did you miss me?

Since my last post school has started, and along with it came all the back-to-school craziness including Back to School Night which we never miss because it's the one night all of Cooper's teachers tell us how much they like him and what a charming, funny guy he is.

Because later in the year, for the mid-semester Parent/Teacher Conferences, we hear about how charming and funny and disruptive he is... not as much fun, although over the last eleven years we have gotten used to it, and until 3rd grade his teachers considered him more charming than disruptive.

We have a pledge from him this year to buckle down and try not to get shut out of every decent college in America because he is so charming and funny and disruptive (which translates into lazy and unmotivated and scraping by on the least amount of work possible while getting the most amount of laughs in class...).

Anyway. That's where I've been.

But this post isn't about Mr. Charisma.

This one is about our Mark. And his new store.

Actually he's had it all summer.

In Ghana you can have a phone in your house, if you have electricity and stuff and you are cabled up to the phone company. We have electricity (usually) but no phone cable, nor do many of the people in this neck of the woods. Or neck of the palms.

You can have a mobile phone, if you can afford one (the basic ones here go for anything from about $90 U.S. to $500 U.S.), and can afford to keep buying SIM cards for them (pay-as-you-go calling).

You can use a pay phone, if you can find one- I've only seen them outside the Ghana Telecom offices, although there may be more around I haven't noticed- suffice it to say they aren't common.

Your final option (and a popular one it is), is to go to a Phone Vendor. The are set up all over Accra- and for that matter, much of Ghana.

The vendor gets a 'transfer chip' from the cellular phone company (which costs a buttload- around $500 U.S.), and then they set you up with a phone and a banner and you are open for business.

We floated Mark a loan for his chip, he scored a box/table, a bench, and an umbrella from which hangs his banner.

Then he set up shop on Jungle Road about a block from home.

Here he is this afternoon, with Elliot who loves Mark dearly but can't stay at the store because even though he behaves he scares away customers.

Jungle Road is a busy place- lots of traffic, both foot and car, lots of activity day and night. Good for business.

Unfortunately, everyone else thinks so too, and within two blocks of Mark's store there are at least four other Phone Vendors on any given day.

But you know by now that Mark is a swell guy. He is cheerful, friendly, cute as the dickens, and I believe pretty attractive to the ladies.

Whenever we leave the house, if we go past Mark's Phone Store, he usually has a few people on his bench. Even if they aren't all paying customers, the other umbrellas rarely have anyone under them.

We choose to believe that Mark is the most popular phone store on Jungle Road.

And he has already paid back a big chunk of money while still sending money home to his Mom, so we are pretty sure that we are right.

Yay Mark! We are so proud of him, and he loves that phone store.

His work around our house is never neglected. Everything gets done and done right, but then we see him wander by the front window and down the driveway carrying his umbrella and phone, off to his second career.

We always make a big deal out of waving to him when we drive by because he always has such a big smile on his face.

We hope having Obronis make a fuss around his store is good for business.

And if you are ever in East Legon and need to make a phone call- look for our Mark! ;-)

Stars and Stripes Forever

2007-08-15T12:00:00.000Z

A long time ago I mentioned that there are no shortage of American flags flying in Accra- they are flown to attract ex-pats, show how global a hotel is, and just because people like them.

It's by no means limited to America- the most popular are the EU, Japan, Germany, and Canada, and of course Ghana. The flags are all handmade, although they often don't look it. Ghanaians are terrific at copying everything from flags to furniture, down to the smallest detail.

When they feel like it.

When they don't, you get hilarious attempts like the common efforts to reproduce a maple leaf on Canadian flags that resemble nothing so much as a smudged handprint, or even an Oak leaf. Cultural disconnect.

But last weekend, we spotted our absolute favorite in the "Flag Interpretation Sweepstakes". This was proudly flying at a used car dealer not too far from our house, out past the University...

Now don't get me wrong. It's technically a regulation flag- thirteen stripes, seven red/six white and 50 white stars on a blue field.

But so completely off that it just makes us giggle every time. We are SO easy.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off!

2007-08-06T14:40:00.001Z

Wow. I feel like I fell down the rabbit hole. Life has been a hectic blur ever since we got home from vacation and it's just starting to get back under control.

First, when we got home, I made Cooper a Dentist's appointment in between loads of laundry. Got him in the Monday after we returned.

He needed to get his last three baby teeth pulled.

Yes, he's fifteen.

No, I'm not the worst mother on Earth- that bad woman doesn't bother to get them yanked at all!

Anyway, they were pushing one canine on top and one on bottom all out of whack, and he inheirited his father's happy front tooth gap, and we opted to fix both those problems sooner rather than later, with Cooper's agreement.

So over a period of four days, the poor kid had three teeth pulled and a full set of braces put on his teeth.

And then tightened.

He couldn't eat at all Thursday.

He ate a little Friday.

He improved over the weekend.

He's back to normal today.

Except he flashes when he smiles now.

For your viewing pleasure, here is his mouth the first half of July, and then the second half of July.

That's our boy!

His dentist is very cool. He's UK trained and spends part of the year there and has a swell little practice that he and his wife run out of their home. His actual "office" with the chair and drill and stuff is in a GMC bus that has been outfitted with very modern equipment (Ted calls it "The Toothmobile"). It's kind of a hoot.

And Coop's teeth are already moving (the braces have already been tightened again!), so cross your fingers for a quick six month fix, and he'll be free!

Elsewhere in our lives, Ted lost a filling (same dentist- no braces for him though), the pool sprung an underground leak that caused a geyser in the pump room and sucked about six inches of water out of the pool, and the kitchen developed a new leak that seeped up into the floor tiles and soaked the whole "downhill" side of the kitchen.

Ted's got a nice new crown, the pool deck has been dug up and repaired, and we're just going to live with the kitchen leak (what's one more????).

While all this was going on, Duke's stepmother died. Her funeral was last weekend and then Sunday Jane's brother died unexpectedly, which was a serious blow to her- he wasn't very old and they were very close.

I hope things will stop being interesting now. That Chinese curse (May You Always Live in Interesting Times) is starting to hit really close to home.

Hedonism on the Sea, The End

2007-07-24T13:30:00.000Z

I need to mention here that there are ports we stopped at that I haven't mentioned because we either didn't get off the ship or we just spent the day at a beach- not terribly interesting. :-)

Next time we did get off the ship was at Cadiz, Spain which is a very nice place- but we only had one day in port and I wanted to take my guys to Sevilla. I had visited there in 1973 with my high school Spanish class and along with Toledo it was my favorite city in Spain, so I dragged them onto a bus and we headed away from the cool coast to the hot interior.

Of all the castles and palaces we have visited in Europe, the Alcazar in Sevilla easily makes the top 3. It's huge and ornate without being gaudy and has the loveliest gardens anywhere. These agapanthus are everywhere throughout the grounds...

and the gardens go on forever...

The palace itself is full of tiles and mosaics and was constructed in the Moorish tradition

(with some ugly gothic additions by Charles the V).

There are tapestries on the walls, and lots of halls and stairs and windows and doors.

Doors for much smaller medieval people-

(note 21st Century boy for scale)...

We hired a horse drawn carriage and took a tour of town, then headed back to the ship.

If I was you, I'd be a little curious about the ship, so we'll take a break from our Southern European tour here to see a little more of the Monster of the Seas.

It's hard to convey how big it is with numbers like tonnage and stuff, so I'll tell you they put maps on every deck and after two weeks on board, we were STILL checking the maps for to see where we were or where we wanted to be.

Here's the one on our deck...

They have a little red dot for "You are Here", so no matter where you are, you're back at the red dot. :-)

On the Promenade they had little ship models to help you find your way around.

Hopefully you can make those pictures big enough to read some of the words- the "Promenade" was a shopping mall and elsewhere on the ship there was an ice rink (yes, we have been ice skating on the Atlantic!), a 30 foot rock wall, a mini-putt golf course, a basketball court, a Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream store, a Johnny Rockets restaurant, and the usual bars, casino, theater, etc. etc. etc.

There were vertical open areas that went five decks or more- it is a truly wild feat of engineering (there was even a program on our stateroom TV that documented the difficulties of building ships this massive with so much open space...).

Here's a shot off the lobby of deck 10 looking straight down. You can see the stairs on deck four and the center foreground is even lower.

The half circles on the sides are the glass elevators. Four elevators on each side. Incredible.

One of the coolest things was the "Peek a Boo Bridge".

You can go on deck at the front of the ship and hang out in front of aquarium-like windows, except instead of fish, it was the ship's bridge!

Very Star Trek.

Our favorite of all the bars was the English Pub because you could sit on stools at barrel tables out front and watch the passing parade.

And just in case you are curious about the staterooms, here is a picture of ours.

Cooper's bed is the fold out sofa on the left foreground. I'm standing next to our bathroom and facing the sliding glass doors to our private balcony. I'm telling you we were in heaven!

When we could tear ourselves away from our floating paradise, we got off again in Lisbon Portugal.

Lisbon is a very nice city- full of killer hills just like our beloved San Francisco, and sharing a Golden Gate Bridge 'wannabe'...

It's a double decker bridge and not exactly as majestic as the real Golden Gate, but it's cute and we got to sail right smack under it coming and going.

We started our Lisbon explorations in this pedestrian mall...

and wandered around until we found this:

It's what the Portugese call an "elevador" and it is used to hoist people up from one street to another on their massive hills. This particular one was designed by an apprentice to Mr. Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame, and it shows. :-)

Just for local color, I'll share this picture of a major plaza in Lisbon,

and the sign contained on one side of it that cracked us up...

We have no idea what a 'bombeiro' is, but we like them anyway just for their name!

Back on the ship for a hop up to the northwest corner of Spain and city called Vigo.

They have jumped on the big decorated cow bandwagon that we've encountered all over America and Europe and they cracked us up. Here is a selection of Vigo cows (note that the last cow is the best because it has Ted in its picture)...

and two really nice fountains we stumbled on as we wandered...

and some gorgeous Hydrangeas in their city park...

It's a very nice little city that speaks a hybrid of Spanish and Galician which torqued my poor brain something awful.

So, over a period of two weeks we traded our usual explorations of a single country for little quickie excursions into many different places, but in return we got a stable, reliable, incredibly pampered experience on our giant Ship of Dreams.

On our last port stop, we took this photo of our home away from home and I'll put it here as my parting shot for a truly memorable trip.

Hedonism on the Sea, Part 2

2007-07-21T17:00:00.000Z

First stop in Italy was Livorno, which is just a short hop from Pisa, and the leaning tower therein. As a side note, on the way to Pisa, the road was lined with large shade trees, underneath which were- at 100-300 yard intervals- pretty women wearing very little clothing. Some had plastic chairs, some didn't. One was speaking to a man in a car who had pulled over under her tree...

At this point you may draw your own conclusions.

We, of course, opted for the smutty conclusion.

In all our travels I believe Germany is the only place (Ghana and the U.S. included) where we haven't seen practitioners of the world's oldest profession, and that's probably because we just weren't looking. It's the one thing that just about every country has in common.

But on to more enlightening stuff... Pisa is one of those places that it's fun to go to after a lifetime of reading about it. Once you enter the city walls, it's an easy shot to the Leaning Tower and it's exactly as advertised.

It's actually a bell tower, and this is the church to which it belongs...

If you get up close, this is the view to the top...

And on the face of the tower just about eye level are lots of these details...

We headed down this street just looking around...

and here's a shot of the Arno River as it runs through town.

All in all, a very satisfying stop.

The next day we were off to Rome.

I'm not sure what I expected exactly, but it was so different from my imaginings.

I always had a mental picture of Rome as a big flat city full of open piazzas and lots of ancient Roman stuff I guess. What it actually is, is a big, hilly city full of narrow streets and hidden piazzas with lots of ancient, old, new and indeterminate stuff all jumbled together.

To my shame, most of my ideas about Rome were apparently all obtained through movies. But the Rome of Roman Holiday and Three Coins in the Fountain bears little resemblance to what is actually there.

So we sucked it up (it's so hard when your illusions are shattered) and started exploring.

First myth busted- The Trevi Fountain. It's not round, it's not in the middle of a big piazza, and it's stuck on the front of a building. Had I not seen the street signs...

I would never have known what I was looking at. It's a lovely fountain - just not what I ever thought it would look like in person.

As you can see from these two shots to either side, it's strangely situated on a small wide spot deep in the city, surrounded by buildings and basically isolated from everything.

From there we headed for the Roman Forum. Ha!

For this monumental misconception, I blame Zero Mostel. :-)

The gaps in my historical knowledge of Rome are wide and deep and apparently the place that knowledge should occupy in my brain is filled to the brim with dippy Hollywood images and ideas.

It's not a single place- Forum to the Romans meant "market" basically, and it goes on forever. There are tons of ruins running through the center of Rome...

in all sorts of conditions and ages...

And it includes the actual Caesar's Palace (thanks for nothing Las Vegas!) high on a hill above the forum...

Lots of good history and interesting building practices here- new things were built on top of the old things and unfortunately, things built by unpopular leaders were destroyed to keep them from being remembered.

A flawed practice at best, since basically everything Nero did here that didn't burn was destroyed and he's probably as famous 2000 years later as many of his more recent peers.

Meanwhile... Note to Roman Tourism Authority: Lose the Centurions.

Seriously.

Although there was no shortage of tourists happy to pay costumed locals to have their picture taken with a guy who has a Mohawk whisk broom on his helmet, it doesn't add to the atmosphere in the forum, but does contribute to the wacky Hollywood view of Rome.

Not good.

Now all this time we have been catching glimpses of the Coliseum as we wandered in that general direction, and that was the big draw for Coop (teenaged boy + place where people were eaten by lions on purpose = worthwhile tourist attraction).

Finally, we headed for the Coliseum itself.

It's very cool, and even today it's easy to imagine it whole and filled with people.

The original stadium.

If you stand to one side you can see the cross section that shows the outer ring that used to circle the entire Coliseum.

We had a great time picturing the ancient equivalent of a TicketMaster admission ticket on papyrus or something that designated one's personal seat in the Coliseum as Gate LII, Row VI, Seat XXIV.

All the gates were really numbered that way!

No matter what, Zero Mostel, Mel Brooks, Monty Python and the rest of those jokers pop to the front of my brain. ;-)

That left the Vatican.

It was fun to see the plaza where all the people gather on important occasions and check out the windows in the Pope's apartments and stuff. My big aim here was to see Michelangelo's Pieta, and I wasn't disappointed.

The picture quality is not great because of the security surrounding the sculpture (this is the one that the crazy guy with the hammer went after a few years ago...), but in person it is a terrific piece to see- you'll have to trust me on that.

We didn't make it to the Sistine Chapel, mostly because although we have always loved the "Spark of Life" painting (known in our family as "Pull My Finger"), we had to choose between going there and missing the boat.

Literally. We chose the boat, and a gorgeous sunset from our balcony...

(Ted took this picture, and I made fun of him at the time,
so now I have to tell you all that it's his picture or he'll pout.)

Next up, the second week of vacation and some tidbits from The Monster of the Seas...

Hedonism on the Sea

2007-07-18T08:00:00.000Z

Longtime readers have slogged along with us on our vacations as we wander aimlessly through Europe checking into and out of hotels. This time we decided that even though there were still lots of places we wanted to see, we were tired of packing and unpacking.

Our solution? A Mediterranean cruise!

We do not fit the 'cruise' profile, but then- alot of people on cruises don't fit the profile. Basically, you buy a stateroom and choose to participate or not in a strange floating summer camp for adults and children while someone else cleans your room, makes your meals (in an endless loop of breakfast/brunch/lunch/snacks/dinner/snacks/room service), entertains you, and generally makes life as easy as possible.

If you are disciplined (or one of the folk we affectionately called FREAKS), you can use the well stocked fitness center (treadmills, stair machines, weights, etc.), take Pilates/Spinning/Aerobics classes, and just ignore the food and the lounge chairs and the hot tubs.

We prefer the food and hot tubs. And free room service. And the nice people at any one of the seven million bars on board who will, upon being presented with your 'Sea Pass' (room key/charge card/passport) which bears a special sticker, give you unlimited soft drinks for free (after you pay a fixed fee on the first day and then try to soda pop your way through more Cokes than you actually paid for).

Anyway, that was our solution to the hectic driving vacations we have been taking, and it began on one of Royal Caribbean's Voyager Class ships in Southampton England.

We flew to London, spent a day there making our annual pilgrimage to the Apple Store on Regent Street (coincidentally on the same day yet another batch of critical-thinking dropouts decided to try blowing up London again), then drove a rental car to Southampton where we traded our Vauxhall Intermediate car for The Navigator of the Seas, or as we call it, The Monster of the Seas.

This ship is massive. It has a 29 foot draft, is more than a thousand feet long, weighs almost 140,000 tons, and can hold more than 3,000 people. The top deck of the ship is more than 200 feet from the water, and it is a mildly worrying puzzle how the whole thing stays upright, although the Captain assured us that they had plenty of ballast and computer programs running 24/7 to make sure it was distributed correctly.

