Kumasi

So Saturday pretty much sucked in every way possible. I got up at 5:45, too tired to be excited for Kumasi. The bus was supposed to show up at 6:00 AM, but instead it arrived at 6:45. This wouldn't have been so bad, but considering everything else that happened Saturday, the bus tardiness could have been the sole reason for the misery.

I stepped on to the bus, truly a zombie this time, and I was suddenly met with the coldest air I have felt since being in Ghana. Every single air conditioner front to back was on full blast, and that bus was freezing! Soon people discovered that they could eliminate the AC turning off the vents above them. My vent, however, was broken and would not close, meaning it was for some time impossible for me to fall asleep. So I decided to eat and read in an attempt to alleviate the pain of my icy hell (I really thought I would never be able to call anything in Ghana an icy hell, but then again, every day's a new adventure...). I had packed a breakfast of bread, cheese, peanuts, raisins, and cranapple juice which I devoured wholeheartedly (coldness speeds up the metabolism, so...). I finished reading Sweetness in the Belly, a book about an English girl who is raised in Morrocco by her English hippie parents. The parents die when Lily (the English girl) is 8 years old. She's then raised by someone else in Morocco, and then makes a pilgrimage when she's 16 to Harar, Ethiopia, and begins a new life there. However, once Ethiopia falls apart, she flees to London, her homeland that's not really her homeland. The book follows her life in Ethiopia and London. I recommend it.

After about an hour or so, I was finally feeling tired enough to sleep, despite the cold. I woke up about three hours later, disoriented and sweating profusely. Apparently the air conditioner broke sometime during my slumber, and so I woke up with the sun beating down on me through the window and my shirt clinging to my sweaty body. About thirty minutes later, we stopped moving. There was a traffic jam because of an accident some unknown distance up the road. After being in the traffic jam for about 30 minutes without moving an inch (literally), some of us (such as myself) were about to lose it on the bus. I was seriously going to cry or hurt someone, possibly both. So I stepped off the bus with a few friends, and that was very nice. It was still hot, but at least we were in air instead of just sweat. We bought some oranges and hung out next to the bus for about 30 minutes or so. Finally, vehicles started moving, so we hopped back on. Of course, we were soon stuck again, waiting longer and longer. After some time (it's hard to say how long, because we were all a bit delirious) we started going at good speed down the road. Suddenly, we pulled over in front of another bus on the side of the road.

"Alright, everybody, we're getting on a new bus," Christa, associate director of the NYU in Ghana program, told us all. So we all gathered up our stuff and moved over to another bus. The switching of buses might seem silly, but the air conditioning and larger seats were a major improvement in everyone's lives. At this point, it was about 1:30, and the administrators told us it would be about another two hours. I made a huge mistake. I had to pee when we switched buses, and I did not. I had had about 3 liters of water (I sweat most of it out on the first bus), and over the next two hours, those three liters took a toll on my bladder. I've seriously never hurt this bad before from having to pee. It was excrutiating. I was in sort of a panic, not knowing what to do, unable to focus. At one moment I almost started crying. The physical pain was so intense that it had become an emotional issue. It had been two hours, and we still weren't there, so I went to ask Esi (one of the admin's) how far we were from Kumasi. "About 45 minutes," she said. !!!!! "Can we stop somewhere to use the bathroom before that?" I asked. "Yes, we'll look for a place." Well, we found that place after about 45 minutes, and I had one of the best moments of my life.

Soon after, we were at a restaurant eating a Ghanain buffet "lunch" (it was about 4:30, but none of us had had lunch... so lunch is fair). We had to cancel all the activies we had planned for the day (except for the eating) because we showed up so late (we were supposed to get there somewhere between 10-11). And after 10 hours on the bus, that buffet was super necessary to ease the pain. (Soon I'll write about Ghanain cuisine and Ghanain buffets). Afterwards, we walked around the cultural center for about 45 minutes, looking at shops and whatnot. It was kind of stupid because coming in, we saw a lively, bustling city in action (I'll write about Kumasi as a city later... it'll be good), and we were in this isolated cultural center which was almost entirely under construction. Silly, no? But anyway, we looked at a few shops. I got a little doll for my niece Breanna. I named her Esi and later wrote a little story for the doll (it's nice to give things stories... dolls, squirrels, cats, and other cute small things). There were a few other cool things at the cultural center, but I'm not really a person who buys stuff, so it was just a browse.

