And now for something completely different

As I said in one of my last entries, I actually had a really terrific weekend. Most of the photos I’ve just uploaded I’m in the process of uploading were from that Saturday (8/11/08). It’s a convoluted tale, but the short(ish) version is that due to a miscommunication, a bus left the school Saturday morning with 51 students on board, headed for a student “Rally” a few hours away… without any teaching staff. Meanwhile, I was on a second bus full of teaching staff, bound for a funeral a few hours away as well. A lot of confusion ensued, but the main idea is that I “heroically” volunteered to chaperone the student trip, and so got off the Funeral Bus in Cape Coast and joined the Rally Bus instead. The students were relieved (their plans weren’t changed!), the faculty were relieved (their plans weren’t changed!), I was relieved (my plans were changed!).

It was awesome.

The “rally” turned out to be a semi-annual (?) conference of the National Union of Presbyterian Students in Ghana (NUPS-G), which was held at a meeting hall somewhere on Sekondi University campus. It was an interesting experience, but a lot of fun too. There was music, dancing, “drama teams”, and preaching (it felt very familiar in a lot of ways!), followed by a 2-hour “prayer/healing” session(less familiar, but still interesting - let’s just say I didn’t have a translator, but neither did anyone else in the room). The campus was gorgeous, and the weather was nice, so I went for a walk towards the end of that final session. My parents have been asking for pictures of me for weeks now, so I took a few shamelessly goofy photos. Blame them, not me!

After the afternoon of “Rally”/church, we had a few hours to kill before the bus returned to take us home. A handful of students passed a hat among themselves, and convinced a security guard at the (walking-distance-away) massively beautiful Sekondi Sports Stadium to give us a private tour. That was also awesome: apparently this is one of the stadiums the Black Stars play at regularly. In any case, it was way nicer than the last stadium I’ve poked around in. On the way back from the tour, we passed a pond that had become the local swimming hole: I’ll warn you that there’s no such thing as “swimming suits” for most kids around here, but I tried to only upload the more “discreet” photos. It’s too bad, because some of the ones that didn’t make the cut are absolutely hilarious. The swimmers were having a great time showing off their diving skills for the group of students and the Obruni with a camera.

We got back to school at 9pm, tired but happy. It was a good day.

The next day I went to the beach for my birthday, but that’s another story.

Mind Dump

Mind dump, because I’m too spastic to type a real entry today.

• The time/season-disorientation I expected has finally hit. It’s almost Halloween, and my mind is still stuck in June. Very strange.
• Met & chatted with a random Obruni in Cape Coast on Saturday; he’s been overlanding all over West Africa since June. Definitely fueled my ever-changing COS-trip dreams.
• I made biscuits and gravy for breakfast today - with no fridge, no milk, no oven. I am awesome.
• On an unrelated note (really! My food is safe, my water yesterday wasn’t), it’s been an “ORS-tastic” day. Fun.
• It’s amazing how such days have become just another part of living in Africa.
• I’m trying to dry limes, and I think it’s working. YAY!
• I’ve felt very MacGuyver this week: added a spring and latch to my screen door, built a drying rack, and made a bunch of new candleholders with nails and tomato paste tins. All materials cannibalised from rubbish heaps on campus. My housemate is in awe of my hammer+leatherman+recycling skills. I’m changing the world one trash pile at a time!
• My cat eats too much sugar. This is bad for her teeth and my sanity. I can has hyperactivity?!
• Every line of poetry, every awestruck utterance, every attempt at descriptive language, that has ever been meant to describe a starry sky: was written with last night’s sky in mind. It was awesome in the best sense of the word.
• Speaking of hyperactive cats: there’s a gecko on my wall right now, and Yosh is trying to attack it.
• I walked out of every class this week either immensely happy with the world, or completely crushed and disappointed. Very Six Flags.
• More on class drama in a future post. I really do have about 3 half-written entries, so I’m not completely full of you-know-what.
• Photos uploading as I type this - busy day at Cape yesterday.
• I. Love. Maps.
• Long hikes. I’ve been obsessing on them for a while. Originally considered either the LT or possibly the AT as viable post-Ghana options. Now I’m thinking a little more exotic. Too early to plan, you say? Never!
• Obviously, I’ve been doing a lot of travel-dreaming this week.

Our house, in the middle of the street

I just uploaded a few photos I took this morning of the area around my house. I thought I should post an entry explaining small-small about what I might variously refer to as “my house,” “our house,” “the house,” “T’s house,” or “Hey, it keeps the rain off.” I lose track of what details I’ve blogged vs. what I’ve emailed, so I thought I’d post a snazzy all-in-one point-of-reference, complete with our highly-detailed, exactly-to-scale, super-technical floorplan, from which to orient yourself.