This is what The Monster of the Seas looks like...

and here's a shot looking down its length from the backend (or stern, as they fruitlessly tried to teach us)...

Our stateroom was deck 9 (second row from the top of the five rows of rooms with balconies) second one from the front. Except on the other side of the ship (starboard) from the picture.

Right by the flying bridge, which meant we could watch the Captain and his crew dock each time we came into a port.

We hung out on our balcony, clutching our binoculars, ready to help out, but they never seemed to need our input.

So we left England and sailed out into the Atlantic, just like the Titanic.

And for two days, this was our view...

For us, this was heaven.

Electricity and water on demand.

More food than we could eat.

A slight chill in the air on deck, but with our choice of five giant hot tubs.

Carpet.

Maid (or rather Steward) service.

Room service.

And did I mention electricity and water on demand? Whoot! We would have been happy if nothing else had happened for two weeks. Africa tends to re-order your priorities. ;-)

After two days, we sailed into Gibraltar and watched a shockingly small cadre of people (four on the pier, four on the ship, and three people steering) dock the Monster of the Seas without so much as a bump.

I can't even dock our ski boat without bouncing off the side bumpers, so I bow to the masters (and covet side thrusters on our little Larsen- THEN I could navigate, by god!).

We had arranged to join a tour of Gibraltar, a move which turned out to be terrifically smart on our part when we found ourselves being whisked through some of the narrowest, most congested, rock wall lined streets we have found yet on a bewildering ride through a maze of unmarked, twisty roads straight up the side of the rock, through narrow tunnels into wildly popular spaces with no parking lots. Eek!

But all we had to do was sit and watch while our driver/guide Phil did it all with ease and made sure we saw the sights of his country while keeping us in stitches with his sit down comedy routine.

Part of the show in Gibraltar are the Apes that inhabit the rock itself. They are smart, greedy, people wise, and way too eager to play the part of delinquent children.

The warnings about the Gibraltar Apes are plentiful and accurate- don't feed them, don't carry anything they can snatch (they will only play with stolen items if you are alarmed and show distress- if you ignore the theft they lose interest and toss the item over the side of the hill...), don't try to pet them, and don't stare at them because they take it as a sign of aggression.

Fine.

Then we get to the top of the hill and Phil rolls down his window. An ape jumps onto his shoulder. We quickly realize that all the driver/guides on Gibraltar are on a first name basis with the apes and that if we follow the basic rules about food and loose items, we will be able to play too. Here's a couple who kindly posed for me...

At one point, Phil looked at me and said, "Hey! You want one?"

And the next thing I know, I have an ape on my shoulder.

Who quickly moved to my other shoulder. And then to my chest. And then back to my shoulder.

As I turned to find Ted, I saw Phil unloading another ape onto Coop. Here he is with his own pal...

He is doing exactly what it looks like he's doing- grooming the human. He dug through Coop's hair looking for tidbits, and thankfully found nothing to eat.

Anyway, there is a lot to see and do on Gibraltar. The place is lousy with history and was a fun place to spend time.

Here's our parting shot of the rock...

Next up: steaming to Italy.

Back From Our Reality Break!

2007-07-16T13:45:00.000Z

Yikes! Thought I fell off the edge of the Earth didn't ya?

We had our first multiple week vacation in many, many moons and just got back last night. It will take me a while to dig out from underneath the mountain of laundry and share the highlights of our trip with you, but I just wanted to check in real quick and let you know we are home and I'm still kicking!

It was very nice to come home to Ghana last night. Not too hot and the power was on (yippee! it really made all the difference to come home to a house with lights), although it went off this AM at 6 practically on the dot for our 'regular' twelve hour outage... :-)

While we were gone the country switched to the new currency. Coop and I hit MaxMart for groceries this morning and I am still a little verklempt by the change. Everyone but me has new money and the prices are all listed in the new currency (without all the zeros). We have until the end of the year to adjust and get rid of our old money, but for now that's all I have and my brain still thinks in hundreds of thousands of cedis.

That will be my challenge for the coming week- to adjust to new monetary thinking... but it will have to wait in line behind all the stuff that didn't get done over the last two weeks and the unpacking, laundry, and reviving of our poor dusty, neglected house.

Anyway- hang around, I'll post again really soon with trip pictures and details and then we'll get back to life in Ghana.

Later!

Ghana Lackawanna

2007-06-25T10:20:00.000Z

Since we have been in Ghana, we haven't had to stop for trains.

Not that there aren't tracks- there just aren't any trains on them.

The last mention I can find of train travel here is from the 60s, when prices here were still in shillings and pence.

Imagine our surprise when we were out running around and suddenly a guy popped up in traffic lanes waving a red flag.

The guy wasn't too remarkable... since the stoplights are frequently not functioning, police or civilians waving branches of leaves are a normal site on many streets, and parking lot guards use red and green flags to stop traffic and allow people to pull onto streets all the time... but this guy was standing on a set of tracks, far from any parking lots or stoplights and snapping his flag pretty energetically.

Ted stopped the car because we take any excuse to pause and watch just about anything. ;-) The guy in front of us decided to stop too, and slowly everyone crept to a halt just before the tracks.

We looked at each other and craned our necks to try to see down the tracks.

Could it be a train? In Ghana?

We didn't see anything.

And there are new red and white striped steel barrier gates at a lot of level crossings in Accra (although at least one that we pass often in Dzorwulu has already been smacked hard enough to knock it down), including the one we were sitting at- although no one had bothered to lower either of them (they are hand operated gates, with a big weight on one end to hold them up when not in use).

I got my camera out, just in case something cool happened, and VOILA! Here came a train!

You can see the unused crossing gate sticking up behind the train's leading edge.

Then entire train consisted of two empty passenger cars with one engine pushing them slowly down the tracks in some kind of test.

People were dramatically unexcited.

Except us. We thought it was really cool that a country so desperately in need of more transportation options is working on getting some!

We immediately started picturing ourselves on a train like this, headed up north in the company of lots of people and probably lots of goats and chickens (they ride tro-tros, they will surely ride the trains!).

I really hope they get it organised while we are still here- train travel rocks, and trains through the African countryside- well, how could we resist?

This Means You!

2007-06-13T17:00:00.000Z

This is just one of those things.

There are lots of signs in Ghana, about as many handmade ones as "professional".

They convey all sorts of information and warnings and offers.

I suppose I should collect a good sampling for you, but until then we couldn't resist sharing this gem that popped up on the street near our house last weekend...

(Remember, many of the folks who live around us have, basically, a plywood box or less to live in- there is certainly no handy tiled bathroom for them to use. And remember also, that "farm" does not mean here what it might mean where you live.)

In Ghana it's more important to get your meaning across than to spell it correctly...

And don't you forget it.

African Wildlife of the Icky Kind

2007-06-05T11:30:00.000Z

This is a quickie to share one of those "Ewwwww!" moments that life hands us all sometimes.

Africa has these winged bugs. They have long thick bodies (about 1.5 inches or more) and long white teardrop shaped wings (2 inches plus, each!).

You never see them around except the first few times it rains really hard after the dry season.

Then they just appear suddenly at night, clustered together in a frenzy of bug love, or bug rumbles or some kind of bug social event.

We have driven through clouds of them. Smooshed thousands beneath the car wheels. Watched them writhe and clump together on the deck or the walls around the house.

And like most bugs, they are attracted by light.

And we have lots of lights around our pool...you know where I'm going with this, right?

So last week sometime I'm noticing that the pool skimmer isn't drawing well, and when I go outside to check on it, this is what I find:

Go ahead. Click it bigger. I dare ya.

Ewww! Both skimmers were completely full of these bugs. They were packed so tight the water couldn't even pass through them anymore. They were piled so deep I couldn't get my hand onto the skimmer basket without burrowing through (mostly) dead bug bodies.

So what did I do?

I called Cooper outside.

I calmly explained the problem and then told him to take care of it.

Didn't work.

He looked at me for a few seconds to make sure he had heard correctly, and then said,

"No way. You do it."

My boy loves me. But apparently not enough to battle ewwy bugs for me.

And I thought he was at least a little bit scared of me. But apparently not as scared as he is of ewwy bugs.

To his credit, he usually doesn't shy away from this sort of thing, but there is something about these giant, suicidal bugs that skeeves him out, and the fact that they weren't all necessarily completely dead just made it that much worse.

[n.b. last year I remember these bugs suddenly appearing, but Mark took care of them before I noticed a problem. This year, I'm glad to have saved him the effort- no one should have to do this job every time.]

So give us a half hour, some rubber gloves, a cardboard box, a plastic bag, some yelps of surprise and disgust, and we managed to get most of them up out of the pool skimmers.

This is just the bulk of the bugs in the first skimmer hole.

And when I say "we" up there, I mean that I did all the icky stuff and Cooper provided scrub nurse support.

I'll get him back. I swear I will.

Africa Day Getaway Weekend

2007-05-31T17:00:00.000Z

Africa Day was May 25th, so we took advantage of the three day weekend to go celebrate Africa and hang out at the beach...(we were helping chaperone the "Anti-Prom" - the brainstorm of one of Coop's friends who was not interested in the Junior/Senior Prom Friday night, considering the impracticality of finding a prom dress/tuxedo, and all the attendant trappings in a third world country. We were pleasantly surprised that the kids understood the dilemma at all, and happy to hang out at the beach with them as an alternative.)

We headed to Elmina, about 2.5 hours after you clear Accra (which took 45 minutes!) and the next town after Cape Coast. Our destination was the Coconut Grove Beach Resort therein (or, as it said on some of the lounge cushions- Coconut Groove Beach Resort). ;-)

Elmina has a 'castle' too- remember that is the name for the huge British built whitewashed stone buildings they put up as forts and "holding tanks" for Africans being sold into slavery. Having been to the castle at Cape Coast, we decided to forego the dubious pleasure of seeing another.

You'll just have to imagine Cooper's deadpan delivery as he expressed a desire to NOT visit the Elmina Castle by playing tour guide...

"This is where we lived, ate, went to church, and sold human beings for profit. Here is the dungeon we kept them in without food or light, here is the door where they were loaded into smelly ships like cord wood. We hope you enjoyed your tour."

If you didn't know its purpose and history, though, the Elmina Castle would seem a very nice place, I suppose...

About a mile down the road is the Coconut Grove. This is the view from our room...

and this is the restaurant...

...and after dinner we sat here and just watched the ocean and relaxed...

The hotel is pretty nice- albeit with the usual Ghanaian touches (foam mattresses, line dried towels, showers without curtains or doors, etc.), but when you are hanging out at the beach with nothing you have to do, it's swell.

There was a village just outside the hotel grounds, and I apologise for the quality of this picture, but I include it because it's a good (if blurry) representation of the village. Those are mud houses, with palm thatch roofs.

Many of the people in Elmina are fishermen as evidenced by this inlet near the castle...

This is just a part of the "fleet" that moors in this inlet. Most of them were out fishing when I took the picture.

Here's a shot of an almost finished boat (they are carved from a single tree trunk and then painted bright colors)...

Lots of the village homes had fences around them, and all of them were made (logically) from palm fronds.

Coop has seen Ghanaians making these fences and he says they just do it- making it look so easy and simple.

We know it's not.

As we headed back to Accra, this was our parting scenery along the roadside...

Pretty good weekend. Pretty nice country.

Mimosa Time!

2007-05-22T15:15:00.000Z

Living this close to the equator makes the seasons a little hard to distinguish, although we do have dry and rainy seasons, the Harmattan, and relatively cool summers...

Even so, though, we are puzzled (both of us being completely retarded when it comes to botany) by the abundance of happy, flowering, leafy plants, trees, and bushes 365 days a year.

How do they do it? How do they know winter isn't ever coming? How do they 'rest' and recuperate from the hard job of making flowers and leaves and fruit?

Our yard is one big flowering extravaganza, and has been ever since we moved in two years ago (see my entry for January 2006 wherein I posted pictures of every flower in our yard...), not to mention our fabled PawPaw Tree (see May 2006- The Papaya Wars).

The exception to this rule is the Mimosa tree. The trees themselves stay fairly nice and leafy year 'round, but they flower only once a year- right around now.

Like they know it's spring.

And they go crazy.

Witness:

Is that not gorgeous?

A man who commented on my previous post pointed out to me that there was a good Mimosa to see near the University, and I agree- we had already taken this picture last weekend!

We aren't the only ones marveling at these abundantly flowering trees.

So I figured you all would like to see them too. :-)

If you've never been here, feast your eyes. If you used to live here, remember the riot of Mimosa Orange all over Accra every spring...

Enjoy!

The End of the 'Cedi Shuffle'

2007-05-15T08:10:00.000Z

We're gettin' new money!

It was actually announced at the first of the year, but with the changeover happening at the end of next month, things are starting to pop! In addition to what's pictured above, there will also be one and five cedi notes.

The currency is being 'redenominated' on July 1 because, as I've mentioned before, you have to cart around buttloads of currency to pay for even small purchases.

It currently takes an excess of 9000 cedis to equal a dollar. If dinner for two costs the equivalent of 50 bucks, you have to have almost a half million cedis to pay it. If you are lucky enough to have scored ¢20,000 notes on your last trip to the bank, you still have a pile of bills too thick to put in your wallet if you expect to then fold said wallet in half.

It gets really ugly if the bank only had ¢5,000 notes on the day you went. That would mean you need 100 bills to pay for dinner. About an inch of paper money. Yikes.

So, with the redenomination, the government is knocking four zeroes off the designated currency. Your ¢10,000 notes will become ¢1 (one cedi), a dinner bill for ¢500,000 will become ¢50 (fifty cedi). It will soon be possible to pay for dinner or a basket of groceries with one or two bills! Yippee!

Laugh if you will, but I can't remember what it was like to hand someone a single bill to pay for anything, ever.

We get new coins too! And considering that the average Ghanaian-on-the-street spends money on a lot of things that are incredibly inexpensive (kenkey, tro-tros, newspapers, etc.) they will be in pretty good shape to use coins.

Right now it takes two of the largest denomination (500 cedi) coins to make a dime. And two handfuls of the 50 cedi coins to make the same dime.

The new coins are pesewas (what they were in the old days before they became valueless and were withdrawn from circulation) and in addition there will be cedi coins.

All the stores are supposed to be displaying their prices in both the old and new cedis (and some actually are...) because the two currencies will exist side by side until the end of the year.

The gas stations have all switched their pumps, so my liter of petrol (or fuel- don't say gas!), costs me 87 pesewa. I think. But for now I just have to switch it back to the normal ¢8,700 per liter that I will still pay until July 1. (...and for those of you in the U.S. frantically doing the math- feel fortunate to pay whatever you are paying because it adds up to more than $3 a gallon here. Eek!)

There have been lots of TV and Radio ads with little vignettes and jingles to help educate us on the switchover. "The Value is the Same" song is a big hit with Duke's oldest girl. ;-)

And if you need help, there are handy dandy conversion charts like this all over town...

You can read a lot about it (if you care) at this website, which also contains links to the audio stuff...(click on the Media and Press at the top for commercials and jingles).

http://www.ghanacedi.gov.gh/

And if you can't remember the old money very well, my August 30 2005 post has pictures and everything! (just click the August 2005 link on the right and VOILA!)

Cooper Does Good

2007-05-06T21:00:00.000Z

Cooper's school requires community service from their students, more as they get into High School.

One of his choices this year has been to give up a couple of his weekends to travel to a nearby rural village and help Habitat for Humanity build a house. He was given a disposable camera to take both times and 'forgot' to use it both times. So we have no pictures. :-(

But our boy now has some fall back skills.

He can make cement blocks (the size of cinder blocks but without the holes), he knows how to use a pickaxe to trench for a foundation and then lay the foundation. He can plaster a wall that has been built from the cement blocks.

It's not the sort of house Americans are used to seeing in Habitat buildings...plumbing is not part of the equation and electrical wiring is an "add on" for people who can afford to have it done for them. The doors and windows are framed up and the house is built around them.

Rather than just the recipients of the house helping with construction, any villager who can help, does. And the whole village opens their own homes to the kids who come to help. Each village home that can takes one to three of the Lincoln students for the night.

Cooper has learned to take a bucket shower, how to cope with livestock (mostly roosters) wandering through his room at night, and how to be a gracious guest in the home of people who are sharing what they have with him, even though it's precious little.

The kids take the equivalent of about 13 bucks with them to help with the cost of feeding hard-working teenagers (and help buy cement in the bargain!). After dinner on Saturday they play a game of soccer with the village players and get to spend time just hanging out with their hosts.

Probably the best part is that he always comes home happy and exhausted. We couldn't buy the life experience and knowledge that he is getting for free from his time in Ghana.

Since I didn't get any pertinent pictures, I'll share a close up of the almost-fifteen-year old when he was just six months. He lived up to his early promise. ;-)

The Washing Machine Chronicles

2007-04-28T14:00:00.000Z

So when we moved here, we bought a washer and dryer (and had the landlord build us a laundry room on the back porch) because there is no such thing as a laundromat here and my people have lost the ability to hand launder more than our dainties.

In the two years since then, the washer has given out, one small piece at a time.