We went to the hotel and arrived just as it was getting dark. The rooms were pretty nice, but I didn't care. Our day had been taken from us. I was, however, looking forward to going out for the night, maybe walk around the city some, go to a cool place to eat, just hang around. At first it seemed like other people were interested in that too. We'd make plans for "like an hour." Or, "well, yeah, let's do that, but let's see what so-and-so wants to do." And then find out so-and-so doesn't want to do anything. We were at least going to go somewhere to eat, but it was one of my friend's birthdays, and she wanted to get free dinner at the hotel, even though some of expressed disinterest with that. So it took everyone about 30 minutes to order. Then it took about an hour for the food to come out. Then we ate (which it was really good, I got chicken jambalaya, mmmmm.... but that's not the point). After all that, no one felt like going out anymore. I was pretty angry, I won't deny. I was super frustrated. Not a single person wanted to go out and do anything the whole night, after we'd spent an entire day of waiting to see the city. I would have gone out by myself, but going out into a foreign city for the first time at night by myself... no thanks.

You see, here's the thing about me and traveling. I don't mind spending a few weeks just hanging around the house, but when I travel, I want to do stuff. I think I get it from my dad who, when we were anywhere on vacation out of town, would always be up at the crack of dawn trying to get everybody up and running for a day full of activity, whatever that activity may be. Of course, I always enjoyed sleeping in (as did everyone else), but now I'm much more like my dad was. If I travel somewhere, I want to be on the go, doing things, seeing places, meeting people. That doesn't mean I can't relax while I do it, but I just want something new and different. That's the reason we travel, right? It's silly to be angry at anyone (I'm not angry), but I still can't believe that no one wanted to go out the whole night. I kept trying to get someone to go out, but there was always something preventing it from happening. It made for a pretty miserable evening. I even had my first cigarette in over 3 months. (Don't worry, though, I have no plans to continue smoking... it was just pretty necessary with my level of frustration). Sometime around midnight, I finally calmed down a bit and just hung around and had a decent time chatting and swimming in the pool. The whole day was pretty bad, but that doesn't mean it has to end bad. Plus, during this short time before bed, I made my plan for the morning. My plan excited me. Basically, the plan was, get up super early, go out into the city by myself, and just spend the day wandering about. I knew we only had until noon to explore (pathetic, right?), so I figured I would need to shoot for an early time to go out.

Of course, I didn't go to bed until 1:00, so I didn't want to get up too early. So I got up at 6:45, 15 minutes before the hotel was supposed to start serving breakfast (notice I wrote "supposed to"). I went out to the restaurant by the pool at 7. There was one other man there, and we were the only ones so far. They told us breakfast wasn't ready. Grrr... ok, be patient. Breakfast is worth waiting for. Well, I ended up having to wait for about 30 minutes for breakfast to come out. The whole while I chatted with Professor Singler (he's a visiting professor from NYU whose class I actually took last semester... strange), Lila, Deborah, and Jen. Conversation was nice, almost as nice as breakfast coming out. They brought out the buffet trays that restaurants use and took the lid off the first one to reveal... corn flakes! Ta da! There were also omelettes, vegetables, beans, and juice though, so I was alright. I went to city at about eight and began my exploration.

So Kumasi... I don't know the history that well, so I'll just give you this little bit from my guidebook, Ghana: The Brandt Travel Guide by Philip Briggs:

"Ghana's second city, with a population exceeding one million, Kumasi is not only the modern capital of Ashanti Region, but has also for three centuries served as a royal capital of the Ashanti state. Tradition has it that the city was founded by the first Asantehene, Nana Osei Tutu, who reolcatied there from his former capital at Kwaman in 1695. Kumasi rapidly acquired the status of largest and most important city the Ghanain interior, and was the inland terminus of most of the 18th-century slave trading routes to the coast."

Alright, so that doesn't say a whole bunch, but it's what I've got. So here's my take on Kumasi. Kumasi is awesome! For one, the city is much more concentrated and city-like than the strange, disorganized, huge city of Accra which is more like a small town that exploded all over the place. Most of the buidings are two, three, four, possibly even five stories, very unlike Accra which has very few multi-storied buildings. Kumasi has more stores and less street sellers than Accra, which is kind of nice. And yet, Kumasi is much more alive. Even though it was Sunday morning, people were out and about, doing this and that, some going to church, some working, some just hanging around, me just wandering about taking it all in. Suprisingly, hardly anyone talked to me as I walked around, mostly just a few children. It was nice just being in the city and able to move about as someone there, as opposed to Accra where I'm obruni, so somehow I'm obliged to speak to every random person that calls me out. Nonetheless, a few people did ask where I was going or why I was there, and that was acceptable. No one kept me for too long. I met a variety of people, a few girls at a salon, a man from Accra just hanging out on the sidewalk, a man who really wanted to know where I was going (I tried to explain, "Me ne nam"..."Just walking around"), a man who told me about his hope to visit his friend in Virginia, and of course a wonderfully drunk man (at 10:00 AM, no less). The architecture of the city is like that of 19th century Portuguese Brazilian/Carribean islands architecture. I'll put up a few pictures so you can just see.

