Festival

During the next week after Wli, I ate at a really good Lebanese restaurant that made me miss the diversity of food in the Bay Area (I've gotten attached to Ghanaian food), and spent a lot of time at the International Students Hostel visiting friends there. Other than that, no real highlights.

The following weekend (last weekend), I ended up in Winneba visiting my friend Senam (remember him?) for the annual festival in town. It is one of the biggest in Ghana and has happened for 300 years (not a long time here, but before the US was the country we know it as today). My camera unfortunately ran out of batteries, but I'll try to get somebody else's pictures to put up later. Because we don't have pictures, I'll try to give you the thousand words. I had a crazy trip there, again traveling by myself to meet some friends who had already gone. I left campus at 5, eventually got to the station and there were 3 buses, none going to Winneba, but one going close by. I joined the mob outside of it and didn't do well trying to push myself in. I eventually was standing on the steps in the bus with a woman named Cecilia who told me to follow her. We walked into the aisle, bought tickets and sat down. Immediately a cop wearing an "Inspector" jersey tapped me and told me the bus was full and I had to leave. Sandwiched between him and Cecilia (who told me not to move), I got a little nervous. I had made friends with a man near the front also and while protests erupted because the bus was over-crowded, and probably a little because I'm white, that man called the Inspector forward. The ticket man began yelling at the Inspector also, and eventually assisted the friendly man to just push him off the bus and then we took off. Everybody in the front wanted to talk to/tease me because I was pretty visible as a source of trouble and the only white person on the bus. Eventually we got to the junction and I hopped into a taxi with Cecilia towards town. We met Senam, Elaine, Natalia, and Thien Vinh as well as Senam's friends Charles (who I met before) and Cypress. We went to a bar, and Cypress offered to buy me a drink. I said I'd have what he was having and he left and walked away. He came back with two shots of clear locally produced rum ("apoteshie") and a small bottle of 8pm (cheap scotch/whisky combination). He poured the 8pm over the two shots and handed me one, calling it an "African cocktail". It was less painful than it sounds, but still pretty rough. We drank and danced and then hopped a taxi to our hotel- the Rocktop, the same place we stayed in Winneba last time. It's owned by a woman named Shelley who's sweet, comes from Jamaica and built the whole place with her husband. I'll definitely get more pictures of the hotel. We woke up early the next day, taxi-ed into town and saw the preliminary parades. The gist of the festival is that two "teams" one painted red and the other white go out into the forest and have to find, hunt and kill an antelope with their bare hands and bring it back to the town. It is paralyzed from fear, paraded around the whole town as music blares and people cheer, and a libation is poured over its head. The chief then sacrifices it on Sunday (I've heard both that he kills it in his palace and that he kills it on the beach), and the whole town celebrates at the beach. We saw the preliminary parade as the warriors left to go into the woods and there was an eerie growing police presence. I later found out it was because the President was coming to speak, but I sadly missed hearing him. We got some tea and egg sandwiches on the street (they were buttery and very good). After waiting for a long time we eventually went back to the hotel, though we hadn't seen the antelope being paraded around. Just as we laid down to nap at the Rocktop, music started blaring from a pyramid of at least 16 large speakers. It made my bones rattle, but I slept through it. We hung out there for a while and then came back into Winneba for dinner and drinks and more dancing and another blurry taxi ride and putting myself to bed. We woke up the next day and half of the group headed back around 11. The rest of us stayed, had some eggs, bread and tea on the roof of Shelley's hotel and went for a swim in the nearby estuary. We ended up on a deserted beach with an old guesthouse it looked like. The roof was falling in and there was no front, but there were toilets and sinks that looked relatively new. We explored it for a little while and swam back across the estuary to the hotel, got a taxi, met Senam to say goodbye, and then took a taxi to a nearby junction. We tried to stick together to catch a tro-tro home, but got split up because none of them had four available seats. We coincidentally met at the station outside of campus, got some dinner and ice cream while talking about the foreigners experience in Ghana and then lazily walked home. I fell asleep shortly after.

This week I finally began my field research and went back to the Lebanese restaurant, where the owner treated us to a free lunch which we ate with him. He's a really nice and interesting fellow, and I'm sure I'll see him again. There was a cinco de mayo celebration that day, but I was stuck in traffic on the way home so I missed it.

The blog is updated! Congratulations on sticking with it so far!