Stupid stupid washing machine.

First the cold water intake stopped taking in. I had a repair guy come look at it. No clue.

So we got around it by turning off the hot water heater in the laundry room and routing all the cold water laundry through the hot water hose. Good enough.

Then the cycle between "G" and "H" stopped cycling. For the uninitiated, that means the wash and rinse water would drain, but the spin cycle wouldn't start. So the laundry doer had to go out and manually move the knobby deal to 'spin' so it would finish the load.

Repair guy summoned. No clue.

Lest you be thinking that I need to replace my repair guy, let me say he (or they- there's a squad of them) are usually geniuses. They fix my generator and my air conditioners, they stop leaks, they re-wire lights. But this stupid stupid washing machine had them stumped.

Meanwhile, the plastic hose attached to the plastic fitting on the plastic back of the stupid stupid washing machine would pop off regularly since there was no way to make the plastic collar that held the plastic hose onto the plastic fitting fit tightly enough to withstand more than a few days of water pressure in the line.

So if the laundry doer forgot to turn the water off (and I would never name any names here, but his initials are C-O-O-P-E-R) there would be an eventual flood on the laundry porch...

This was all part of life Chez Us (notice how fluent I've gotten in French since our recent trip), until this week.

Cue Mark at the door.

"Madame," (that's me) "the washer is not right."

Cooper was theoretically doing laundry (he made a deal with me a couple of years ago that if I wouldn't nag him about his dirty clothes, he would do his own laundry. I thought about it for two seconds and then said, "DEAL!"), but he had gotten interested in something else and completely spaced on his load of washing.

Unfortunately, the washer chose that load to go ballistic on.

It had been sitting out there on the the porch, for way too long, filling a tub full of drain holes, waiting to become full so it could agitate, in a machine that had lost the ability to shut off the outflow of water from the tub.

Great.

Mark had noticed the flow of clean cold water coming from the pipe that goes from our house to the storm ditch out front and followed it back to the merrily pumping washing machine. Arrrrgggghhh.

The washer we left behind in the U.S. is the one we purchased from Sears in 1986. Is there a reason why the one we purchased here should only last two years???? Gah.

Anyway, that was the last straw.

When Ted got home, I gave him some space, a haircut, a clean towel and a smooch.

Then told him I was going to pound the stupid stupid washing machine into tiny pieces of stupid stupid plastic and we would need a replacement ASAP.

He wisely agreed with my plan (after talking me out of the actual physical destruction of the SSWM), and Thursday morning Duke and I went out to buy machine #2.

Of course, the silver lining is the Ghanaian rule regarding large purchases (and this has been true of the washer/dryer, fridge, satellite dish, desk, kitchen island, et al). You buy it and the merchant asks if there is someone at the house to take delivery.

Like right now.

Sometimes, the delivery truck just follows us home. Sometimes, we don't even get home before they arrive with our purchase.

None of this "we have you scheduled next Thursday between 1 and 5..." business. You buy it, you get it. Right now.

And as I've mentioned before, nothing in this country that plugs in is sold without proving to the customer that it actually works, and that goes for washing machines. The guys brought it, hooked it up, ran it through the cycles, and... voila! I have a washer that works again.

Engagement, Ghana Style!

2007-04-18T17:20:00.000Z

Last Saturday, we were invited to the engagement ceremony for Jane's younger sister Jennifer.

We could live here the rest of our lives without getting to participate in so much of the Ghanaian culture if we didn't count Duke and a few others among our friends.

Duke came and got us and drove us over because even after driving there, we had no idea where we were, except Accra. Maybe. ;-)

There were four shade tents set up, two facing each other were for the families of the bride and groom. Here's the groom's side...

and here's the bride's side...

(Click it bigger and you can see Jane standing sideways, Jane's mother sitting in brown, and the bride herself)

The groom's sister had a tray that she would fill with gifts- liquor, envelopes of money, stuff like that and she would let the family preacher examine the gifts, discuss them, make jokes, etc. and then she would present them to the bride's family.

Then a crate of Coca-cola, a crate of Malta, and a gift wrapped suitcase were brought out. Duke informed us that the suitcase was full of underpants, brassieres, and nightgowns- her trousseau provided by the groom's family so she wouldn't bring her raggedy old underwear to the marriage. (There were many jokes and comments about this suitcase and its contents- even Jane got into the act...)

Although it was all in Ewe (Jane's family is from the Volta region and speaks Ewe), it was pretty easy to tell when they were having a good time, and Duke said we were freaking them out because we laughed in all the right spots and they kept asking him if we spoke the language (it's the rare obroni who masters even Twi, let alone Ewe or Ga).

Then the bride and groom were paraded in front of each other's family tents so everyone could get a good look at them...

Note that their outfits match. :-)

Then they were seated with their families again and asked separately by their family ministers if the other person was the one they wanted to marry. When they each said yes, everyone whooped.

Once they had agreed to marry each other publicly, the bride was given a ring box attached to a gift wrapped bible, and the groom placed the engagement ring on her finger...

...then they made their way from the bride's tent to the groom's tent together...

...and sat to listen to both family ministers and assorted family members give them advice and well wishes.

They are a lot happier than they look in these pictures. We asked about it and never got a coherent answer, but they both kept suppressing smiles and laughter, so apparently they are supposed to be serious and somber whether they feel happy or not. (the groom actually has a great set of dimples)

After all the talking was done, and after we all stood while the prayers were sung, there was a happy dance in the center of the yard.

The betrothed couple danced and were surrounded by anyone who felt the spirit move them, and occasionally, someone would dance up and throw money which the sisters of the bride would gather to give the couple. That lasted about 10 minutes.

(note the fabric in the yellow dress nearest the camera- it's Ghana's 50th Anniversary fabric!)

Meanwhile, the Obroni contingent (that would be Ted, Cooper and me) sat in our assigned places and tried not to be intrusive in any way (although obviously I moved around a little to take pictures. When I checked with Duke to make sure it was okay to take pictures he was very enthusiastic and said they would be pleased if I took lots of pictures), and we were happy just to have been included in a family event like this.

(that's Christa over on the edge- she sat on my lap sometimes, but eventually fell asleep in that chair)

What we didn't plan on was another culture clash.

Since we had been invited to an engagement party we brought a small gift (a picture frame that we hoped they could use for an eventual wedding photo). But in Ghana, the groom's family gives all the gifts and ours was the only non-family gift offered.

This required that the three of us troop out into the middle of the yard to stand with the bride and groom who were holding our wrapped gift, and have our picture taken.

If you check the picture where Tomås gives Jennifer the ring, you will see half a dozen "photographers" with cell phones. They were all present for the "gift" picture too, in addition to the hired photog and the videographer. We felt like celebrities as all the cameras clicked away. We also felt really stupid. ;-)

Talk about feeling like a spectacle.

Then Jennifer's sisters passed around soft drinks and Malta along with small "Thank You" bags containing a vegetable pie, cookies, and cake.

Now it was time for the dancing and partying to begin, and Duke very kindly told us we could leave anytime.

When he repeated the invitation to leave, we realized we were putting a little bit of a damper on the celebration- everyone felt they had to be a little subdued while we were there.

So we thanked our hosts and congratulated the happy couple and headed for the car, which we couldn't get into right away because a few people wanted their picture taken in front of it, both with us and by themselves.

We were a pile of melted sweaty obronis by this time, but really truly glad to have been included in this happy day for Jane's family. How often do you get a chance to do something like this?

Duke told us Monday that his family left about 5 o'clock, but that the dancing and celebrating went on into the early evening. Can these people celebrate, or what?

France, or "Bonjour Ya'll!", Part Trois

2007-04-13T16:00:00.000Z

In the morning, we headed for the coast, to see the English channel and maybe see Omaha beach.

We got lost.

Again.

Good thing we have so much fun being lost. We never did see Omaha Beach. But then again, another vacation day spent someplace so full of sadness for so many people during WWII probably wasn't a good idea anyway (remember Dachau?).

But we did make it to the English Channel and the beautiful coast of Northern France.

And here's mostly the same picture, much improved, because my guys are in it...

If you turn the other direction, you see this...

...which was captured in this painting by Claude Monet.

And a little farther down the coast...

These pictures don't do the water justice. It is the most beautiful color, clear as glass and COLD!

We stuffed our faces some more at a beachfront café and then headed out to Rouen, also known as the town Joan of Arc saved and then died in.

Rouen is a fairly large, fairly busy city, and it's loaded with one way streets, no left turns and lots of the cute, frustrating two way "alleys" that they call streets and that are only wide enough for one car at a time. We found them in every single city, town, and village we went to in France, much to our delight and dismay.

We were looking for a hotel Mercure that we had read about because it was near the city center cathedral and it seemed like a good place from which to do our exploring.

Insert hysterical laughter here.

After circling downtown, the Cathedral, and the Beaux Arts school, trying in vain to find a right turn, or a street wide enough to drive on, or in fact ANY way to get to our hotel, including accidentally crossing the river, and then purposely crossing the river, we were just about to give up (and Ted was just about to die of stress and frustration), when we decided to make a quick left into a narrow cobblestone alley we hadn't been on before.

After a block or so there was actually a signpost for our hotel! We followed it around the corner onto an equally narrow cobblestoned alley complete with pedestrians who politely, if casually, scattered for us to pass, and suddenly, there was our hotel, and a garage door marked 'Parking for Mercure Hotel'.

Whoopeee! Ted pushed the button on the wall next to the garage door and begged entry. The door opened and we entered a sloping driveway less than a foot wider than the car on each side and at the bottom was a sign that said "Large cars left, small cars right". Being big stupid Americans, we considered our little VW rental to be a small car, considering that our two suitcases and three people filled it trunk to steering wheel, and went right.

Wrong.

We were a large car.

After some jockeying around in seriously tight, enclosed concrete spaces, we had arrived!

This is the view from the Cathedral looking back at our hotel room window. We are the second window up, just left of the pink part of the Mercure sign. Perfecto!

We set off walking to find the spot where the end had come for poor voices-in-her-head Joan of Arc. The area where she was staked and burned is nicely preserved and very low key. Even with the new buildings around it's easy to imagine a crowd of people gathered to watch her burn in that charming way the French (and most everyone else in history) had of using executions as entertainment.

That day, we were the only people whose business was this site. All the other people around us were local, and busy doing other things- no one spared a glance for us or the historical site until we took our camera out.

We couldn't guess whether the looks we got then were understanding ones or grimaces. It was a strange moment in time.

Anyhoo, as we wandered in our usual half brained way just looking and absorbing we stumbled across this place.

Did you really look at the picture? Because we were standing in front of the building trying to decipher the sign on the right side for quite a while before Ted finally said, quietly,

"Those are bullet and mortar holes."

Take a closer look...

Isn't that amazing?

We still haven't got a satisfactory translation of the sign, but the gist is that for four years during WWII the French resistance put up a fight here and were eventually imprisoned or executed for their trouble. The building was preserved in its besieged state - something Cooper sincerely appreciated, as you can imagine.

Here's the sign, in case you want to take a crack at translation yourself. We can't find any resource to translate the word 'bagnes'. Good luck. :-)

Finally we had to head back toward Paris to catch our plane home. As we approached the west side of the city, we decided to give Versailles a look, even knowing that every tourist and school group on the continent would be doing the same thing.

The place is such a monument to excess you can't even get a picture of the whole thing without a panoramic camera, which we didn't have, so you'll have to settle for this shot at an angle (including some scaffolding for work they are doing for the soon-to-arrive summer crowds).

Then if you turn slightly to your left you see this...

I'm telling you this place makes Hearst Castle in San Simeon look like a hillbilly house. William Randolph Hearst had nothing on Louis and Marie. They rent golf carts to the tourists just to get around the grounds.

We are all willing to bet folding money that the royal couple never even saw all the rooms in their palace, let alone all of their yard. Let them eat cake, indeed.

To the right of the palace is one of several ornamental gardens...

Goodness.

We were overwhelmed pretty fast and hot footed it to the exit, thinking fondly of our empty Chateau Chambord and our enigmatic rocks in Carnac- much more our speed. ;-)

To get up to the palace, we had walked a section of the grounds that was graded into the hillside and popped out near the fountain in the picture of the 'front yard'. When we left, we took the stairs next to the ornamental garden.

Actually, Ted ran down them first in order to look back and snap a picture of Coop and me at the top. You can barely see us, but I'm in white, waving goodbye!

Au revoir ya'll!

France, or "Bonjour Ya'll!", Part Deux

2007-04-11T09:50:00.000Z

Bright and early the next morning, we picked up our rental car and headed for the Loire Valley.

That's the succinct, grown-up version of events.

In reality, we stuffed our little Europcar rental with our suitcases and paraphernalia, opened our two ton spiral bound Michelin map book (3 miles = one inch and 400+ pages), and promptly drove the wrong direction through the rental car area ending up in a dead end facing a forty foot concrete wall as a helpful Frenchman motioned us to do a 180 in order to exit the lot.

Not our best start, and unfortunately prophetic.

French highways all have a number and letter. A4, D286, N42, etc. When you are looking at a map made by French people, you can find these numbers next to the line that represents the road.

Sometimes.

If the area is busy, with lots of intersecting roads, they just leave the route numbers off.

No problem, you think, we'll just follow the road signs.

Problem.

France considers road signs "frills". Not that there aren't beaucoup signs on all the roads, giving all kinds of information, but none of the information is uniform (e.g. D982 will list Lillebonne and St. Arnoult, then at the next exit/roundabout D982 will list two completely different cities. Further on, the route number will be gone and the cities will have become some combination of the original four- but rarely the one you are headed for).

There is not a single sign in France that says "A4 East" or "D186 North". Geographical direction is a useless concept to French drivers, apparently. So if you are on one freeway and want to switch to another, you must know your French geography very very well because you will be given a choice between "A4 Rouen" and "A4 Lille" and you'd darn well better know which city is where because if you don't your navigator will be frantically thumbing through the city index desperately trying to find the cities in question and determine which one is, indeed, East- the direction in which we would like to go.

Add to this our complete lack of French language skills and it's a true wonder we aren't sitting in some French incarnation of a Mayberry RFD Pokey trying to explain to the local gendarmarie why we were driving aimlessly in the wrong direction on a well signposted no trespassing property.

So. We left Charles DeGaulle airport on the north east side of Paris and attempted to take the outer belt to the south west side. We managed to exit the city fairly near our target after a confusing and rapid introduction to the aforementioned road maps and signage.

Just as we relaxed a little and started to breathe normally, we passed a large blue road sign that said a lot of stuff we didn't understand, but enough stuff we did understand to let us know that we were headed for a toll booth.

PEAGE. (a conjugated form of "pay up")

Whoops! How much?

Don't know. There are no signs, French or otherwise.

In another burst of panicked activity, we begin emptying pockets and wallets into a central tray on the console hoping to have enough money to proceed. As I'm counting up our Euro coins Ted says,

"Oh. They just want us to take a ticket."

Disaster averted for the time being, but what do we do with all this adrenalin???

Onward to our first chateau in the Loire Valley, a place liberally peppered with chateaux. We had read about Chambord and decided it was the place for us- the largest chateau in the whole valley, built for Francois I (or II, I forget) and used heavily by many aristocrats and a couple more kings since then.

This is the first view you get of it...

Pretty cool, huh? Your admission price gets you access to the chateau and grounds so you can just wander all over, inside and out, until you are Chateau-ed out. And we did.

From the inside, this is one of the views of the grounds...

This is the double spiral staircase inside- one of Leonardo Da Vinci's ideas. People going up one spiral can pass people going down the other spiral.

Really, really cool.

At the top of the spiral staircase, you can look straight down to the people on the ground floor...

That's five people down at the bottom with no premonition of loogey danger.

Silly people.

Lucky for them we are over our need to spit off high things.

When we finished wandering Chambord, we headed out to Amboise to see the last house Da Vinci lived in. He was buddies with the French King and they had a tunnel between Leo's house and the palace so they could visit without mixing with the hoi polloi.

Then for a total change of pace, we headed off to find the Stones of Carnac. The French call them "The Alignments". They are large randomly shaped stones, arranged in fields, and they go on for miles. Like this...

We love this stuff.

No one knows what they are. What they are for. Who used them. Or even who put them there.

But they are way too orderly to be an accident and they have occasional crypts along their edges- the significance of which no one knows either.

We just wandered along wondering and speculating and marveling.

They are older than Stonehenge, yet we had never heard of them before. Just sitting there in Brittany, almost to the coast, all lined up with no one to use them because no one knows what the heck they are for.

You can't make this stuff up.

All this cool sightseeing was broken up by our inept attempts to navigate French highways and backroads, our frantic scrambling for money when toll roads suddenly end without any indication of the cost until the toll booth lady says the numbers in incomprehensibly fast French, and lots of really good food.

On the toll roads, since you naturally have to stay on them until they end, there are occasional rest stops with gas stations and restaurants. These are exactly what you expect them to be- gasoline, toilet, convenience store, diner type restaurant.