One thing I really loved was that Kumasi is a pedestrian-friendly city. After all, cities are supposed to be where people live, not where cars live. I've seen many cities of varying degrees of person-friendly/car-friendly, and from my experience, person-friendly cities are far superior. Why do you think I chose New York City for college? Well, pedestrians owning the streets was only one of the reasons, but seriously, I hate cities that are only accessible by vehicle. Kumasi is not one of those cities. The city was also cleaner than Accra (I'm not trying to trash Accra here, I'm just pointing out how cool Kumasi is), although it's still got many problems with sanitation (I'm going to write a blog soon about sanitation and sewage in Ghana). There were actually a few trashcans in Kumasi which all said, "Donated by Simple Man. Keep the City Clean!" Whoever Simple Man is, he must be a great man. There are virtually no trash cans in Accra, which is depressing, but like I said, I'll write more on that later...
Kumasi is a much more local city than Accra. Accra, though once belonging to the Ga people (they still have a little bit of land left, Jamestown), doesn't really belong to any one group of Ghanains (and in some ways it is international), but Kumasi belongs to the Ashantis, who once had an empire in West Africa that was larger than Ghana is today. I didn't see a single obruni all day (not even someone from my group, although I know some of them went out), though like I said, I was not called out as much as in Accra. I strolled around, getting lost in an urban maze of life (one of my favorite pasttimes), going down paved and dirt roads alike (most of the roads I went on were paved, though).

After wandering for several hours, I came across the Kumasi Zoo. I wasn't sure what it was at first, but I saw lots of bats flying around as I got closer to the zoo, so I knew something was up. I payed 10,000 cedis to get in, and what I discovered was a total nightmare. This place made me so depressed. It should not exist. They put all their animals - monkeys, baboons, lions, goats, ostriches - in the smallest cages possible, and they even put a monkey in a cage by itself! How cruel is that? To make matters worse, what little plant life there was in the zoo looked like it was just making a come-back after centuries of suffering from nuclear warfare. To make matters even worse (and actually quite disturbing) was the fact that a baboon and a monkey both had these strange tumors on them. Well, I really don't know what they were, but those were not normal parts of any animal. To top it all off, there was also a large stream of sewage flowing right through the middle of the zoo. Sick, right? The only cool thing about the zoo was the fact that literally thousands of bats were flying around overhead the whole time. Bats are so cool. Seriously.

So after almost breaking down in tears at the sheer inhumanity that created that animal hell, I left the zoo and decided to spend what little time I had left in Kumasi at the market. I hadn't seen all of the city (one million inhabitants in about three hours... kind of difficult), but I had seen enough to get a really good picture of the city. The central market in Kumasi, called Kejetia Market, is the largest market in all of west Africa. It was pretty big. From certain parts in the city, you can get really nice views of the skyline, and admist all the multi-storied buildings, right in the middle of the city is a huge block of market life. You can get pretty much anything and everything there from agricultural chemicals to food to ammunition to fabric to random little things that one sees and can't help but wonder how someone could've dreamed up such weirdness (and sometimes awesomeness). Nonetheless, it was still just a market, and I'm not much of a consumer of random goods. It was still fun, though, and fascinating to see, although perhaps a bit overwhelming. All I got at the market was some apples and water, and so from there I left to go back to the hotel for checkout.

After checking out of the hotel, we all loaded up on the bus and went to Manhyia Palace, which was palace of the Ashanti King from 1926-1995, when it was turned into a museum. Now, when picturing the palace, imagine a pretty big house instead of a palace. It was alright. I wasn't really in the mood to tour a piece of Ashanti history (I was running on little sleep, and I had had a pretty active morning), but it was still interesting. We learned a bit about Ashanti royals and society and such and such. There were creepy lifelike figures of Kings and Queen Mothers placed in a few chairs in different rooms in the palace. One thing I found interesting was that Ashantis always have two rulers - a King and a Queen Mother, that way neither man nor woman could dominate politics. Also, they couldn't be husband and wife.

After leaving the palace, we ate at the omnipresent Pizza Inn/Chicken Inn/Creamy Inn food court combo scattered throughout Ghana's cities (essentially road stop fast food). I had a chicken burger that was pretty awesome. After getting on the bus to go back to Accra, the staff thanked all of us students for being so patient despite a somewhat failed trip. We really do deserve a pat on the back for our patience, because we had to deal with a lot of waiting and a lot of unpleasantness. I almost lost it several times - during the traffic jam-sauna combo, during my near bladder explosion, and during my failed attempt to go out into Kumasi at night - but through it all, I was alive and well and I had done something at least. I do wish I could have spent more time in the city, especially since it definitely seems like my kind of city. Maybe I'll go back and visit another weekend, and I'll leave Friday instead of Saturday. So that's my Kumasi trip. Hope you enjoyed it more than I did (it wasn't that bad, though).