Road Trip

10:00 AM Updated throughout the drive 14 July

We're heading to Kumasi today. It's about a 4 to 5 hour drive, but since we received a lot of rain this week there is potentially a lot of flooding of the roads. So we've been told to prepare for closer to 6 hours... Which in Africa time means 7 at least. It's a little silly though, because we are only going to be in Kumasi for one full day, since we are leaving on Thursday.

This concept of time is an interesting one. Many of the students are frusterated with the trip because if the lack of ability to get everyone ready and out the door on time. It's true though. Our travel assistant will say that we need to be ready to leave by 9am but then we won't leave till almost 10. It's a combination of his fault as well as the others. If he was more strict in the beginning of the trip, emphazing the importance of being on time and iterating that if you were late your grade would suffer, I'm sure people would have responded appropriately. But, in reality, our travel assistant himself is always late and does not respect our time. One could say that he lacks "time consiousness". I was talking with my friend Johnny - born and raised in Cape Coast but has spent 3 years living in the UK, and he said that this idea of time conciousness is definitely a cultrual thing. Johnny is a great guy to hang around with. He knows everyone and he takes Ross, Gezell, Unise and I out to the bars with his friends.

One girl was continuing to state how fed up she is with the lack of organization of this program. And how she felt that we've paid a lot of money to be here and for what? This annoyed me because the money is just going back to Northeastern as if we had taken classes in the classroom - so what difference does it make. Then she went on to complain that at Northeastern we have at least Internet that one could say we subsequently pay for through our tuition. And she felt that if we are paying the same amount of money that we should have the same accomodations. Haha. We're in Ghana!!! Wow. People can be peculiar at times. It's usually the girls that become difficult to coupe with. I don't understand why people can't just go along with the flow. Just enjoy it for what it is and not get so worked up about things. John, perhaps this is something you have taught me. I give you a lot of credit for it at least.

We will be staying in a hotel in Kumasi, and I must say, I am looking forward to the possiblity of a hot water shower.

One of the things we are doing in Kumasi is taking a drum and dance lesson. I'm a little nervous about the dancing aspect, but the drumming sounds like great fun. Plus, I've bought a small drum since being here, so perhaps I will take home some new beats.

I had written an interesting post concerning some cultural differences between the ethnic group Fante and Ashantee but I accidently tried to publish the post when I had a bad wifi connection and consequently the post got lost in the abyss. Perhaps I will try and restructure the post.

The road we are travelling on is paved but has huge potholes. Are driver Arthur is the Man with manuvoring the bus around the street opsticles.

It's 1:25PM so we've been driving for about 3.5 hours. This road is horrible. It's filled with crater size potholes and Arthur can only drive about 10 miles an hour in order to slowly bring the bus down and out of the craters. It's too bumpy to sleep. We're driving through small towns and for the most part, they are pretty nice. Concrete houses instead of shanty shacks. Many schools.

-- Posted From My iPhone