We loaded up on the garbage kind of food you get at the On The Move stores in the U.S. - packaged sandwiches, pre-packaged cheese and crackers, little bowls of fruit or pasta or green salad, and cans of Coke.

Except it wasn't garbage. It was delicious. The sandwiches were fresh and full of flavor and special touches, the cheese was to die for, the pasta salad had tons of little fresh shrimps in it, I'm telling you- the French really, really get food.

And as we ate and navigated our way through it all, the French people we dealt with were uniformly kind and patient and cheerful. No one ignored our pathetic attempts to speak French, no one refused to speak English if they were able, we were applauded when we got things right and gently guided when we simply didn't comprehend. It was true in Paris- it was true in Brittany, and later in the week it was true in Normandy.

Maybe all the rude French people are in the south. Or maybe it's a big lie concocted to keep crowds away. But France, as in most everywhere we go, people are friendly and helpful and willing to laugh with us as we bumble around.

We bumbled our way to a place called Mont St. Michel which is a monastery/cum fort/cum prison with the attending medieval village surrounding it.

Voila!

(and by the way, they really do say Voila! all the time- when they finish doing something, or set something in front of you or anytime they want to punctuate an action they yell VOILA!)

The island is in the middle of a tidal flat that has such surging tides the water moves faster than a horse can run when it comes in and goes out. Hence this sign at the entry...

click on the picture to make it bigger and you can read the warning in your language of choice!

...telling you in no less than five languages that if you parked where the Ps are, your car will be swept away on the incoming tide. A helpful board nearby lets you know when that incoming tide will be so you can plan you time accordingly. We had five hours.

Here is the view from the base of the island...

And here is the view looking back the same direction from about 2/3 of the way to the top of the monastery...

It's a wild and crazy place. Narrow walkways, millions of stairs, houses, buildings, stores, cemeteries, gardens. And wind like nobody's business. Cooper was thrilled to face the wind and lean forward about 20 degrees without falling on his face.

Forget the history, forget the architecture, forget the views - you could lean into the wind without falling over. And he'll proudly tell you that was the best part of Mont St. Michel.

After that, we found a place to spend the night and next morning we found a perfect little village called Honfleur.

Honestly- could you resist this? We sat at a Cafe near the green awning on the left side and ate Croque Monsieurs. It rocked.

Then we headed off for the Normandy coast across this bridge...

Next time, more adventures in Normandy!

France, or "Bonjour Ya'll!"

2007-04-09T12:10:00.000Z

Bonjour! We have just returned from a week in France.

I have to say here at the very beginning, that I apologize to the people of France for all the things I thought and believed and said about them before ever even visiting their country.

We never bought into all that stupid garbage about 'Freedom Fries' and boycotting Yoplait, especially considering that we were on record with NIMN as opposed to the war in Iraq even before France objected to it, but we were guilty of a generalized prejudice concerning the French based on other people's assertions and experiences.

Perhaps we are too easily pleased, perhaps we are too childlike in our approach to people, perhaps we are just clueless and don't notice things that other people do, but from the very first guy who flipped through our passports, looked up at Coop, shot him a big grin and said, "Coop-air?" we were treated very kindly and patiently by the French people.

And believe me, we needed a LOT of kindness and patience from just about everybody. We had resisted this vacation for a long time, based in part on our irrational bias, but there were a few things Coop had mentioned that he would like to see in France, and we finally agreed to this trip on the condition that he act as translator for us (with almost two years of Lincoln Community School French under his belt).

Apparently he thought we were kidding.

Ted had beaucoup years of French in high school, complete with a trip to Quebec his senior year, but soon after our arrival it became apparent that he knew about as much as I did- which, in his words, was enough to make any Frenchman's ears bleed.

Swell. Every time we asked Coop how to say something or to translate a one word sign for us, he would get this pained look on his face, roll those teenaged eyes, and with a big impatient sigh say,

"I don't know!"

Our fourteen year old tour guide was a bust.

Our only hope for translation and understanding was a slim phrasebook with pictures. And the French are a proud people- the amount of English they use in their public signs is practically nil. We accept this- it's their country and the lack of language skills entirely our own fault- but it still made things...interesting.

So the first 48 hours were set aside for Paris. We napped off our red-eye lack'o'sleep and then boarded the Metro train for Notre Dame. We got off the train, took the escalator up, and popped out right in front of the Cathedral. Not too shabby.

I know you have seen millions of shots of this cathedral, but never one that I took, so here you go...

and the famous rose window around the right side, facing the river Seine...

I have lots of pictures of details (the saints and gargoyles carved on the facade) that I will spare you, but it is a swell place, loaded up with flying buttresses in back and everything.

After Notre Dame, we got on a boat to cruise the Seine. Even though it was chilly, we sat outside at the front of the boat. Here's my guys enjoying the view...

and here is our first view of the Eiffel Tower (from the boat)...

After the boat ride, which was really informative and gave us a good overview of Paris, we just wandered the streets of Paris until dark, stuffing our faces and exclaiming over how good everything tasted.

Seriously.

The French definitely get food.

The next morning we got back on the train and headed for the Louvre, and its "side door" entry- one we had read about at an online tourist site where people share tips. There was a line about a bazillion miles long into the main entry, and by using the carousel entry way we managed to avoid it completely. Yay us.

Here is the plaza where the line forms at the main entry...

There is no way to see all the Louvre has to offer in less than a week, so we made deliberate choices and set off to see what we could see, concentrating on paintings. We discovered that the way to interest a teenaged boy in Renaissance paintings is to show him evidence that the painters were once teenaged boys themselves.

To wit, this painting...

and the detail from under the first woman rowing...

That image got Cooper to laugh out loud, and caused him to scrutinize a lot more paintings a lot more closely, just in case they too had 'good bits'.

Hey, everyone appreciates art in their own way.

Here's a shot of the courtyard inside, from one of the higher floors- the place is massive...

After a couple of hours, we agreed that we probably needed to try to see the Venus de Milo, if for no other reason than she was there, so we joined the teeming masses and made our way to her.

Ta Da!

After the Greek Antiquities last summer she was less than awe inspiring, but it was nice to get a close look.

Then I was forced by my engineer husband and his progeny (read: man who avoided all Art History and Humanities classes clear through graduate school and his chip off the old block son) to endure the walk of shame to the Mona Lisa.

Let me say right here, for the record... puke.

The Mona Lisa is probably the most overrated painting on the planet- it's nice enough, but hardly Da Vinci's best or most important work. Nice shading, enigmatic subject, blah blah blah.

9/10ths of the people who were there to see it only wanted to see it because it's one of the only paintings they know. I agreed to accompany Ted and Cooper into the crush of people streaming to see the painting, but stayed back at the entry waiting for them to get their close up look in order to keep myself from cold cocking the first moron who was sure to say,

"Gee, I thought it would be bigger."

No pictures here of La Gioconda- you'll have to find them somewhere else.

That was the end of our trip to the Louvre, which we enjoyed (overall) pretty well, but at risk of offending the French people and lovers of the museum itself, I have to say I think the Prado in Madrid has a much better collection, at least of paintings. Just one woman's opinion.

Our next idea was the Musee'd'Orsy (much of Monet's work is there) and the Rodin museum (Cooper is familiar with 'The Thinker', so it seemed like a natural), but when we emerged onto the plaza in front of the Louvre and took a good look at Coop, we just couldn't make him endure any more culture that day.

He was dazed and mute.

Too much art, too much history, too much book learnin'.

He's young, he'll get another crack at artistic enlightenment in Paris someday, I'm sure.

Onward and upward.

We headed down to La Place de Concorde and walked the length of the Champs Elysee to the Arc'd'Triomphe. Lovely views, terrific people watching, and great fun to be in the middle of something that we had seen pictures of all our lives...

I know, yet another one-of-a-kind photo. But we liked it.

From there, we had to complete our collection of less-than-unique vacation photos by going to the Eiffel Tower, so here it is, up close and personal...

And for sticking with me this long, you get the bonus shot straight up from underneath the tower itself...

Pretty cool, eh? Well, we liked it.

As I mentioned, it was chilly, but the day was bright and sunny and we were pretty comfortable most of the time, especially when we spotted the many early blooming flowers all over the city...

Our day in Paris was approaching the twelve hour mark and we were pretty much touristed out, so we headed back to the hotel, stuffing our faces again all along the way.

Next time, France outside Paris, and maybe even some pictures of places you haven't seen a million times before. :-)

Do I Know You?

2007-03-30T10:15:00.000Z

I don't know if Ghanaians just pay better attention to what goes on around them, or if they are possessors of some vital gene I simply don't have, but we are continually amazed and humbled by the memories of the people we meet and deal with here.

We were sitting at an intersection weeks and weeks ago and a motorcycle cop pulled up next to us and chatted with Ted. Last weekend, we were at the same intersection and one of the street beggars came up to us and said,

"Good evening! I hope you were not inconvenienced by the policeman last time I saw you here...".

We both just stared at him waaaaay too long and then agreed that his unique approach and excellent memory was worth a few thousand cedi. ;-)

Then there's the basket lady I like on 5th Circular Road. Her baskets are so nice and have little touches that make them different from others we see. I bought a few small tabletop baskets from her about 5 months ago. Last weekend we went back because I wanted a carry basket. Sure enough she had just what I wanted and when I asked how much she smiled and said,

"¢80,000, but for you- ¢75,000. Just don't wait so long next time to come back."

That's the first time ever a vendor has dropped his or her price for me without cause- and since I consider her prices too reasonable anyway, I gave her the money (about 8 bucks for a carry basket you would pay more than 50 bucks for in the U.S.) and got a hug goodbye for my trouble.

We went to dinner at Chez Afrique (our outdoor, live music, neighborhood restaurant) Friday. We didn't get our usual waiter- but the man who did come to our table said,

"Long time! Do you know me?"

We pled old age and bad memories and he smiled and said,

"You work for WAGP, right? I used to be a janitor in your building in 2005."

We shook his hand and agreed it was, indeed, 'long time', and complimented him on his excellent memory.

When we left the restaurant, being old and having a bad memory, I left my reading glassed on the table in their case. When we returned the next morning to retrieve them, our usual waiter ran up to us as I entered the patio area and told me that our Janitor/waiter had taken them for safekeeping and would bring them to Ted's office on Monday- and asked his friend to watch for us and let us know if we showed up looking for them.

In Ted's words- at, say, Bennigan's, by Monday they would have hit the trash.

I won't bore you with the details of the countless places we walk into around here and hear "long time!" and get big hugs and hand shakes from people who haven't seen us for weeks. People who know what beer we drink, that we have a son who accompanies us rarely (one waiter at Ryan's Irish Pub always stops by our table and asks about his 'small brother'- even though Coop has only been in Ryan's three or four times in two years), that we like RedRed, or extra blue cheese, or lots of wasabi.

I tell you, if this country had to succeed or fail on its people alone, it would have nothing to worry about, ever.

Culture Clash

2007-03-16T16:30:00.000Z

This is a refresher picture for you of Duke's two gorgeous girls, Erica (left) and Christabelle (right).

On Wednesday Duke's wife wanted to get together because we hadn't seen each other for a long time, and I suggested that we go to a new "family fun place" I had noticed, (but not gone into) so the girls would have something to do after lunch.

Whoops.

The place is called ChurChees and it has a nice family restaurant upstairs and a very small play area downstairs with some Chuck E. Cheese type games (four), a small carousel, and an eight foot trampoline.

Lunch was mostly fine because they cater to all tastes, although I ordered Christa a cup of vanilla ice cream to go with her lunch, and when the ice cream came, she had no idea what it was.

Jane spooned some up for her and although she was very surprised at how cold it was, she liked it enough to eat about half of it. Her little sister Erica tried it, but the surprise and annoyance on her face at the coldness of it was all we needed to know she would refuse further offers of devil ice cream.

Duke took off to pick Coop up at school (Wednesdays are half days at Lincoln) and Jane and I went downstairs to the play area.

I paid for twenty "games" and we all trooped into the room. The employees started up the four horse carousel and both girls started crying.

Finally, Jane put Erica on a horse, held her hand, and walked beside her as the carousel went round and round.

While she did that, Christa cowered behind my leg and yelled "I don't like those goats!" Granted the carousel horses were about the size of the goats that roam freely all over Accra and Ghana, and nothing I could say would convince her they were horses and that I wouldn't let them hurt her.

So much for the carousel.

We moved on to the basketball game. When it starts up, ten grapefruit sized basketballs empty into a bin so you can shoot baskets and get points. When the balls were released, Christa jumped a foot in the air with surprise and began crying again. I gave her a ball to hold and her Mom showed her how to throw one at the basket. She watched and refused to try, always keeping an eye on the ball bin in case more demon basketballs came shooting out of the hole.

Next!

A variation on whack-a-mole, where two people whack colored lights and try to make their Frog climb fastest. I did one side, Christa and her Mom did the other side. Christa never took her eyes off the frogs climbing- and when Jane beat me twice in a row, she was...unimpressed.

During all this, Erica is standing, holding on to Jane's leg, comatose, wondering what kind of Twilight Zone hell we have entered.

Next!

We tried a game where you roll balls down a ramp and try to get one ball in each of seven slots. Christa thought this was mildly interesting and played that one three times before asking where Cooper was.

That's what Jane and I wanted to know. We figured once Cooper came, the fun would begin.

Meanwhile, Christa agreed to get on the trampoline with the girl who worked there. The girl bounced, Christa looked at us like we were the strangest people on Earth. All alone, Christa was too light to make the trampoline bounce. And she had no idea why she would want to, anyway.

Enter Cooper.

The girls were glad to see him, but couldn't spare attention for him in case the carousel 'goats' got loose and tried to eat them, so Duke and Jane played the whack a light/Frog race game, shot baskets, and then we used our last token on the ball rolling game for Christa.

On the way home, poor Christa fell asleep on Cooper while Erica watched me warily from beside her Mother wondering what dumb idea I would have next.

Duke said when he got home Christa chattered about her day non-stop - especially the "killer goats".

At least the adults had fun.

Ghana is 50!

2007-03-09T16:16:00.000Z

Hooray Ghana! March 6th was its 50th Anniversary of Independence!

The whole country was so excited and everything shut down for this big deal - we watched it on TV having no interest in sitting in 90+ degree heat for what turned out to be six hours.

The ceremony at the Parade Grounds started at 7AM, by 11AM they hadn't gotten to the speeches yet- eek! The Managing Director of Ted's project was there (in a suit!) and got on TV, but I doubt it was worth it. ;-)

The school kids did a really neat marching thing with flags that was so much fun to watch.

Everyone has flags on their cars and their house gates (we do!) and all the businesses are dressed up in bunting. The city has been working for MONTHS to get everything spiffy and nice for the celebration. Last Saturday an army of volunteers was whitewashing the curbing on Liberation Rd. - by hand!

We headed out in the afternoon on the 6th to get a feel for the city on this happy day and there were people everywhere- many dressed in "Ghana at 50" tee shirts, Ghana flags wrapped around their heads, small flags painted on their cheeks, and little paper flags in almost everyone's hands.

Ghanaians are a happy people generally speaking, but celebrations like this bring out a joy that is infectious. We were given a paper flag by a man walking by who smiled and yelled "Celebrate Ghana!".

It was a very cool accident that we managed to be here for this milestone- we have told Cooper he will be only 64 when the 100th Anniversary happens, and he can come back and say (to the extreme boredom of his children) "I was there for the 50th!"

The strangest thing by far has been the absence of street vendors. Starting late last week, gangs of police officers would approach intersections in tro-tros and then burst onto the street to nab the vendors and confiscate their goods.

Officially, they are not allowed to sell to people in their cars, but in practice they are terrifically handy to have around when you need a hankie, some apples, a snack or a million other things.

Usually they are left alone with only a token attempt to roust them by police, but apparently for the 50th the government didn't want all our esteemed visitors to think we were backward enough to have people selling plantains off bowls on their heads.

Even though almost all the visiting dignitaries came from countries that do the same thing.

The intersections were sad, boring, lonely places without the vendors.

This picture probably looks normal to you, but to us it looks like a ghost town. It's missing at least twenty people on foot with 15 different items for purchase on their heads.

Anyway, this website will give you an idea of what's up and what's happening during the year long celebration...

Ghana @ 50!

Adventures in Ghana, Part IV

2007-03-05T12:52:00.001Z

Now for all the odds and ends from our trip that had nothing to do with our destinations, but caught our interest anyway.

In Kumasi, when we came up the hill all sweaty and vibrating from the market, I snapped this sign (hence the terrifically bad framing, etc.).

Signs like this for Doctors and clinics are pretty common, always listing the ailments the Dr. is able and willing to treat. Someday I'm gonna get a picture of the clinic by our house that has a sign listing many conditions, including "white problems". We want to know exactly what that encompasses. :-)

This sign just made me smile. There are plenty of AIDS billboards, some sponsored, some just put up by the NGOs, but I appreciated the sentiment behind this one. (and apparently you should be happy, careful and TRAVEL!)

These funeral signs more common in the rural areas. In Accra funeral notices and tributes are on large sheets of paper containing pictures, really thorough obituaries, and posted like missing persons signs, but the care (and expense!) behind these lovely signs is pretty special.

