The dynamic drumming duo...

After spending an afternoon at the arts and crafts centre, bargaining, we are now proud owners of one djembe drum and one kpanlogo drum.We even managed to bargain a drumming lesson into the price! The djembe is a drum played with the hands that is common throughout west Africa, while the kpanlogo originates from Ghana and is played with hands or sticks.

Pictures of the two beautiful drums (and possibly the two beautiful performers too) will shortly appear on the blog, together with our other latest pictures. However, since the trip is coming to it's end (leaving 31 May...) we probably will wait and upload them from London where the procedure will be faster. Please be patient...

Some tips and tricks for beginners of blog reading...

I've had some questions about the blog, and I'll do my best to answer them here:

1. How do I leave a comment?
In the lower right corner of every entry in the blog there is a small blue text saying "X COMMENTS" (where X is a number representing the number of comments on the topic, most commonly "0 COMMENTS" which means no comments have been posted...). If you click on the blue text, you come to a page where you can read the comments and write your own. After you have written a comment, I will read it to make sure that you're not writing something offensive or something I do not want on my blog, before it is shown on the page. In other words your comment will not show until I have read it and authorized it to be published. This might take a day or two, since I'm not on the Internet every day... Don't fear, soon enough your comment will show up.

2. Where did the pictures of [this or that] go? Where did the post about [some topic] go? I can't find them anymore?
On the first page that you come to when you visit obroni.blogspot.com there is a limited number of posts shown. These are the newest posts. The older posts are found under the headline "Previous Posts" or "Archives" on the right hand side of the blog. "Previous Posts" contain links to a few more of the recent entries, while "Archives" contain all posts sorted by the month they were written.

I hope I hereby have straightened out a few question marks (?) to exclamation marks (!). It's always nice to see that people are reading, so feel free to comment!

Film festival

There is currently a film festival going on in Accra. Different venues show films on a "African documentaries" theme. So far we have seen "Mo and Me" about the African photographer Mohammed Amin, a film about prisons in Africa that I can't recall the name of and "The colonial misunderstanding" about the roles of missionaries in the colonization and other colonial issues. It's seriously interesting and best of all... It's FREE!

There seems to be quite a few festivals like this going on, in the beginning of our stay there was another festival with an ecological theme, that we sadly only saw one screening from ("Darwin's Nightmare", about the state of the fishing industry in lake Victoria. A must see!! + two other films that didn't leave as much impression....). So I recommend everybody coming here to contact the Alliance Francaise or the Goethe Institute who seem to have a finger in the film festival arranging business here. They also regularly screen films anyway...

Tonight we're going to see "the house of Saud", an Egyptian film that talks about how the Al Saud family keeps their power... Interesting or what?

Rainy season

And so the rain begins... The rainy season in Ghana goes on roughly from June until September (varies a bit depending on who you ask though...), with at least some precipitation each day, to my experience so far. The last few days we have had all from heavy pouring thunderstorms to slowly trickling summer rain. Like magic the street vendors disappear with their goods in a matter of seconds, and a new, previously unseen breed materializes out of air: The Umbrella Salespeople! Within seconds from that the rain starts, someone is there offering you to buy an umbrella!

However, the need for protection is questionable. The rain even feels quite cooling and refreshing on occasion, when the distance you decide to walk is short. And at most you need as many umbrellas as half the amount of people you are in your group. Me and Mrs share one semi big umbrella, which is cozy.

The rains have kept us more indoors than before, and we have borrowed DVD's from the British Council (we're in the middle of watching all 13 episodes of the second season of the BBC TV-series based on Agatha Christies "Poirot") to entertain us when the downpour simply is overwhelming. This also means that we have done and seen less of interest, and the Blog has been suffering a little... I'll try to write more.

Finally I'd like to recommend two books.
The first one is called "No more worries" and is a book put together by the women's Association of North America (I think) containing lots and lots of information about Accra, especially useful if you are planning on staying for a while. It's terribly outdated in some aspects, restaurants have closed, money value has changed etc., but all in all it is a good addition to the books helping foreigners in the region.
The second one is called "The curious incident of the dog in the night-time" and is written by Mark Haddon (click on the name to look it up on Amazon...). I read it straight through in one day and a half. I especially recommend it to my mum...

Ta ta!

Living the highlife...

Not only is highlife the most popular music style in Ghana, it is also a way of life. Mrs and I have on two occasions allowed ourselves to have a taste of the jet set lifestyle recently.
First: We went to Hotel Novotel (****) in downtown Accra, and had rather pricy pizzas which we paid for with VISA card!
Second: We went to Labadi Beach Hotel (*****) and had cocktails that cost about as much as the pizzas above.
I don't know how to put it... Sometimes you have to let the pikey backpacker in you have a rest and indulge in some vulgar luxury, innit? However enough is enough, we have our poor student economies to worry about... Just another slice of pizza maybe? Or a limo to take Mrs to school? Or maybe....