I say “our” floorplan, because I share “our” half of the building (it’s something like a duplex) with another teacher. For now I’m just going to refer to her as “T”, until she says otherwise. She’s lived here alone for the past four years, so when I moved to school housing, I really moved into a room in her house. This had (has) pros and cons, as you may imagine. Suffice to say… I believe we both are adjusting well. Things are working out, but I reserve the right to vent my one-room-frustrations here in the future.

A few notes: As is common in Ghanaian architecture, the rooms in the house are oriented around an open-sky courtyard. This means that I can lock my room door without restricting any of T’s access to the rest of the house. It also means that we can hang our laundry to dry in the privacy of our courtyard, instead of outside. Also, regarding the toilet and shower room: we don’t have indoor plumbing, but we do have a toilet - to flush, simply pour a bucket of water into the bowl. The shower room is more appropriately called a “bathing room”, and is just a concrete room with floor drain. There are no showers without plumbing; I’m proud of the fact that I can bathe with half a bucket of water.

One more thing; when viewing the floorplan, you might wonder “who’s ‘???’?”. Good question. If you find out, please let me know. (Apparently, the room belongs to another teacher, who uses it a few times a term - another teacher whom I’ve yet to meet. School Powers That Be are said to be moving “???” to another room in another house on campus, in order to give me access to ???’s room in our house, but that other room has yet to be vacated, though the teacher who lived there retired last term. Confusing? I know.).

Photos?!

Final blog update of today; wanted to let you all know that I’m currently uploading a handful of photos to the gallery. Finally, I know! At the rate of the bandwidth at this internet cafe, I should be finished uploading in about 30 minutes.

The permalink to the shiny new Ghana gallery is here:
http://whimsicorical.com/gallery/v/pcghana/. At the moment the images in the gallery’s root are from June and July, when I have more time I’ll fix the (lack of) organization.

Anyhow… enjoy.

Wow

I could try (and fail) to write something profound here; touch on the magic of exploration, our ever-increasing nearness to alien worlds, and my renewed faith in humanity.

But I won’t, ’cause that’d be stupid. So here:

Just… wow.

A new thing

Continuing with the theme of photographic improvement, I’m going to start this new…thing. For the next month or two (possibly all the way until June 7th, probably just until I get tired of it) I’m going to make a point of taking & posting new photos. It’s easy for me to only take pictures at specific events or places, but being deliberate about shooting the “boring” everyday world around me will, I hope, help me improve. Stuff like cute kids and exotic locations shoots itself, so by saying I’ll semi-regularly be posting new stuff here I’m hoping to make myself work harder at this …thing.

Tomorrow is Sizdah bedar, the end of the Persian New Years’ celebration. It’s the 13th day of the year’s largest holiday, an auspicious day, the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. My family is pretty Americanized, but we still go through the motions of Norouz. An important aspect of the holiday is the Haftsin table, symbolically similar to the Christmas Tree. Every Haftsin table has some type of Sabzeh - growing green stuff - and ours is usually a tray of wheat grass. This morning I was watering that bit of grass when I decided to grab my camera & mess with DOF. This was the result.

New Album

Confession: a lot of the motivation behind this post is that I want to knock the last one off the top of the proverbial stack. I want it to be there for good, but I don’t want to see it right now. So… now for something completely different.

Not long after my last entry I started going through old photo albums, digital & otherwise. A day or two after that, I used up a lot of frustration working on the code for the gallery here on Whimsi: fixed the stylesheet, among other things (finally!). Ultimately I combined the two efforts into making a new album: my favorite photos of the last 12 months. (Incidentally, PLUG for Picasa. Made narrowing down the last 12-months’-worth of photos stupid easy).

Making that sort of collection actually turned out to be pretty fun. It’s a nice boost to the ego to see how I’ve improved (in my own opinion, anyway) over the past few years. “Fun” also to look back and remember details of the year I’d forgotten.

So new album here: Favorites 2007-2008. If you have any constructive criticism, I’d really (really) appreciate hearing it. I turned on the Rating System for that album, so you don’t even have to spell words - just click stars. At least let me know what’s better & what’s worse. Help me improve before I go to Ghana and waste all that sweet subject matter. If you’re only comment is “hey, 50% of those are from China! You were only in China 20% of the year!”… then shut up, come visit me, and be more interesting than a Chinese kid.