Once we hit the coast road, about 2 hours from home, we stopped at the Biriwa Hotel for lunch. We sat high on a bluff overlooking the ocean, outdoors, with just enough breeze to cool us and ordered fresh prawns and cabbage salads and looked out over this:

Perfection.

Okay, this next part is a little gross, but it's very much a part of life in Ghana and it took me until this trip to haul my butt out of the car and sweet talk these guys into letting me take their pictures.

There is a small mammal in Ghana called a Grasscutter. It's also known as a Cane Rat, but it isn't a rat- and they are enough of a staple here to be the object of a small Grasscutter Farming industry. But most of them are in the wild and when Ghanaians catch them, they sell them on the side of the road, all over the country (including the edges of Accra). They are eaten in a variety of ways, including grasscutter soup.

Here is a late, 3-D Grasscutter.

Why mention that it's 3-D? Because just as often the roadside Grasscutters are flat. As in pressed duck. And then they look like this:

Please note the look on my Grasscutter Salesman's face.

He is pitying me because I have just explained that

a.) I do not want to buy his Grasscutter for my dinner and

b.) we do not have Grasscutters where I come from.

What's the point of a country with no Grasscutters? He can only imagine what we eat- and it isn't good. ;-)

And finally, my new obsession- palmnuts. The really pretty, low palms with the long fronds that grow in the tropics produce palmnuts. The nuts are used to make palm nut soup, palm butter, palm oil, and palm soap. When they come off the tree they look like this:

I bought the one at bottom right on the side of the road from the woman whose foot just barely shows and her very puzzled daughter whose bare feet are at the top of the picture. I was excited to have seen the palmnuts in time to get Duke to stop and was quite a spectacle for her, I'm sure. Cost me a buck.

When we got home, I plucked the palmnuts out of what I call the Palm Nut Cone, which was actually fun since I don't have to do it more than once, and this is what it looks like empty (mostly) of nuts.

I liked the look of it, so I set it on the patio table as decoration.

Mark came to me the next day and asked if I really meant to save it. When I said yes, he gave me his usual bemused smile that conveys so much of his wonderment at what his crazy obronis will do next. (Imagine your West African employer eating a bunch of grapes and saving the empty branchy cluster thingy the grapes were stuck to for display on his coffee table because he liked the look of it).

Now I have a wire basket full of the most beautiful palm nuts! I have no intention of making practical use of them. Aside from the fact that I lack the skills, this is yet another West African activity that involves pounding and peeling and stuff. Not my area of patient activity.

So I'm keeping them until they either dry or rot.

Because they are so gorgeous...

Adventures in Ghana, Part III

2007-03-02T10:00:00.000Z

Okay, now that I'm actually writing about Lake Bosumtwi, I can't find some of the stuff I was reading about before we left. I swear I read that it was one of only five meteor crater lakes on the planet, but now I can't back it up.

In my defense, if you disagree, please note that many people (and websites) refer to volcanic craters and their lakes incorrectly- they are calderas and not the same thing.

So there.

And whether it's one of five or five hundred, it's a very cool thing to see. And humid like nobody's business. A huge bowl of water, sunk in a crater hole, in a humid equatorial climate, evaporating all around you. Seriously- the worst humidity ever.

The lake itself is huge- more than 10 kilometers from rim to rim and very hard to take a picture of without an airplane (or a public domain satellite pic!) but hopefully you will get an idea of it from the pictures I do have.

Scientists have matched tectites from the meteor all the way to the Ivory Coast- the next country over. That was one big noisy impact, and certainly got the attention of whoever was hanging out here a million years ago.

We stayed at the lake's edge in a hotel next to the village at Abono. This is the view from our room...

In our usual fashion, we got a little bit lost on our way to the hotel, and ended up in Abono at the water's edge, and Duke asked directions from a guy in the village. We weren't too far off and after a short back track up the hill, found the hotel easily. As we got out of the car in the parking lot, the guy who had given us directions popped up, having simply walked from the village to the hotel (about 100 yards...)

His name was Paul and he wanted us to know he 'had a boat' and would gladly give us a verbal and waterborne tour of the lake at our convenience. I told him we needed to check in, get some lunch, and re-group before we worried about boat rides, but thanks. He smiled and headed back for the lakefront.

When we went to the shoreline terrace for an al fresco lunch, SUPRISE!- Paul was sitting in the shade nearby, waiting for us.

While we waited for lunch, I lobbied my guys for Paul and his boat tour.

But I was dealing with:

1. Duke, who has a pathological fear of water

2. Cooper, who is a teenager and is thus contractually obligated to view any parentally sanctioned activity as 'boring' and/or 'stupid' and

3. Ted, who was hot, weary, and pretty much not interested in what he correctly assumed would be an incredibly rustic cruise of questionable reliability.

Duke was easy enough- I appealed to his sense of guardianship over us and said we couldn't go out there without our African back up.

Cooper was easy too- I just pulled rank and told him he was coming, thus enabling him to make a face at me and try to spend the rest of lunch not smiling or talking in order to show his displeasure. (He didn't manage it, but at least he tries! Please don't report him to the brethren of the United Sullen Teens Union.)

Ted was a harder sell. I couldn't counter the hot and weary- I felt it too. I couldn't refute his theory that we would be setting sail on something straight out of Gilligan's Island, but I really wanted to see the shoreline from the water and support the local tourist industry, such as it was...

His first refusal involved me going without him, but I turned my big brown cow eyes on him and won that round.

Then he wanted some facts and dollar amounts from Paul, which was just silly because as soon as we showed any interest at all, Paul considered us sold. $10.50 for all four of us.

So after lunch, we all trooped across this bridge...

past these fishing nets... (and Duke with his cat tail 'sausage')

and literally walked the plank to get into a boat of questionable seaworthiness. (Note to Steve and Judy: the boat was about 50% bigger than the LoneStar with a 25 horse motor slapped on. Putt putt doesn't begin to describe it...)

We four were joined by Paul, our Captain, his first mate, and an unnamed dreadlocked painter/ entrepreneur.

Duke was scared spitless, Coop was bored and annoyed, Ted was resigned to his fate, and I was re-thinking my need to see the shore from the water while checking to see if there were oars or paddles with which the Cap'n could get us back to shore when we broke down miles from the village...

Our Captain is in the blue shirt, his first mate is riding shotgun, and that little Suzuki was about half the bare minimum required for the size of the boat, let alone the load (Rasta Salesman included!). During the ride, the engine sped up and slowed down on its own, but to their credit, it did the job.

Please note the look of joy and rapture on Ted's face. He must really love me.

Here is the money shot of the shore (and hotel) from the lake.

and a closer shot of a super major tree stump I couldn't have gotten from shore.

Hey. For $10.50 I was ultimately pretty happy.

And just as important, Duke liked it. He even managed to trail his hand in the water a little right at the end. He was proud of himself for doing it, and thrilled to have been so far from land for the first time in his life.

The lake itself is considered sacred to the Ashanti who live in villages all around it. They do not use modern boats or even traditional canoes on the lake, but fish from what are basically big fat planks that they kneel on and paddle with their hands. They put large baskets on the fronts of their planks and collect fish from the hundreds of traps set up all over the lake.

This is the boat parking lot for the village at Abono...

I watched a guy emptying his traps early the next morning, but before I thought to get my camera he was out of range. Sorry.

Why was I up early enough to see fishermen?

Oh... well... we started with three rooms. But the air conditioner in our room wasn't working (after 4 hours running full tilt, our room temp was 32C, over 90F) and they had no other rooms to give us. Since this was easily the most humid place we had ever been on the planet (and that includes Houston, Hong Kong, and Accra!), we were desperate for AC simply in order to sleep.

Our first thought was to trade with Duke who is always freezing around us. Ted went to his room to check on that, but then told him we just wanted to make sure he was comfortable after noting that Duke had his own AC turned down to what Ted called "ice cream temperature", and probably didn't want to trade with us.

Apparently we have given Duke an appreciation for artificially cooled and dried air. Whoops!

That left Cooper's room. We gave him a choice. Take our room and sleep hot, or share with us.

Imagine his joy.

So I was up earlier than I might have been otherwise, and got to see the fisherman. But too early to function logically and remember my camera.

Next post: odds and ends of the trip from along the road. :-)

Adventures in Ghana, Part II

2007-02-28T10:30:00.000Z

Hello again! Here we go on our second leg of the New Adventures in Ghana Trip...

From Kumasi we headed for the Fiema Monkey Sanctuary at Boabeng. The drive was an interesting mix of nice smooth wide pavement and rough dirt, until the turnoff to the forest and village where it became just dirt, but pretty nice...

When we entered the sanctuary, a sign directed us to check in at the information center which didn't really exist, but a lady walking by explained that we should drive on into the village and a guide would meet us. Sure enough, a mile or so down the road was the village and when we parked we were joined almost immediately by a uniformed Park Guide- a terrific old guy named Jonas.

There are two kinds of monkeys in the Sanctuary (mona and colobus) and after a night or day of normal monkey-ness in the forest, the mona monkeys come into the village and the village homes and help themselves to whatever they can find. The villagers consider the monkeys sacred and will put food out for them each day in the morning and evening.

The monkeys, of course, being monkeys, help themselves to the offered food and then take whatever they can steal. This is part of the village on the edge of the Sanctuary forest...

When a monkey dies, it is buried in a small box in the monkey cemetery. Dork that I am, as I read the little signs on the graves I said, "Oh, look! They knew that one by name- Mona." Cooper and Duke gently pointed out that it was not the name of the monkey but the type of monkey it had been. Oh. Yeah. I'm sure our guide thought I was brain damaged.

As we walked through the forest with Jonas, he carried a bunch of nuts for the monkeys and made a clicking noise with his tongue that coaxed a few of the mona mothers out to see us and take nuts from us. Their hands are impossibly small and dextrous, and if you hold the nut tightly they will patiently and carefully pry it from your fingers.

Here is Duke feeding one...

what I wish you could hear is him saying

"Take the picture! Take it take it take it!"

because he was unsure he wanted to feed the monkeys at all. ;-)

This, like the Canopy Walk at Kakum National Park was something he was not crazy about when we started but glad he had done when it was over.

There are a million paths through the forest and we wandered for a while, stopping to look at monkeys and occasionally admire the many helpfully labeled trees. With our guide's blessing Cooper and Duke each climbed inside this ficus... (ignore the look of joy and happiness on his face- he was practicing his teenaged ennui, and doing very well I might add).

and Duke sat on the 'giraffe shaped' part of this one...

After quite a while, Jonas found us a pair of colobus monkeys. They are considerably less social and do not go into the village. These two were completely aware of our presence and totally miffed at our gawking - they actually turned away from us as we tried to peer up into their tree which was actually kind of nice to see.

Pooh on us and our free nuts- they are wild monkeys and don't need no stinkin' people. This is the best shot we could get...

That long white tail was very impressive.

Back in the village, we had a very short wait for the monas to start their evening invasion. Coop and Duke sat outside one of the houses and eventually Coop held out his (empty) hand and after the monkey approached and saw that he had nothing batted his hand away in disgust, which of course cracked Cooper up...

The man who lived there very kindly came out and asked if we would like to see the monkeys inside his courtyard.

So this is inside the walls, in his dooryard-

his house surrounds this area on three sides.

Jonas said each troop of monkeys visits a specific house and if one troop invades another's house there is a screeching mess until the interlopers go away.

It was a cool thing, and it's very nice to know that way out there in the center of Ghana is a small village at the edge of a big forest taking special care of two species of wild monkeys.

Next time, we head for one of only five meteor crater lakes on the planet!

Adventures in Ghana, Part I

2007-02-26T12:35:00.001Z

Major road Trip! Cooper had last week off school, so we took the chance to grab Duke and go see more of the country.

Ghana does a pretty good job of building and maintaining roads, but it's a struggle nevertheless with labor being easier to provide than working paving equipment. There are countless major roadworks projects, but they all proceed very slowly and most of them won't be finished during the years we spend here.

The road from Accra to Kumasi is one of them. It's only 130 miles from here to there, but it's at least a four hour drive, and then only if everything goes smoothly. Large sections of the road are unpaved or viciously potholed so progress is sketchy. Sometimes we would be on wide new smooth sections of multi-lane highway and sometimes we would be tilting along a washboard road with axle deep potholes that kept Duke's steering skills finely tuned.

Cannibalized hulks of terrifically bad accidents are a common sight on the sides of Ghanaian roadways, but this picture of a truck on its side was a first for us.

That's a semi-trailer blocking most of the road, and the cab is at right angles to the trailer, pointing at the sky.

Unbelievable.

Cooper snapped this quick shot out the windshield while the rest of us went "WHOOOOOAAAA!".

Anyway, we got to Kumasi in the early afternoon and checked into our hotel- we were hot and dusty and the hotel had a nice pool with a small waterfall, so we went swimming and Duke joined us on the pool deck.

From his lounge chair, Duke reiterated his assertion that the day I gave swimming lessons to our employees he would be calling in sick (snort). He has a major fear of water and does not wish to spend time encased in it. We continue to work on his phobia, though, being firmly convinced that knowing how to swim is a practical skill no one should be without if at all possible, and he just smiles and chuckles.

But I think he's weakening. :-)

The next morning we headed to Kumasi central and the market there. We parked the car at an apartment building near the market and walked down the hill.

This tro-tro parking lot is a perfect slice of African reality- there are just thousands of them in all makes and colors, some of them 40 years old, none of them less than 10 years old. They move hundreds of thousands of people from place to place every single day, just in Ghana and they are found in every African country we have visited so far (six of them!).

Once we got to the market our aim was just to soak up the atmosphere, see the sights, and smell the smells.

It's an endless crush of people and things, just like Accra Central, but instead of alleys off of main streets, it's just a maze of alleys covering more than 10 acres of land. No walkway was wider than six feet, yet at one point we had to squeeze into merchandise to avoid a reversing taxi who had incredibly driven into the market to drop off a customer!

The smells alternated between tantalizing whiffs of grilled veggies and the overpowering odor of decaying fish in a section of the market dedicated to fish- fresh, dried, spoiled, you name it, they have it- and thus incredibly smelly.

This is the place you go to get whatever you need to live day to day- plastic buckets, shoes, cloth, air fresheners, diapers, underwear, batteries, fire extinguishers, whatever. If you think you need it, and they don't have it at the market- you probably don't really need it.

After wandering for an hour or so we were impossibly hot and sweaty and on sensory overload so we burst from the market onto the sidewalk of a city street and hiked back up the hill to the car.

On the way I took this picture of the Kumasi bats hanging from the trees.

Accra has the same bats, in the same stupendous numbers, but our trees have too many leaves to get a shot of them this good. All the things you see that looked like large dried leaves hanging down from the branches are actually bats. They hang there all day and then fill the skies at dusk to eat their fill of flying insects.

It's fascinating, and given the sheer numbers of them in Ghana it's a wonder there are any mosquitoes at all!

After lunch we went to the Palace of the Ashanti King (Kumasi is the "county seat" of the Ashanti Kingdom).

The Palace grounds contain new buildings that are currently being used by the King and the original Palace is a historical museum now. After paying an admission fee to the Palace (which is a two story colonial building built as an apology to the Ashanti King Prempeh for exiling him to the Seychelles) and grounds, you walk down a wide drive with lots of trees and peacocks and are picked up by the man who will be your guide for the duration.

His job is to make sure you are impressed with Ashanti history, that you understand how rich and important the Ashanti King is, and that you do not, under any circumstances, try to take a picture of the Palace.

He is serious about his job and you will just have to use your imagination and my description above to picture the building in question. Our guide was earnest, unintentionally amusing, and completely serious about the history and present of the Ashanti Kingdom- parts of which are impressive for their excess if nothing else (the King always wears the symbols of his wealth for public appearances and these take the form of six inches of gold bracelets on each arm, gold rings that even a Gabor sister would find gaudy, and enough gold chains and medallions to sink Mr. T.), and parts of which are laughably cute (for instance, the "King's Chair" in the official sitting room. A ratty black naugahyde Lazy-Boy just like ones all across America from which men rule their tiny kingdoms in suburbia...including Archie Bunker.)

Our guide was also notable as the first person since we moved here to chastise me for accepting something from him with my left hand. It's customary in most all of Africa to never use your left hand to accept an item or to eat with, however, in my experience it's overlooked almost all the time.

I have tried, while we live here, to be aware of what my left hand is doing, just as I have tried not to show the bottoms of my feet or shoes to people who are facing me (also taboo), but given that I am left-handed body and soul, and am, at best, awkward trying to do anything with my right hand, it's mostly a case of "take me as I am"- and so far everyone has, until that day in Kumasi.

When our guide abruptly told me that in his country it was considered very ill-mannered to accept something with your left hand I briefly considered telling him that in my country it was considered ill-mannered to correct a guest on their behavior. But then I remembered that I was a guest in his country and simply apologized for the lapse in etiquette. Tolerance is too often a one way street.

