Cape Coast (sick of riding on the bus)

We are in Cape Coast right now. Laura's blog post is much more detailed than mine will be - I'm tired and sick of looking at this slow computer's screen. She wrote hers on a friend's Netbook.

I like it here, but the beaches are covered in poo. People poo, dog poo, pig poo, goat poo, you name it it's there. It's gross. We carefully picked our way over to some rocks this morning and watched the sun come up over the Gulf of Guinea as the fishermen in their long wooden boats (some with sails, most with outboard motors) made their way out to the best spots to cast their small-mesh, gill-nets with random pieces of cork threaded painstakingly onto a thin piece of rope on top and hunks of metal (lead?) strung on a little rope along the bottom of the net. I want to go out on one of those! I'm not sure how to convince the crew to take me out and then bring me back in, but I'm thinking.

One interesting thing about fishing, as well as most Ghanaian activities involving harvesting natural resources, is that they have a traditional method of conservation: taboo. There are certain days of the week for each activity (farming, fishing, hunting, etc.) where it is considered an offense against the gods/ancestors/spirits to go and participate in that activity. For a fisherman, it is fine to sit around mending your net or fixing your boat, but you must not go out and fish on that day, be it Monday or Friday or whatever it happens to be. Apparently the original purpose of these taboos has been lost - allegedly if you ask a Ghanaian why he or she does not fish/hunt/farm/etc. on that particular day, they will say it is because they will anger the spirit of their fishing/hunting/farming spot, or something. It's kind of like their built-in, superstition-based day of rest. Pretty cool.

Cape Coast is more touristy than most of the other places we've been. Everyone is extremely shocked if you speak Twi (especially since they speak Fante here, which is supposedly mutually comprehensible with Twi, but in my case the comprehension is a one-way thing, i.e. I can't understand them but they can understand me). At one of the Bush Kanteens we ate at (basically just a covered area with tables and various food vendors, usually on a college campus, where students go to get their lunches - you can buy fufu, banku, and other Ghanaian staples, as well as beans, rice, plantains, and all sorts of fruits) here I went to buy a papaya (medium-sized, soft not hard) and three bananas, managing the whole transaction in Twi, and as the lady was cutting everything up for me, she asked if I liked pineapple, too, and threw in a whole bunch of pineapple as a "dash" (more of that social capital I was talking about earlier) for free. It was a delicious fruit salad for 70 pesewas (about $0.50 or less). Today for lunch we went to a vegetarian non-profit NGO that had delicious food and smoothies. Megan (New Orleans) would be better at describing the food options, but it was wonderful. I got an orange, ginger, papaya smoothie (so much ginger - yum!) and split a spicy mushroom salad (they were weird mushrooms, and I actually didn't mind eating them with the cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes and onions they came on) and a tofu garlic sandwich (on whole grain bread!! unheard of here in Ghana). It was wonderful.


On our way there, some of the street vendors selling crafts and touristy things started talking to us as we browsed their shops quickly. I responded in Twi and they (again) got really excited. One of them kept exclaiming, "You have done well! Oh you have done very well!" in Twi, and then he declared that he was going to give something to me so I would remember him always and gave me a miniature djembe on a keyring (or "key holdah! You put your house key on it so that you will know it is there when you are opening your door and looking for where you have put your key," as he described it, in typical Ghanenglish). I feel kind of bad because I can't remember his name now, but it was something-boateng (non-linguist pronunciation guide: bwa-tang). Maybe all I'll need to do to get out on a boat is strike up a conversation (although really, what we know is pretty much limited to greetings, introductions, and bargaining, which we are now quite good at).

Linguistic note: Twi doesn't really distinguish between R and L. Most Ghanaians whom I have had the pleasure of meeting don't have much trouble with the two, but our beloved Papa Attah (SIT staffmember - the name Attah means that he has a twin, in his case a sister) has some really fun ways of saying certain things. Our favorites so far are: "Oh, she has been to the doctor. She is not well. She has typhoid and mararia," and "It is not raining very hard. It is just dizzling."


We also went on a canopy walk today and visited a slave castle. Both were interesting. We gave our mini-Independent Study Project presentations the last three days, showing everybody what we learned during our research projects in the villages. The power and water frequently shut off at our hotel, but oh well. It's comfy, otherwise. At first they brought out about half as much food for all of us as we needed for both breakfast and dinner, but they seem to have caught on (thanks to our leaders having a chitchat with the hotel, I think) and are now bringing out enough food to actually feed 15 hungry college students. The lack of food at the beginning sort of scared me a bit, though, and now I think I'm overly concerned about not having enough food while we're in Cape Coast... working on getting over that. Today we had a nice big breakfast with scrambled eggs that had peppers and tomatoes and onions mixed in, bread, hot beverages (Milo, Nescafe, and British-ish tea), and some watermelon/orange/pineapple. Dinner was beans, rice (plain white, of course, meh), plantains (I still can't eat them), and a big cabbage/tomato/pepper/onion salad. I can rest easy, I believe.


Ghanaian idea of a compliment to a woman: "You have become very beautiful! You have put on so much weight in such a short time!" Hahaha. Big women are attractive here, and almost all the men have no body fat and pretty defined muscles. It's funny watching all the African-American music videos they play on all of our many long bus rides (the roads are always wonderfully bumpy - if the road doesn't naturally have huge ruts and potholes, the government kindly adds large rumble strips at the entrance and exit of every village/town along the road, so you get the experience of driving on a more typical road anyway) and seeing how the beauty ideals are so different. I guess in theory muscular men are supposed to be attractive, but all the videos seem to show big guys strutting with ultra-skinny ladies. It's interesting.