Gone to Ghana: My African Adventures

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August 28, 2014

Another Homowo festival: this time Selina, who’s the teacher who runs our fishing village project, took us to Labadi. Apparently at the different places on different days there is a theme that runs through the day. One place might have a day for drinking, and yesterday at Labadi it was a day of hugging. Basically if anyone came up to you and hugged you it was acceptable. I’ve never been hugged by so many strangers before. Many of the men wanted to hug us bruni (that’s the correct spelling of Bernie) women. Some of the men were more aggressive about the hugs than others. One guy actually picked us up, and at one point on of the guys kissed me on both cheeks and I had to push him away. Another fun thing was that the kids were all wearing masks and hats made out cardboard and paper. Some of us bought those silly hats. There’s no significance behind them they’re just something fun for the kids. The craziest thing that happened at one point was when we were trying to get through a crowd of people when Selina said, “Someone’s coming” and tried to push me out of the way. The next thing I knew was that I had been thrown to the ground by a topless African lady. It was some kind of traditional thing where two women were wrestling and I just happened to be in the way. I’m fine, but I do have a bruise on my hip to prove the story. We tried fried octopus and palm wine, which was pretty disgusting, but we found a new brand of good hard cider.

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Photos

Woman carrying fried ocotpus
It was quite good.

Max in his hat
He got the coolest hat! Ironically it was made from a German newspaper. He was happy about that.

A-Rod in Africa
So this is what A-Rod is doing with his year off. I was surprised to see this guy wearing this shirt. Baseball is pretty non-existent in Ghana, but come on if you're going to wear a Yankee shirt at least wear a Jeter jersey.