Inside the Palace the displays include wax figures of former Kings some of which are adorned with Ashanti gold (and protected by cameras and alarms donated by a local bank), and many examples of the former Kings' furniture and ceremonial swords.

The Palace itself made Ted and I both think of our respective Grandma's houses. It's dim and musty and has creaking wooden floors and lots of knick knacks and dark wood.

It was an interesting glimpse into the Ashanti kingdom and history, and once we were through with the tour Duke (who is of the Ashanti and who had been asking questions the whole time) began speaking with the tour guide, asking about the Golden Stool- the investiture seat for Ashanti Kings (the British had tried to confiscate it almost a hundred years ago and as a result the Ashanti have hidden it) and was told that its location was never disclosed to anyone.

Duke also queried our guide about taking pictures, and since he was Ashanti and evidently showed this man the respect he thought he was due, got permission for us to photograph the peacocks on the grounds and a large tree that the guide thought would impress us.

(that's Duke with a couple of the Palace peacocks...)

By this time we were overdosed on the traffic and crowds and hustle of Kumasi (please note that the driving habits of Kumasi-ans makes the drivers of Accra seem timid and polite, so if you have been following our driving adventures in Accra you will need some powerful imagination to envision just how nightmarish driving and traffic is in Kumasi...) and made plans to leave early in the morning for more rural parts of Ghana to the north.

Stay tuned!

Daddy's Home!

2007-02-13T17:29:00.000Z

This is for the folks at home. A snapshot of life Chez Us.

Ted was in Nigeria last week for a couple of days. He has to go occasionally for work, and when he does I get up and take him to the airport at 6AM. Duke would happily take him, but Duke wouldn't happily kiss him goodbye and whisper sweet nothings to him, so I go instead. No sense both of us getting up at the crack o' dawn if only one of us is gonna kiss Ted goodbye. ;-)

Anyway, when Ted comes home, the timing of the flights is either just as Coop gets out of school or after 6pm. Duke would probably argue with us, but his first priority is picking Cooper up at school. We appreciate knowing that no matter what else is going on, Coop is taken care of and in Duke's safe hands. And we send Duke home to his family well before 6pm unless something very very extraordinary is going on, even though (no surprise here!) he tells us it is his job to be here whenever we need him.

But since I can easily do it, and Duke has obligations elsewhere, I am the one who picks Ted up when he returns from trips.

And here is where I demonstrate the advantages of living directly on the flight path, half a mile from the end of the runway.

About 15 minutes before his plane is due, I go sit on the porch. When a jet comes over I go out in the driveway and check to see if it's Virgin Nigeria- their planes have dark green cowlings on the wing-mounted engines (remember, the planes that go over our house are low and directly overhead- we can't see tails or fuselage paint- we have learned to identify every airline by its belly colors and/or markings).

If the plane is indeed VN, I go inside, put on my shoes, grab the keys and head out to the airport. While I am driving, (we are half a mile from the runway as the jet flies, but more like 6 miles from the terminal as the people drive...) Ted is going through immigration.

Depending on the lines, and Ted's ability to speedwalk ahead of the crowd to immigration control, there is sometimes a short wait for me. To avoid the nightmare that is parking at Kotoka International Airport I wait on this little dirt patch off the back entrance to the airport property.

When Ted clears immigration, he gives me a call on his cell and I head up the hill to the terminal. We meet up at a bus stop right outside and I whisk him away, no muss no fuss.

I never have to call the airline to see if his flight is ontime - I always know exactly when Ted's plane arrives.

If you come visit, we will know just when your plane arrives too.

Ga Mantse Goes Home

2007-01-29T09:00:00.000Z

Saturday was the funeral for the late Ga tribal chief- Ga Mantse, Nii Amugi II, for this region of Ghana (which includes Accra).

Tribal Chiefs in Ghana are still very much a part of everything important that goes on in the country- it would take the rest of my life to start understanding much of what they do and represent for the people of Ghana, but I do know they are hugely misunderstood by governments outside Africa.

They are not allowed to be 'political', meaning they do not participate in the elected Government of Ghana, but they are very important in their localities, given much respect, and are the arbiters of local issues and disputes in the ten regions of Ghana.

If you are lucky enough to meet a Chief, you must be introduced and then basically do whatever you are asked to do which may include shots of an unbelievably potent liquor and participation in a tribal ritual. It's steeped in cultural tradition and easy for an outsider to screw up, but Ghanaians are forgiving. Especially if you are visibly snockered on 150 proof Palm wine.

Anyway, Ga Mantse died almost two years ago, but tribal chiefs are not buried until their succession is settled. This is a phenomenon we have encountered quite a few times since we moved here. Delayed funerals are not uncommon. We have no idea where the deceased hangs out while he waits and there is no polite way to ask.

When Ghanaians die, they 'go home', which reminds us of Mississippi funerals (and is surely a historical connection between blacks here and in the U.S.) where the family celebrates a 'homegoing' for their loved one.

So Ga Mantse finally got to go home, and the region literally shut down.

Remember, we live in the capital city, and it was still shut tight. The big Lebanese-owned groceries all the way down to the humblest plywood box thread seller were all closed and shuttered. There was almost no traffic on the streets and all funerals except this one were forbidden- even the hospital mortuaries were instructed to retain their bodies until after the funeral.

We didn't want to be disrespectful, but the prospect of an empty Accra was too tempting, so we went out exploring and found a ghost town. The main cemetery outside the Parliament grounds is usually bustling on a Saturday but there wasn't a single living soul in sight. Markets and traffic circles that are usually choked with people were simply empty. No taxis, no tro-tros, no people, no one trying to sell plantain chips and water to us at stop lights. Just a few cars (thankfully some of them containing Africans and not just rude Obronis), and an eerie quiet.

The funeral itself was in Teshie which is on the beach just the other side of La, and we stayed a respectful distance from that area to make sure we didn't commit any gross errors of cultural protocol.

This was one instance of local tradition that, while interesting, is too deeply ingrained in Ghanaian life for us to participate in. We could only wait and wonder and try not to be in the way.

Smokey the Bear Doesn't Live in Ghana

2007-01-22T14:48:00.000Z

Burning brush (and trash and stumps and everything else that burns...) in Ghana is an unfortunate fact of life. The sky, at any given time is dotted with plumes of smoke, grey, white and black from open fires started for any number of reasons.

It's not like there is a lot of choice. We can afford to pay to have someone pick up our garbage- private garbage service costs us $9 a month, which to you guys is cheap, but which to a Ghanaian is a ridiculous amount of money to spend when a box of matches is so much cheaper.

So. What's my point?

Well...we have no actual homes adjoining our property- just empty lots.

The north side is a long skinny lot with a house that is 25% finished and has been that way since before we moved in. Here's the satellite photo of our house and the lot next door (the lot in question is the top half of the picture- you can see the house doesn't even have a roof- just a foundation and some walls).

The whole place just sat there, ignored, until last week.

Then someone showed up to burn the brush. When they lit it, it went up like a tinder box and we heard the crackling flames even from inside the house with the A/C on.

By the time we twigged to the fact that our neighbors' yard was on fire, Stephen had already climbed our dry fountain to yell at them over the wall. We don't know what he yelled, but he had the language and cultural edge, so we left him to it with thanks.

All was quiet for a few days, and I was outside reading when I heard the familiar dry crackle of a new fire starting- unfortunately from next door again.

As I started toward that side of the yard, I saw flames popping up over the eight foot wall and watched in dismay as huge burning sheets of black ash came over the wall and started landing everywhere including in the pool and on my roof...

I climbed the dry fountain and started looking for someone to yell at and there was no one around.

Big surprise- throw a match and run before Stephen kicks your ass.

As I climbed down, I saw with horror that one of our beach towels was on fire. I grabbed it and threw it in the pool, then turned around and saw that one of the rattan lounges was smoking. I quickly found out it was smoking because the lounge cushion we had bought for it was also on fire.

I believe, as I grabbed pool water to pour on the chair and cushion I may have uttered some bad words, real loud, in the general direction of our "neighbors" to the north.

Meanwhile, in response to my yells, Ted has gotten the hose hooked up and dragged around the house (the hose hookup is on the south side of the house) and gone back to turn on the water.

I am standing at the north wall holding the hose, ready to go, when he wanders back, shrugs his shoulders and says... "No water."

Oh.

See, we have a water pump to provide water to the house, but we can't use the tank to pump water outside the house, so if we have no city water, there is no water to the hose.

At this point we are very very glad we live in a stone house with adobe tile roof and very little wood anywhere- Accra has one fire truck and it would take it about 25 minutes to get here if there was NO traffic and you all know what the possibilities of that are...

Plan B (we have developed, in the last 18 months, a truckload of Plans B, C, and D). Ted gets a wash basin and while he stands on the dry fountain, I pass up basins full of pool water which he then dumps on the burning yard next door.

Take that evil neighbors.

Try burning soaking wet ground.

Since it was Sunday, Mark had finally, deservedly, taken some time off. Imagine his horror when he came home and found ash everywhere, holey towels on the line, and big burned gashes in the lounge cushion.

He was LIVID! It was pretty funny actually- certainly the most words he has said to us all at once the whole time we have known him. He went and found someone to yell at and gave them heck. He was so pissed off.

He said it's illegal to burn like that and they should take it out with machetes like he would have, and that the people who belong there swear it wasn't them. Mark's personal theory is they were smoking weed and....POOF!

Mark and Stephen have declared war on the firebugs next door.

Suffice it to say, if they ever finish that house and move into it, I will not be taking over cookies and my phone number.

Harmattan Blues

2007-01-15T08:20:00.000Z

While we were galavanting on the opposite coast of Africa, the Harmattan descended with a vengeance.

It had started, mildly, before Christmas, but it gently ebbed and flowed and we didn't think much about it.

But around New Year's Eve (a kind of "Welcome Home" gag gift from nature) there was no doubt that we were well and truly deep into the 2007 Harmattan.

It usually shows up in December and blows itself out by March. Last year's was a non-event and don't think we weren't grateful, but apparently we weren't grateful enough, because this year we're gettin' nailed.

Plenty of people will be glad to tell you (and me) that it gets a lot worse (and actually, it does), but it quickly turns into the sort of conversation you can have with anyone from the upper Midwest about the "Blizzard of 19__". You know, when you walked to school barefoot. Uphill both ways.

So let me just say that the Harmattan, any Harmattan, is messy.

This is a picture of a ten o'clock sun out my bedroom window...

By mid afternoon, once the wind had kicked up a little, this was what it looked like...

That's a straight on picture of the SUN, no filter, no nothin'- just the air and sky and what feels like half the Sahara desert.

Aviation all over this chunk of Africa is disrupted because the visibility is so bad. Nigeria has suspended VFR flights into Lagos to avoid the inevitable crashes of the past, and two of the major airlines have had to cancel flights or return to the airport here because the blowing sand was just too dangerous.

The air is so dry it's hard to even describe it, and I spent ten years shriveling up in the Mojave desert. Trust me- that's damp by comparison.

Our back door won't stay closed because the wood has shrunk enough to misalign the latches. We have to use the sliding dead bolt to close it.

We are getting static shocks off metal for the first time EVER in Africa.

The dog's butt hair looks like he was electrocuted.

My skin is in dry flaky overdrive, always a good look for an older woman.

The cars are covered, inside and out, with a fine grit.

My bare tile floors are dusted with a layer of North African sand.

The pool is turning a lurid mossy green from the amount of particulate matter it's collecting with which the filter is unable to cope.

And until we returned to Accra to find it in the throes of a full blown Harmattan, we hadn't realized how much of our time here is spent outdoors.

So next time someone tracks snow into your dry, static ridden house...remember- it could be worse!

It could be the Harmattan!

Mauritius, the Dodos, and Us.

2007-01-08T08:00:00.000Z

Happy New Year!

The island nation of Mauritius lies east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean off Africa's east coast. If you haven't heard of it before, you are in good company- not many people have, but it's remarkable as the only place that ever harbored the extinct Dodo bird. The wooden carving above was one of my holiday purchases on the island.

If you have seen the movie Ice Age, you might remember the part with the Dodo birds fighting the heroes for watermelons. "There goes our last female!" was yelled by someone in our family every time we saw a new Dodo likeness, which was pretty often. Tee shirts, statues, key chains, magnets, paintings, you name it- never has an extinct animal enjoyed such adulation.

Anyway- that is where I've been lately. :-)

We planned and executed a hedonist's holiday, spending 11 days relaxing and doing our best not to think or do anything difficult. We succeeded admirably.

We flew from Ghana to Dubai in the U.A.E. (United Arab Emirates) where we switched planes for the last leg. Due to lag in flight scheduling, Emirates Airlines provided us with a hotel room in Dubai for 18 hours (and three meals!) and after a nap we went out to explore a little. This was the first visit any of us has made to an Arabic country.

Cooper has certainly been exposed to a lot of different cultures, even in the U.S., but this raised the bar for him substantially. It was an eye opener for him to see, side by side, women in tube tops and hot pants and women in full burkas. He heard his first muezzin call and watched people respond to it, and he spotted his first arrow (on the ceiling of our hotel room) pointing him toward Mecca. He got to see endless examples of the graceful written Arabic language and see signs for 'exotic' destinations hanging over the highway just like any busy street in America.

We enjoyed our brief stay and wallowed in the modern efficiency of the city- what a change!
(n.b.- Hi Jin! We were practically in your backyard, but so jet lagged, we couldn't think straight.)

Once we arrived in Mauritius (a few days before Christmas), we checked into the hotel and our terrific room beachside.

Our room is straight back if you just stay between the trees, on the ground floor. The picture was taken from the beach. We just walked out our patio door, across the grass and parked ourselves on beach chairs, steps from the Indian Ocean.

This is what you see if you stand in the last picture and turn 180 degrees.

It looks like heaven, and it was.

This was our holiday tree...

...shared with the other guests and photographed through the lobby looking across the pool and out toward the ocean.

We didn't learn a darned thing, didn't see anything historically important, and didn't expand our minds an inch during this vacation, but it still felt pretty good.

We spent three hours touring a wildlife reserve on the south end of the island on Quad bikes (the four wheel off-road ones that are so fun and can be so dangerous). The wildlife was boars and deer, neither of which are in short supply in America so we didn't exactly swoon over them, but this was the scenery we drove our ATVs through...

We also visited a glass blowing factory (all their glass is made from recycled material) where we watched them work for quite a while and then bought way too much stuff, including a small glass Dodo. :-)

The island itself is volcanic, and even though it's been a couple hundred plus years since the last eruption (sometime just after the Dodo went extinct), there is a huge volcanic crater in the center of the island. This is what you see standing at the edge of the crater...

...and when you turn around...

...you get a terrific view of the island from about 1500 feet in elevation.

We snorkeled a lot, watched dolphins play, collected bleached coral from the beach, and ate WAY too much.

When New Year's Eve came, the hotel thoughtfully provided party hats (which Cooper found very much to his liking) and midnight fireworks on the beach.

Here we are amusing ourselves by snapping pictures of ourselves as we wait for the show to begin in the last minutes of 2006...

And here is the world's worst picture ever of fireworks, but we like it anyway.

It was a great evening and a terrific vacation.

Still More Odds and Ends

2006-12-20T08:05:00.000Z

When we are out running errands and things we try to remember to bring the camera so we can capture the fun and/or interesting things we see. Often we forget, often we haven't got time to snap a picture because of traffic or whatever, but here are a few of our recent shots...

I have talked about buying furniture and stuff from the roadside, and although each place is a little different, this place is at least typical...

That's Ted headed over to talk to a guy about some small baskets with lids (which we didn't buy because he wouldn't budge off his original price- and the first price quoted is NEVER the real price, so we must have looked like suckers that day).

Note that you can buy everything from upholstered sofas to wooden baskets here- that's also typical.

Sometimes we are just tickled by businesses- this one is in the Shell station near our house.

While you get a fill up at the pump, you can get a haircut and email your Mom. One stop convenience.

Eddie's just cracks us up. No frills. No fuss. When he's open, the padlocked doors are flung wide and his meager stock of groceries (many past their expiration date) is available for sale.

Finally, our favorite car repair picture ever.

Who has the money for a hydraulic lift, or even a garage with a pit?

Need to work on the undercarriage of a car?

Get five friends and have them help you tip the car over onto four unmounted tires.

Voila! Instant access to the bottom of the car. (Try not to think about what's happening to the fluids in the car while it's being worked on...we can't bear to).

When Cooper saw this picture, his reaction was- "What's the big deal? I see that all the time."

We had to remind him that what seems commonplace to him now certainly didn't when he first came here, and challenged him to remember seeing this method of car repair in the States.

The light slowly dawned.

Also worth noting in this picture is the building being constructed in the background. This is very typical construction- each floor being held up by a forest of bamboo poles, and much to the chagrin of my Civil Engineer husband, no matter how tall the building the support beams and floors are never any larger or given additional reinforcement. Gravity and load are not part of the construction equation here... (we won't even mention OSHA).

