Somehow we arrived an hour and a half late to the port this morning, even though last night we got here so early we had to sail in circles before we could enter their waters. Anyway, when we got off the ship, Heather, Rachel, Oscar and I walked to Market Circle. It was about a 30 minute walk in the heat of Ghana. On the way there, Ghanaians were talking to us, trying to sell us bracelets with names on them, or trying to direct us to clubs and beaches. They would ask us our names and how to spell them. Some of the men even claimed to look like certain rappers, like Chingy and Snoop Dog.
When we got to the market, we found it was mostly food. We started walking into it to see if there was more there, but there wasn’t. We ended up walking through tiny alleyways with room for just one person surrounded by people selling vegetables and fish. Oscar says that he saw a fish that was fried in a circle with its tail in its mouth. One lady stopped him and said she never saw earrings like his before – he has small gauges, and she told him to give them to her. We just kept walking. The market smelled horrible. The ground was covered in nasty water. Many of the children there did not have shoes on their feet, or were wearing small sandals.
Something that I have seen throughout my travels so far is that many people carry things on their heads. To get the baskets and bundles to stay up there, they wear a cloth rapped in a flat style on their head. This is how they get it to stay still on their heads. Everyone here does it, no matter how far they have to go.
For lunch we stopped at a place called You 84. I ordered fried rice, chicken, and Fanta. The rice was very spicy to me, but everyone else said the chicken was what was spicy, not the rice. I didn’t think the chicken was spicy at all. The Fanta here was very carbonated, making it even tangier. Glass bottles of Coke were only 50 cents, because the bottles are recycled here.
Later in the evening, the four of us took a taxi to Cape Coast. It was supposed to be an hour long drive, but it was almost two. We saw many areas where people were living in shacks, and other people were living in homes made of cinder blocks. It reminded me very much of Burma or Vietnam, but better. All along the road we had to stop at police stops, for no apparent reason. We were going 130km/h, but because we have not gone that fast in so long, it felt like we were flying. At one point I thought we might take off! We got there around dark, so we didn’t really have time to do anything. It would have been better to just go there in the morning.
We stayed at the VEC Hotel. It was not a nice place at all. It did not have wifi. There was a decaying lizard in our shower. Heather and I slept with bug spray on. Outside our room we could hear everyone talking. Rachel and Oscar’s room did not have air conditioning and their shower looked horrible. We got dinner at a place called Solace Place. I only had french fries, which are called potato chips here. The ketchup that came with it was mixed with ranch. It was very different. Before going to bed, Heather and I watched The Proposal.
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