Spring Break, Day 1

I'm finally back in Accra after a long and exhausting (yet super-duper amazing!) Spring Break trip. I traveled with Tania and Rachel to Togo and Benin, two tiny countries countries to the east of Ghana. Both countries are French-speaking, and though they share many similarities with Ghana, I felt like I was in a completely different dimension. Right now, it is a bit difficult to make any sense of this trip. The whole journey felt like National Lampoon's Vacation or Eurotrip, everything just being so unexpected and not very believable to audiences. But believe me friends, everything I write here is as far from fiction as words can be. So here is my day-by-day retelling of the 7-day adventure that was Spring Break 2007...

Day 1, Sunday, March 11, 2007

After many delays in leaving for my Spring Break trip (was supposed to leave Friday, then Saturday...), I finally woke up on this beautiful Sunday morning (cue Velvet Underground: "Sunday Morning... Praise the dawning... It's just a restless feeling by my side...") ready to leave for Lomé, Togo, the first stop in our adventure. I did my usual morning stretches and then made the greatest oatmeal creation that man has ever made. I cooked oatmeal in milk, then added peanut butter, cinnamon, banana, toasted oat cereal, raisins, and brown sugar to it. It was pretty incredible. We left the house after 7:30 for Tudu Station, the station that tro-tro's and buses going east leave from. The taxi driver who took us to Tudu dropped us off right in front of the STC bus that was about to leave. How convenient! What a great start to the trip.

On the ride over, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I'm thinking is one of the greatest books I've ever read. It's actually my second time reading it, but I don't think I loved it as much the first time. It was very fitting that I began reading this book as soon as the trip started because the whole book is filled with outlandish characters who have the most peculiar idiosynchrisies, and the whole time everything seems like a dream or a religious text... it just seems to much to take word for word. Yet it's reality in some sense. I say it's fitting because that's what the trip felt like. But nevermind, I didn't know that at this point.

After growing tired of reading, I tried to sleep some, but it was pretty much impossible. The road was in horrible condition, so the ride was extremely bumpy. On top of that, if you'd ever taken a bus or a tro-tro in Ghana, you'd know that every time you sit down on one, you immediately say to yourself, "Yep, this is definitely the most uncomfortable I've ever been before." Despite the bumpiness and discomfort, we got to Aflao, Ghana around noon. Aflao is the border town in Ghana; Lomé's right on the other side in Togo. Being a border town, it was filled with people trying to sell things and exchange currencies. I already had my CFA Francs, though, so no need for me to exchange currency. (CFA Francs are the currecy used by five Francophone countries in West Africa: Togo, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Le Côte d'Ivoire (The Ivory Coast).)

Crossing the border was surprisingly easy. I just had to fill out a little paper in the Ghana immigration office, and then I got stamps from both Ghana and Togo immigration (I had already gotten my visa to enter, though). And then I was across. We got attacked by more one-man forex bureaus and market sellers, one of which convinced us into buying her fried balls of something that tasted like coconut. We took a cab to the hotel we had written down in my journal, Hotel du Boulevard, which would be the first of many crazy places that we would stay.

You should understand that we pretty much played the whole trip by ear. Before we left, we borrowed a friend's West Africa guidebook and wrote down all kinds of information - places to go, things to do, hotels, and any other relevant information. We would've bought a guidebook ourselves, but they cost about $50 here! Besides, the guidebook isn't up to date the second it's published because half the hotels cost more than the guidebook said they did. Anyway, we got to the hotel which was on Boulevard de 13 Janvier, the main road of the city. Lomé isn't nearly as big as Accra, but it does have a population of about 800,000, so it's by no means a little town. The hotel was an old building that for some reason seemed like it should be in Egypt or something. There was a cute little courtyard, and four different stories to this old stone building. Some of the building was just wooden beams or broken rooms, which gave it a feel of a building from a distant time that someone decided to start living in again. We were shown to our room which had two double bed, somewhat separated as rooms, and old dresser, and a bathroom with no door. One thing you learn quickly living and traveling through Africa is that you don't always have privacy, even when using the bathroom.

We put our stuff in the room and head out to get lunch before going to a soccer game. We walked down the Boulevard for a while, and immediately I noticed huge differences in this city that was only a three hour ride from Accra. I saw restaurants advertising coffee, pizza restaurants, ice cream, spaghetti, women selling baguettes and croissants, more cigarettes, and in general not as many West African restaurants as Accra, although you could still easily eat all the fufu and banku you want. Basically, when the French left Togo, they didn't take their food with them, and I couldn't have been happier about it. You just don't find pizza, baguettes, coffee, or sandwiches in Accra.