That's the latest Odds and Ends roundup- enjoy your holiday season and I'll be back next year! (I have to say that here because I don't have any elementary school friends to say it to anymore). :-)

Ghana, My Way

2006-12-14T14:05:00.000Z

For this one entry, I would like to speak seriously for a moment in an attempt to put this blog, and our experiences here, in perspective.

My purpose in starting this blog was to keep my family and friends up to date with our adventure in Africa, and although I have attracted many new and interesting friends along the way, my point is still mostly to offer some glimpses of our privileged, somewhat sheltered, life in Ghana. I can't change my skin color, I can't (and won't) try to live with less money, and there is no way for me to shed my native culture- one that is so different from that of Ghana.

So my posts tend to focus on the things that catch my interest, things that are very different from what we are used to, things that are new or that make me shake my head in wonder.

I'm not trying to minimize the poverty, or the problems. I'm not an apologist for the damage done to this and other African nations by colonial governments, and I'm not going to waste your time with my take on the political situation here (especially considering the embarrassing and needlessly confrontational government my own country is exporting to the world).

I can't fix Africa's problems. I can't fix Ghana's problems. I can help my little corner of the world and my Ghanaian friends, but that is between them and me.

If you find my descriptions of life here simplistic- so be it. The day to day drudgery is no more interesting to write about than to read. But I have had enough feedback from people who have lived here and loved it as I do, (and who miss it now that they are gone) to know that my perceptions of Ghana are accurate.

We live with appalling shortages of everything from electricity to water to medical care. But they are appalling only to people from a first world country used to an incredible amount of security, civil liberties, solid infrastructure and a strict adherence to rule of law. I do not try to push my American sensibilities onto Ghanaian culture or the Ghanaian people, but I can't help seeing life here from an American perspective- that's who I am.

We are guests in this country, a fact that we try never to forget. The Ghanaian people have been almost universally welcoming, helpful, friendly, open, and kind to us. I hope that anyone who has been with me through all these entries can understand that without my explanation.

Beyond that, this is my experience- it can't be anyone else's and doesn't try to be. It is what it is.

Thanks for reading. :-)

Beads! What Else Happened...

2006-12-01T11:30:00.000Z

The bead factory in the previous post is not too terribly far from our house- just a couple of hours on some fairly good roads.

We took off early Thanksgiving Day- notable mainly because it's the time of year close to Christmas when Ghanaian Police Officers (thankfully just a few of them!) have their hands out, looking for a little Christmas Cheer (read: bribes from Obronis and anyone else they can intimidate).

We were clear of Accra, and moving through a checkpoint when a policeman on the opposite side of the road spotted obronis riding in a new car and made Duke pull over. He told Duke to get out of the car, bring his license, and show his safety equipment.

In Ghana, every car must have two reflective strips on the front and back bumpers, an insurance sticker and registration sticker- both glued to the windshield, a fire extinguisher, a reflective road triangle, and a driver with endless patience.

As opposed to the only other time we have been stopped capriciously by the Ghanaian police, this one was hoping for more than he would get by just asking for "something small for the boys" (that guy, last year, cost us ¢10,000 or about a buck)- so when he got to the safety equipment, knowing it was his last chance to nail us for something, he declared that we were supposed to have TWO triangles.

Liar liar, pants on fire.

Duke expressed surprise and told him we would surely get another one ASAP.

No dice, Duke. This officer was bent on getting some Christmas cash.

After Duke puts away the safety equipment and accompanies the officer to the passenger side of the car, Mr. Policeman looks in the car at the three obronis and asks us how we are.

We tell him just fine, thanks.

He waits.

We don't start crying or handing him money.

He starts jabbering at Duke that he must have two triangles and that his "transport officer" should have known that.

We know enough to let Duke do the talking, and so we sit politely and wait for the next scene in the play.

Cue Mr. Policeman, to Ted: "Do you have something you want to say to me?"

Ted: "Yeah, I guess I do! I hadn't realized that we needed two triangles. Is that a new law? Because my company is very stringent in its safety program and we are usually on top of any new regulations."

Mr. Policeman: "You need two triangles!" then to Duke: "I am taking your license, you can pick it up next week at court."

Duke: "Okay. Please write me a ticket so I can prove that I have a license but that it is with you until next week."

Mr. Policeman: "Okay! I will write you a ticket!" then to Ted: "You wish to speak to me?"

Ted: "Nope- like I said, I'm surprised my company didn't know about the new regulation but I'll be sure to check on it tomorrow!"

Duke: "May I have my ticket please?"

Of course by this time, Mr. Policeman is annoyed and sweating because he hasn't got a leg to stand on. If he writes Duke a ticket he will have to basically sign a paper saying he is lying about two triangles and trying to extort money. And we are apparently too stupid to know that this is the part where we are supposed to hand over piles of cash to avoid court.

Freakin' obronis won't play.

In a fit of pique, Mr. Policeman chucks Duke's license back to him and says, "Get another triangle!" and stalks away.

It took every ounce of restraint in my body to keep from yelling "WAIT! What about our ticket Fatboy????"

... and I was biting my cheeks really hard to keep from speaking because Ted usually kicks me in the ankle when I mouth off to the immigration twerps at the airport and I wasn't sure what he would do in this case...plus Duke knows what to do and it's always best to shut your mouth and let the native speaker do his thing.

Duke gets back in the car, with a big goofy grin on his face and we are off again into unexplored territory where the regular, friendly, hardworking folk live and play.

The rest of the drive to the Bead Factory was uneventful and after our tour we looked for someplace to eat lunch, finally settling on a 'resort' with restaurant situated slap bang on the banks of the Volta River. We ate outdoors at a table just feet from the water's edge. Can you beat this for atmosphere?

(this is Duke enjoying his warm Coke)->

We lolled in the shade, wandered the grounds and ate lunch. Ted wanted to visit the little boys' room before we got back on the road, so he wandered up to the bathrooms. He was back within a minute, asking for the camera. This is why...

Back on the road, we found ourselves following a truck load of people. An open truck FILLED with people, all headed down the road and glad of the lift. When Ted raised the camera to shoot a picture through the windshield they all started laughing and posing.

As they turned right to leave the road we were on, they all waved and shouted goodbye. God, I love these people (Fatboy notwithstanding).

A little further down the road, we were suddenly confronted with a sign that said "Road to Accra CLOSED. Diversion".

We stopped, looked at the sign, looked at the dirt and gravel piles ahead of us and dithered for a minute.

Then Duke spotted a policeman and asked him where the diversion would take us. The policeman said basically it went around by way of Siberia but if we didn't mind a road under construction we could continue if we liked. While Duke was clarifying this statement, a pickup came from the opposite direction and told us the road was easily passable.

Since we LIVE on a dirt road with gravel piles, we were blissfully unafraid, and after thanking the pickup driver and policeman, we headed down the [closed] road to Accra.

When they finish, it's going to be a spectacularly beautiful, wide, road. The scenery is unbeatable, the point where we entered the road is a couple thousand feet up in elevation and it curves gracefully all the way down to sea level and home.

But we were frequently glad to have a 4X4 nonetheless.

Here are a couple of shots I took after telling Duke to stop the car so I could share the experience with you all. He did not understand why I would want these pictures, but he often does not understand us, so he just smiled and did as I asked. I wanted pictures of the really tricky, ditchy parts, but Duke was busy driving us safely home and I couldn't bear to make him stop in mid-ditch so I could snap a few shots. ;-)

We were home well before dark, for the first time in our explorations of Ghana! Whooot!

Beads!

2006-11-27T12:30:00.000Z

Cooper's school decided to give the kids Thanksgiving Day off this year and we seized another opportunity to go see Ghana.

We headed pretty much due north, seeking beads.

Ghanaian beads are so cool. They use old glass to make them, and they come in every color, shape and size you can imagine. There are antique beads that are beyond our budget (and probably beyond Ghana's "Export of Antiquities" laws!), and beads that were made yesterday.

Between Kpong and Semanya is a place called "Cedi's Bead Factory" and they give tours to people who are willing to go out in the boonies and follow a deeply rutted mile long dirt road to their property.

Thankfully the Piece of Crap Company Car was replaced this fall by a new Suzuki with some ground clearance (and double the gas mileage!), so it wasn't the disaster it would have been.

We parked under a tree once we got there and were met by a smiling man who said he would be happy to show us how they made beads and answer all our questions. He took us to a table where the many tools needed to make glass beads were assembled.

The process is beyond me, both intellectually and physically, but the gist of it is that they melt crushed glass in clay molds, or use powdered "white glass" and powdered colors to make beads with patterns on them.

There is also a process of smoothing the beads while still warm and lining the molds with a clay powder to prevent sticking and putting a casava stick in the center of the bead while it melts into shape- all of which were things our guide did effortlessly and which we knew would result in goofy looking beads if we tried any of them.

Then, just in case we weren't feeling humble enough, he made a patterned bead while we watched which involved steady hands, four colors of crushed/powdered glass, the complicated pushing around of the ingredients to make diagonals and curves and other parts of the design. He made it look tremendously easy, much the same as Olympic gymnasts and wood carvers do- but we had the sense to understand we couldn't begin to accomplish what he was doing.

From there we went to the ovens. Little half bee hives of wood fire and heat that are filled with bead molds and fanned to a sizzling temperature for about 45 minutes.

There is no chimney on this thatch roofed building, that's just the thatch smoldering from the intense heat below...

Once the beads are removed from the molds...

...this guy works as a human 'rock tumbler' using the stone and sand to polish the beads and make them smooth and shiny.

From there they go to this lady (she has a small toddler who was happily pottering around her feet the entire time we were there) who patiently strings thousands of beads which are then sold in the shop.

The shop contains two foot looped strands of beads in every size (from grain-of-rice-size to about the size of a ping pong ball) and color- both round and cylindrical, loose beads, bracelets, necklaces, and the larger shaped pieces of glass that are holed and used as pendants (fish, stars, circles).

We just loaded up on our favorite colors and patterns and hopefully made them glad they had given us the lovely free tour. We unstrung them all (don't tell the hardworking bead-stringing lady!) and put them in our handmade wooden bowl... Here is a selection of the beads we got, both patterned and clear, plus the intricately designed large beads...

It is such a neat place to visit- I'm hoping one of my ex-pat friends will want to go see it too, so I have an excuse to go back.

Later this week, I'll give you the skinny on the trip itself- blessedly free from the angst of our previous travels around Ghana!

Fun With Duke and Jane

2006-11-20T11:30:00.000Z

I don't know where to begin describing Accra Central to you.

It's basically 'downtown'.

If you can't find it there, you probably don't need it. European doo dads mingle next to piles of shoes, moth balls sit next to a booth selling buttons or hair barrettes. The sidewalks are clogged with vendors and their tables, the 'stores' are mostly ten by ten concrete boxes subdivided from large multi story buildings and stuffed with clothing, fabric, and luggage.

As you make your way through the area your choices are simple- walk in the street and risk being hit by a vehicle or at least having your toes run over by the traffic anarchy that includes reckless taxis and lime green double decker buses, or stay on the sidewalk and try to watch your footing (to avoid the rubble of old pavement, precipitous drops in the pavement that still exists, open ditches, broken pavers, and various goats and chickens) while keeping an eye out for oncoming pedestrians with large, heavy loads of goods on their heads that are often unfortunately at just the right level to take an eye out or at least give you a whacking good head smack.

Accra Central does not have many obronis- we are surely there, in ones or twos, at any given time, but as a diversion, it's not the sort of place that many foreigners end up. Ted and I like it because it's so alive- it's not something you can duplicate and has to be experienced where it was invented. Tons of people, tons of stuff, rabbit warrens of alleys, endless lines of honking cars, trucks and buses, and equatorial heat just to keep it interesting.

Just getting into the area takes patience since the traffic jam starts well before you get there. Sometimes we park for free at Duke's brother's small electrical shop in an area he shares with about ten other merchants and sometimes we park in the municipal lot, which costs us about 70 cents for as long as we want to leave the car.

Last Monday, Duke, Duke's wife Jane, and I went to Accra Central to get fabric for some clothes that Jane is going make for me. We went in and out of a dozen different fabric shops looking at cloth and trying to decide what would work for trousers (I kept saying 'pants' and getting blank looks from poor Jane), what would work for tops and what would make a nice dress...

It was hot as a blast furnace, and the crush of people and radiating heat from the mass of concrete made it 100 times worse. I could sweat in a snow storm (thanks Dad!) so by the third store or so I looked like a drowned rat/obroni and was wiping sweat out of my eyes and shaking it off my soaked hair and dripping arms. Duke and interested strangers (read: every Ghanaian) always think I'm dying when I get this hot, and it takes all my powers of persuasion to convince them that sweating honestly won't kill me, although it's apparently very painful to watch.

So against their better judgment ("What will I tell Boss when we have to say you melted in Accra Central???) we kept shopping for fabrics.

Duke was sure Jane was bullying me to accept her choices, so when she and I agreed on something he kept asking me if I was sure and not to let Jane make me take things I didn't want. He must think I'm a much nicer person than I really am. ;-)

Duke was carrying Erica (their youngest daughter- the older one, Christabelle, was in school), and Jane was carrying an increasing load of folded fabric. Neither of them would let me carry anything- not that Erica would let me hold her. At 18 months, Cooper is the only obroni she trusts.

Finally, when even Duke and Jane were showing signs of being hot and all three of us were near collapse from dodging and weaving our way through the throngs, we bought the last of the fabric and headed back to the car for the slog home.

I got two pieces of kente cloth (the fabric made here by the Ashanti from whom the Twi language also comes) one colorful and one black and white. If she had her way, Jane would dress me head to toe in kente cloth and I would look like Carmen Miranda most of the time. It's beautiful cloth but very busy, usually containing four or more(!) colors in the pattern.

When I chose the black and white I asked her if it would be wrong to wear the trousers she made from it on a day when I wasn't going to an 'event' (code for funeral, or as Duke calls it "Market Day for Dead People"). She was non-committal, so I may be a walking faux pas when I get my new black and white kente pants and wear them out to dinner. This is the kente cloth:

And this is all the fabric we bought.

Since Jane has a hard time telling me what she thinks her excellent sewing skills are worth, I'm not sure exactly what my final bill will be for the clothing she is making me, but trust me- it will be a fraction of the cost of the same (or inferior) items in the U.S. Two pairs of pants, four or five tops, and a dress for something under $100 (labor and fabric), which I am spending completely without guilt since I haven't been exactly been burning up the malls with my credit cards for the last year and a half. ;-)

Remember Gas Lines?

2006-11-13T16:40:00.000Z

Shades of 1978. This morning the residents of Accra collectively (for a country with substandard communications technology word travels very fast here) became aware of a fuel shortage (don't say 'gas' or even 'gasoline'- you will be met by blank looks and puzzled expressions. You put FUEL in your car- or maybe diesel, but never 'gas'.)

When I logged into IM with Ted this morning he told me about it and in the almost 30 years since the oil embargo I've apparently lost a tremendous number of brain cells and/or suffered a lot of brain atrophy.

My flawed reasoning was... "I have to get groceries later, I'll just go to the Total station next to MaxMart then." Three hours later, I drag my butt out the door and head down the block in my little white Opel, which incidentally is running in the red part of "empty" on my gas gauge...

When I turn onto Jungle Road I'm faced with a scene from the past- a gas station filled with cars and a line that has spilled onto the street. I dutifully pull up behind a silver Honda, about 30 cars back from the single working gas pump. Then I realize that the silver Honda belongs to a friend, so I beep at them and once Dennis (her driver) sees it's me and not some crazy taxi honking for him to get out of the way, Anna runs back to my car to pass the time and reminisce about the embargo.

Then a green SUV pulls in next to us- like somehow the line doesn't matter for him.

And a taxi pulls into line behind the green SUV.

Anna starts yelling 'NO!' at them and demanding that they wait in line like everyone else.

They are amused by her.

Then the taxi driver decides to avoid the crazy Obroni woman by backing out and cutting into line on the other side of me.

By this time, there are two legitimate lines being served on alternate sides by the one remaining fuel pump. And the car behind me is Duke. Ha!

Everyone in town is looking for fuel and word has gotten out that there is still fuel at the Total station in East Legon, and by pure luck our Duke has pulled in behind me to fill up the company car.

Now I'm safely cocooned between Dennis and Duke, slowly making progress toward the pump.

Occasionally Anna pops out of my car to insist that the green SUV never be allowed to cut in front of us (the driver keeps explaining that he needs gas...we honestly can't figure out what his train of thought is regarding the rest of us, but at least Anna's antics are entertaining the locals.) or to tell the taxi driver that he cheated and will be punished for line jumping someday.

After about 50 minutes (as the line behind us gets steadily longer), Duke makes it to the pump on the left side, Dennis on the right. They pull up to their respective sides of the pump where a heated discussion has begun among various Africans and Total employees about whether they should be allowed to fill jerry cans with fuel without waiting in line (some people are sending their drivers with cans just to get their cars running so they can wait in a fuel line...).

When it's my turn to fill up, Duke has already run the big car next door to the MaxMart parking lot and come back to oversee my fueling.

After a few minutes he takes my car keys from me, gives me the company car keys, tells me to go to MaxMart and he will catch me up, but if he doesn't, just take the company car home and he will meet me there.