Oware

Mrs has introduced me to this traditional game from Ghana. It reminds me quite a lot of Kalaha, but the rules are different.
Each player has six pods with four pebbles in each on opposite sides of the board. One player picks up the pebbles from one pod placing one pebble in the each of the following pods counter clockwise. The pebbles in the pod where the last pebble is placed are picked up and the pebble placing continues counter clockwise. If the last pebble is put in an empty pod, your turn is over and it's the other players turn.
Anytime four pebbles are formed in one pod (except from the start when all pods contain four...) the player on whose side the four pebbles are may pick them up and keep them, lets call them a 'set'. If the last pebble you drop forms a set you may pick the four pebbles up and keep them, even if they are on the opponents side. The game continues until the next but last set of four pebbles are gained by one of the players, who then gains the last four aswell. The players count the number of sets of four pebbles they have, and the one with the most is the winner. The board is reset (four pebbles in each pod), but the players now have as many pods as they managed to get sets of four pebbles. For example, me and Mrs play. I win (he he!) because I have collected 7 sets of four pebbles, while Mrs only has 5. This means that in the next round I have 7 pods, one on Mrs' side of the board, and she has the remaining 5. You can just imagine how eager she is to get even, right?
Ah, I don't know how informative this description is, I think you'll have to challenge us when you meet us instead. I'm still learning but might put up a fight against another beginner...
I searched the Internet for online games and apparently this game is popular in many parts of the world, especially in different parts of Africa, and there seems to be lots of variations on rules (amongst one is the afor mentioned Kalaha...). Thus the online Owares I found do not share mine and Mrs' rules... Feel free to search on your own. A Google search for "oware online" gave a few different versions playable online!

More pictures... Kumasi and Mole national park

This is me and Mrs when we are greeted by various relatives from Kumasi. Note auntie Regina in pink to the left of me in the picture.
Mrs with more relatives... The whole meeting procedure was so quick I had no chance of remembering any names... Sorry y'all!
Mrs and relatives...
This is a picture of the bats in Kumasi Zoo... They are fruit bats, thus no reason to fear for ones health. They were living in the trees surrounding the Zoo out of their own free will!
This is uncle Earnest who took upon himself to guide us during our all to short stay in Kumasi. as you can se he is prepared to enter the Ashanti gold mine we visited, with his headlight mounted on his helmet...
Mrs found gold! Se that yellowish streak on the rock she's holding? GOLD!!!
This is a picture of a wart hog in Mole National Park. It is kneeling to beable to eat, it has to do so because the back bone of a wart hog is stiff ant they cannot reach the ground without kneeling. Wierd but true!
The baboons in the park were quite fun. They liked hanging around the pool area of the hotel, stealing food or playing with things people left out. This one is just hanging around the close by village, maikng sure no one steals the welcome sign.

Pictures from the Kwahu...

Finally! The pictures we all waited for! This is a road in Kwahu in the mountains. The area is really beautiful and I wish we would have had time to take a few hikes in the surrounding rainforest. However, the easter festivities kept us to the village. This is the view from the house we were staying in where Mrs' grandma's sister lives. And here she is, together with me on the left and one of her daughters on the right. (Sorry about having you guys tilting your heads. Limited computer access makes picture turning a second hand activity...) This is the chief whose hand we shook,currently surrounded by fans... Uncle Kofi Osei did not recommend us to bring the camera to the festivities in the evenings, where people were dancing in the streets an presumably snatching cameras, so you'll have to imagine that....

Aaaarrrrgh! I have more pictures, but they'll have to wait. I put them here, but a freak accident deleted 45 minutes of work and more than half of the pictures dissapeared from the blog entry. I'll do it in portions over the coming days/week.

Take care until next time!

Convalescence

Aaaahhh! I dislike being sick! I've had some kind of stomach bug for three or four days giving me reason to not go to far from uncle Joe's house where we've been staying. I've got medicine and am steadily improving. Sadly my mood has been rather low during my sickness, I've been moaning, complaining and missing home. All three has gone out over Mrs (for which I apologize) who kindly has supported me.
Anyways, I'm getting better and yesterday we took a day out at the British Council to at least dampen my home sickness with some British newspapers and BBC-news... Got a membership card so I could borrow books and films from the library. It's not Sweden, but a piece of Europe which has comforted me a bit.
Today we went to Achimota, a Senior Secondary School to see if Mrs could do some of her research for her project there. No result from that effort so far, we're trying again tomorrow, but we got to experience the "stubborn beggar" phenomenon quite closely. A man came up asking for a small donation so he could go to hospital with this wound on his head. Fair enough if it wasn't for the wound being healing pretty well by itself from what we could see, nothing really nasty. However saying no proved not being very efficient. The man followed us for roughly an hour, constantly trying to conversate. One moment he was "not doing it for money", the next he explained how great it would be to have some money from us. In the end we literally had to push him out of the taxi we were taking to leave the school. I'm glad we didn't separate from any money. If we had done so he would have been encouraged to continue his business instead of finding a job or something to sell... Had he been seriously ill I might have considered giving, but with a scratch on the forehead you ain't getting no dough from this Swede! Especially not for stalking me.
We ate at decent Chinese food at a restaurant in Osu and then went to Koala supermarket to restock insect repellent. Rumor has it that things like insect repellent lotion and sunscreen with a factor higher than 6 is not to be found in Ghana, but if you go to Koala or MaxMart, two typically western supermarkets, you actually can find what you need! Good advice for other travelers who accidentally reads this blog maybe?
alright! I will try to get myself to a fast internet connection, AND bring the digital camera, ASAP. Time to show some animals, relatives and tilted buses, don't you think?