Another thing I quickly discovered was the heavy presence of motorcycles. In Togo (and Benin, and from what I hear, the other Francophone West African countries), motorcycles rule the streets. They all just zoom along on the streets, creating lanes wherever they feel like it. At some times, there are six or seven lanes of motorcycles, all weaving in and out of each other. I don't understand how there aren't accidents, but I suppose it's like so many other things that I'll never understand. What's really interesting, though, is that the motorcycles are taxis. There are almost no taxi cars, just motorcycles. You just hop on the back of a motorcycle, and for 150-300 CFA Francs (about 30-60 cents), they'll take you wherever you want to go in the city. Pretty crazy.

We ate at a Senegalese restaurant. We were brought a large tray from which we all feasted. There was couscous with chicken and most amazingly delicious grilled onions I've ever had. Of course, Rachel didn't eat the chicken because she's a vegetarian, but I'm sure the onions made up for that. After eating, we took a cab to the soccer stadium where World Cup Africa under 17 games were being played. We saw Ghana vs. Burkina Faso, and of course, we had to sport Ghana as much as possible. Tania and Rachel bought flags to display; I bought nothing because I don't really like buying stuff. We went into the stadium and to the stands. Immediately our attention was drawn to a large group of Ghana fans, at least 100, all dressed in the same shirt with Ghana's flag on it (and also a Coca-Cola logo... does Coca-Cola pay them to do that). Some were playing drums, some trumpets, some holding flags and signs, some acting as energy-motivers, and all standing and dancing or jumping around, all in full support of Ghana. What's funny is that almost everyone was on the other side of the stadium, the shady side, but this large group of Ghana fans were the only people in the stands on the sunny side, working up a sweat but not giving a damn about it.

We went over to them (because it's always nice to sit with your fellow fans) and they quickly ushered us into their energy. We found out later that this group of people followed the team wherever they went and they didn't get paid for it. They just did it. They never lost their energy throughout that whole game. They started at least an hour before (when we showed up), then kept going throughout the whole game, even halftime, and then of course after the game they got even more lively because Ghana won 3-1. We even saw them about 30 minutes later as we were walking down the road and they drove by in their bus, all standing and partying and having a great time. They were fun people.

We only stood with them for the first half of the game because we just wanted to chill out for the second half. Plus, we weren't completely comfortable with the way they treated us. They were wanting pictures with us for no reason, and then they wouldn't let some Ghanain fans cheer with them because they weren't part of the group, but they had let us cheer with them. Just because I'm white? I hate it when that happens. Rachel suggested we all get shirts made that say, "Would you still love me if I were brown?" But anyway, it was fun.

After the game, we walked around a bit and met a guy named Mark, who, like most people we met on this trip, I could not talk to because I don't speak French. "Je ne parle pas Français." Rachel doesn't speak French either, but Tania does (in addition to Spanish, English, and Italian... little language fiend), so she acted as our translator and our voices throughout the trip. Sometimes it really sucked that I couldn't talk to people, but in some ways, it's kind of nice. It makes life all the more a mystery.

Mark walked with us for a while until we got a cab to meet a woman that Rachel met at FESPACO in Burkina Faso named C-2 (I don't know how it's spelled, I just like to imagine it's written like that). We went to the French Cultural Center, the designated meeting spot. It was close to the hotel, in the downtown area, and basically it was a restaurant/bar and a movie screen with chairs. There was hardly anyone there, and you could easily forgotten you were in Africa since the few people who were there were mostly French. It was a nice play to hang out for a while. We chatted with C-2 and her boyfriend John about what there was to do in the city. They walked us to a few places - a beautiful independence monument, the Congress building, a public park (ahh!! yes, a public park!), and then down the Boulevard for a while.

They asked us if we wanted any ice cream, and we told them we weren't really hungry. C-2 looked at us really shocked, and she said to us, "When someone invites you to someone, you don't refuse it." She said it like it was a cultural lesson or something, but I don't see how telling someone you're not hungry when they ask if you want ice cream is a cultural don't. Anyway, we went to a place called Nelly's Pizza, a name that one would not expect to find in Togo. It was a cute little pizza place downstairs and then a dimly lit restaurant upstairs. Although the truth is the power was just out upstairs and we went there cause there was no room downstairs. We were excited about getting pizza, but then the waiter brings us all huge bowls of ice cream. I was kind of hungry, but I wanted real food, not ice cream, but I would've felt like a jerk if I had turned it down (even though I already told them I didn't want it). It turned out to be alright because it was amazing ice cream - pistachio, coconut, and chocolate flavors. Mmmm... So good.

We went back to the hotel to discover that we were all very tired and that our air conditioner did not work. So we all laid around, trying to sleep in our respective puddles of sweat, and finally we got a guy to come fix the AC. Of course, after the guy fixed it, it still didn't get cool because we discovered one of the windows was completely busted out. So, I just made do with the sweat and fell asleep. What's amazing is that this day was the most normal one I would have for the whole trip.