I give him a blank look (remember I have brain atrophy) and he leans in and says, "I do not want you here. It's getting ugly."

That's my Duke. The combatants are not mad at me, they are mad at each other, and a smiling Obroni woman is rarely in danger in broad daylight in a crowd, but I've learned to trust Duke so I did as he asked and left him to fill my little car with fuel.

A few minutes later he joined me in the grocery store, both cars fueled, with plenty of time left to get to school to pick up Cooper.

Who will undoubtedly, upon hearing that there is a gasoline shortage, volunteer to stay home from school as a conservation measure.

Persistence Pays...

2006-11-08T17:00:00.000Z

It's official! I'm official!

After a year and a half and three renewals of my temporary Ghanaian Driver's License, today they issued my permanent one. Hooray!

And Duke and I only had to sit in the DMV for an hour and a half, watching the little window, waiting for the lady who showed up every 20 minutes or so with a handful of papers to call out my name.

I had figured the delay in getting my permanent license was Obroni-related. That they figured I was just here on vacation or something and didn't want to put themselves out for a casual visitor, but we talked to a Ghanaian man there today who has been waiting more than two years for his, and some others who have waited almost as long as me, and we left before we saw if they got their licenses or just another renewal, so...

Apparently it has more to do with bureaucracy than anything as organized as resident alien redlining. :-)

The bestest part is that Ted applied for his before me- a couple of months before me. And still doesn't have his. I told him next time he goes in (December) to tell them he is with me. Apparently I have pull.

Don't Panic!

2006-10-30T18:00:00.000Z

Okay, so you know from my stories about Stephen and stuff that we have security. The gates to my driveway are always closed and aren't opened without permission. I have razor wire on my 8 foot cement block wall, and spikes set into the tops of the walls.

This is to deter people with sticky fingers. Honestly. We feel safer here than we do most places in the U.S. Violent crime is really not the issue. Considering something that I have left carelessly laying around inside my house to be "up for grabs", is. In a country where a tip can be a nickel or a dime, we are unbelievably wealthy- even though most of what we have was left in storage in the U.S., what we have here is still more than the average African will acquire in a lifetime.

So anyway, because of the possibility of sticky fingers, we have 24 hour security with live people on the premises at all times. Stephen doesn't leave until the night guards show up, they don't leave until he comes back. They all have walkie talkies that link them to the InterCon office, they have a log book that details all the mundane comings and goings around here, and we all have a panic button.

Well, the guards have one, and we have one in the house. So two panic buttons.

If you press and hold it, nothing obvious will happen. A small light will come on and then nothing. But soon, a Rapid Response Team will show up at your house ready to do battle for you.

I have always known this. I have seen other companies' RR Teams zooming around the city since we first got here. They all have snappy names- "React Squad" and stuff like that, and they are very serious and have big muscles and generally look very much scarier than our ordinary guards.

So yesterday I see a couple of Storm Troopers out the front window, wandering my yard. They are easily identified by their starched navy blue uniforms (the regular guards have tan shirts and navy slacks), their riot gear (big round helmets with face plates) and four foot billy clubs.

I figured it was just a spot check- the supervisors show up twice a day to check on the guards and make sure they are on their toes, and occasionally a herd of them show up with Storm Troopers in tow and I ignore them, assuming Stephen will let me know if my input is needed.

Well, Friday, it was.

I answered a knock on the door about ten minutes after seeing them in my driveway. They had secured the outdoor area and were now checking with me because the panic button had been activated. Stephen hadn't pressed it, and he knew I wouldn't just do it without reason, or telling him or SOMETHING, and they had to check with me.

Ummm. Nope. Wasn't me. (meanwhile the dog is row-row-rowfing his head off on the other side of the door, certain it's a trick to get me outside and steal all the rawhide chips).

On the driveway just off the porch there are three Storm Troopers standing with their pants tucked military style into their calf high leather boots, clubs ready.

I fail to resist the urge to say "Cool!" and give them two big thumbs up. Dork.

The Supervisor and Stephen are on the porch with me, as I shout to the dog to shut up, and I assure them I didn't push the button, although I appreciate the response just the same. Stephen and I speculate that the generator guys may have spiked the current enough earlier when they were doing regular maintenance to set off the main box in the Guard house (which is rigged to trigger if it's tampered with).

The Supervisor keeps asking me if everything is all right and I'm reminded of my years at the bank when we were being robbed at gunpoint and I was at my desk pushing THAT panic button for all I was worth and then answering the phone when the police called and having them say, "Your silent alarm was triggered. Are you in trouble?"

Uh, YEAH. That's a good bet. Would you like me to describe them over the phone as much as I can before they SHOOT ME????

Three times in two years I had to say, "Gosh yes! We have LOTS of that. You should come to the branch anytime and we'll get it taken care of. 'Bye now!" while some hopped up junkie waved his gun at the tellers and I tried to slide under my desk...(n.b. hopped up junkies get real nuts if you don't answer a ringing phone, so we always picked up promptly!)

I tell the Supervisor that things are dandy, but seriously, if they weren't, what would I say to him? My son happened to be inside just then and he could have been a good conduct hostage.

Which prompted the Supe to ask again if things were really okay.

Perhaps Stephen and I will have to work out a code. Or at least I will have to make sure he knows that if my lips are saying "Just fine." and my eyes are rolling into the back of my head, there's a problem.

But it is good to know that I have my own squad of serious muscle-y guys ready to pop in any time to crack some heads if I need any heads cracked.

Germany, the Rest of the Week

2006-10-24T21:00:00.000Z

Onward, and literally upward!

We spent Sunday night in a hotel that has been around since 1550 or so (thankfully remodeled since its original owners), and then we headed for the top of the German Alps known as the Zugspitze. It's about 10,000 feet, give or take, on the border of Germany and Austria. (click on the picture to make it big and notice the town waaaaaay down there in tinyville...)

They provide a combination of cog wheel train and cable car (the kind that dangle in the air) to get to it. The train starts in the valley and passes through this pastoral scene...

When the cog part gets really steep the train is inside a looooong tunnel barely big enough for the cars and that gave me a little claustrophobia much to Ted and Cooper's amusement. Once you come out and switch to the cable cars you are almost to the top. Where it's cold and windy and absolutely beautiful.

There is lots of space to wander and look and take pictures and have your picture taken while freezing your fanny off.

There are also signs that give you a chuckle.

The danger wasn't funny. The syntax, however, was.

From there we went to Passau and stayed on the Danube again...(that's morning steam)

...and headed out the next morning into the Bohemian Forest (near the Czech border), across to Nuremberg which we mostly gave a pass to. The site of the war trials is still a Hall of Justice and not someplace equipped for visitors, and we were much more interested in getting to Heidelberg.

Speaking of which, what a place. It's a maze, it's crammed with history, it's cramped and narrow, it's full of people and students and traffic, it's stuck to steep hillsides and built right up to the edge of the Neckar River and we liked it. Alot.

All the pictures you have may seen of it have been taken from the opposite bank at sundown. Our timing was wrong, and traffic was a nightmare, so you get a new view courtesy of our lack of planning. ;-) We are standing on the grounds of the Heidelberg Castle (which is also part of the usual photos you may have seen) looking down on the city. The castle itself is a spectacular thing built into the hillside and occupied for centuries. You can see the work of at least two different centuries in the ruins pictured here...

and get an idea of the precipitous perch it's on in this shot that happens to include both my guys (one of whom is immune to my cries of "Hey! Look at the camera!").

At the bottom of the hill we stopped in the market area, one of many we stopped in during the week. They are all "Something-platz" and they are great fun, full of fresh produce, flowers, handcrafts and people.

This view as you are leaving the market area was Heidelberg for us...

and these flower boxes were the norm, even though it was mid October and chilly- we couldn't believe how many places had bright, lively flower boxes blooming in defiance of the season.

From Heidelberg we went to Trier and made a quick foray into Luxembourg just because it was there. Pooh on the European Union- we drove into it like we were going from Kansas to Colorado and no one wanted to see our passports much less stamp them. But we were there. And I have Coop's picture to prove it...

We wandered around and then ate dinner, getting language whiplash from trying to remember we were no longer in "danke" land and trying to substitue "merci". At dinner we listed our French vocabulary words (Coop, who is taking French at school, declined to play), and mostly came up with a lame list that included Chevrolet, beaucoup, pommes frites, and Oui! So we got in our car and headed back to Deutschland and a language we were still hoping to absorb.

As long as we're talking language, I'll share with you our favorite german word (and those of you who are familiar with our everlasting immaturity will not be surprised)... fahrt. It means 'trip' and is part of a great many phrases, the most ubiquitous of which are 'entrance' and 'exit'. Einfahrt and Ausfahrt. These two words are used approximately seven million times on the Autobahn to mark the appropriate places, and we never failed to snort and chuckle as one of us yelled "Ausfahrt!" at each highway exit we took. In order not to cause accidents, we never managed to get one of the big blue highway signs that pointed down the exit ramps, but here's a train station example for you...

We think the 'h' adds some class to the word. ;-)

Okay, back to being grownups. We left Trier and headed into the Mossel Valley in Rheinland to follow the road up the Mossel river through Reisling wine country. The river valley is bordered on both sides by steep hills that don't stop the wineries from planting grape arbors straight up the sides of them.

As you can see, they put the grapes on any piece of ground they can get the vines to hold. They use what we started calling 'grapecarts' to harvest them...

...the people walk the hillside picking grapes and put their bounty on the rack behind the driver. We saw some grape pickers and couldn't believe how difficult it looked to pick fruit on a steep incline.

In an effort to see the valley from on high, we followed a small narrow road that lacked signposting until we felt we might be either a) trespassing or b) stuck in a spot we would have to back down all the way from. A German couple had arrived at the same place and conclusion sometime before us and the man came to Ted's window to ask him (in German) what he thought. With a combination of smiles, laughs, hand gestures, and raised eyebrows, we all decided that perhaps we should try to extricate ourselves from the narrow hilltop. Our new best friend peeked around an outcrop just ahead of where we had stopped our car and suddenly broke into a wide grin and waved us forward. We drove around the rock and found ourselves in a wide spot big enough for about five cars to park and take advantage of the view. Our German friend followed and we all piled out of our cars to stand on the edge of the precipice and marvel and snap pictures like this...

As we exclaimed to each other in our respective languages, another German couple poked their heads around the outcropping with worried looks on their faces. We all laughed and beckoned them to bring their car down and share our tiny parking lot. After we had our fill of oohing and ahhing, we headed back the way we had come to the accompaniment of enthusiastic waves and laughter from our soon to be erstwhile friends.

The valley is home to countless castles- most in ruins. It was common to look uphill and see this...

...a former feudal castle, fronted by those impossibly steep vineyards, protecting a town of untold age and history.

When we reached the end of the valley road in a town called Cochem, we stopped for brats and schnitzel at a tiny Bierhouse where the owner/waiter spoke no English and practiced our German phrases on him. Mostly he wished we would just shut up and point, but our lunch was delicious and we followed it with a walk through the local Something-platz.

From there we headed to Mainz where our only goal was the Gutenberg Museum. We tried to fire Coop up for the sheer spectacle of seeing the first books printed on a printing press after centuries of handwritten manuscripts and painfully hand printed flyers, and only succeeded marginally. The museum was dedicated to all aspects of books and printing as a result of Gutenberg's invention and he was more interested in the teeny tiny books and the fact that Gutenberg used dog skin for his inkers since it has no pores and wouldn't absorb the ink. But he did look at a huge number of exhibits in the four story museum, so we suppose he got something out of it.

Ted and I sure did.

As you can imagine, the 600 year old Gutenberg Bible (it's three volumes!) and many of the other exhibits were not things you could photograph, in fact the bible was in a vault that was humidified and indirectly lit with 25 watt bulbs, so we felt special just to be able to get a look at it at all. So there are no pictures of this part of our trip. You can Google it if you need visuals. :-) It was very cool, and worth the trip.

Outside the museum was the Something-platz for Mainz so we wandered the booths and stalls collecting cheese and bread and marinated shrimps and cherry tomatoes for lunch and then sat here and ate it all.

It was a serene end to a swell trip. We headed to the Frankfurt airport that night, and came back to warm, sunny Africa in the morning.

Germany, the First 48 Hours

2006-10-23T14:25:00.000Z

Akwaaba (welcome) home to us! We spent the last week in Germany- mostly Bavaria, a little bit in the Rhein Valley.

Our combined knowledge of the German language consists of 'gesundheit' and two friends of Cooper's who live here in Ghana and who occasionally say "mein gott!". So we armed ourselves with two maps, two guidebooks, and one really good phrasebook.

We started in Frankfurt because that's where Lufthansa lands after they leave here. We had been flying all night, and gotten about three hours sleep apiece, but were determined not to waste time, so we picked up our rental car and hit the Autobahn.

Let me say right here, we love the Autobahn. Yes it's clean, clear, safe, and speedy, but mostly it's populated with German drivers who are easily the kindest, most orderly, safest drivers on the planet. Granted there are exceptions, but we marveled at what Cooper called "the zipper effect". Two huge lines of traffic that need to merge, because of roadworks, into one huge line of traffic.

In America and England and Greece, this results in a kind of haphazard blending of both lanes in a catch-as-catch-can sort of way, in Ghana it's a free for all with no rules that routinely brings the whole shootin' match to a dead standstill, but in Germany, every single time, the cars seamlessly meshed in alternating turns into a single lane that never dropped below 50kph.

On one day, we got caught in a massive traffic jam, the cause of which we never discovered, but there were only two highway lanes. The "slow" lane was nose to tail with semi trucks- literally miles and miles of them. We drove past three miles of stopped trucks before our lane of cars was stopped, and not one truck moved into the car lane to attempt to get further along the highway, because they weren't supposed to. In Ghana, not only would all lanes have been filled with every kind of vehicle, but there would have been third and fourth lanes made from the emergency shoulder and grass median. We were awestruck, and bow to the drivers of Germany. It was a unique experience for us and the wonder of the whole thing completely mitigated the half hour delay in traffic.

Anyhoo, we took off for Bavaria and managed to get to Ulm before our jet lag kicked in. We checked into a hotel - the first of a few directly on the Danube!- and took a two hour nap (enough to get us through until our new German bedtime- two hours off Africa).

As we tried to plan our first full day in Germany, we realized that our idea to start at the Austrian border would be scuttled by the fact that Dachau was closed on Mondays. Sigh. So we re-plotted our course for the North side of Munich and headed out the next morning to visit what I hope will be the last Concentration Camp I ever visit.

Not that it was a bad place to go, or that I'm not glad we went- I just don't think I can face another one. Dachau wasn't even a 'death camp' in the sense that people weren't sent there just to be exterminated. But the fact of the camp at all and the number of deaths from mistreatment, medical experiments, and other dubious causes still make it a terrifically horrible place.

The camp was established in 1933 and was the model for all subsequent concentration camps. Of the more than 200,000 people incarcerated there, almost 25% died. The malnutrition and disease in the camp at the time of liberation claimed hundreds more.

This is what you would have seen as you stepped out of your railway box car and walked away from the railroad tracks.

This serene view is what's left of the barracks area- only one of the barracks still stands, but in 1933 each side of this pathway was lined with a couple dozen barracks meant to hold 200 people each. By the end of the war, each one held ten times that many. Needless to say, the trees were NOT part of the original Dachau experience.

Inside the barracks, at the beginning of the camp's life, these were the bunks for prisoners, usually equipped with straw mattresses.

By the end of the war, the neat dividers were gone and each 'bunk' had become a large open plywood box filled with countless prisoners.

The prisoners who didn't survive (often because of 'medical experiments', even more often because of having their arms tied behind their backs and then hung by the wrists and "played with") were cremated here.

The ashes of all those thousands of people were dumped nearby, at a site identified and given a suitable memorial by the Allies after the war.

This picture shows Ted and Cooper at the 'strip of death'. If you were on the grass, you were within range of the guards' rifles and would be shot first, questioned later. What doesn't show up is the razor wire and electric fencing, but trust me, it's there. Sometimes prisoners would 'commit suicide by guard' and intentionally run onto the grass. I might have done that myself in their situation.

Needless to say, it was a somber, emotional day. Cooper learned more in four hours at Dachau than he could have in a week in a classroom. He read about the people of all races and religions who were rounded up as enemies of the Third Reich, saw pictures of real people living a waking nightmare, and put the 'glamorous' images he had of WWII into a sharp and decidedly un-glamorous focus. He was moved by what he learned this time last year about Anne Frank, but actually standing in a concentration camp and seeing the film of the liberation armies has given him a much broader, more factual perspective.

But I don't want to see this kind of proof of how evil men can be again. I certainly believed it happened and had even taught some of the history of Sobibor to my adult literacy students, but to actually stand there and try to absorb it all was painful and draining.

Nuff said. If you can, try to go see one for yourself. Sometimes the hardest things are the things most worth doing- but I won't fault you if you can't do it more than once.

Tomorrow I'll post about more cheery stuff and the whole rest of our week in Germany.