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Published: October 15th 2008
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Hey guys,
Apologies that its taken me a while to do the next installment of this but i'm a busy boy y'know?
So since last time!i've started teaching properly now and it's been a mixed bag really. Some of the students are shockingly bad, like they can't do anything because their education up until now has been pretty shoddy and then there's kids who are stupidly intelligent (like, wellllll more intelligent than I was at that age or perhaps even now) and the divide makes it really difficult to teach them all at the same pace. This makes my job more difficult but i must admit it's pretty good when they all get what your talking about. Plus I was going out of my nut having nothing to do for the first week or so, it's definetely a welcome distraction!
Been spending a fair bit of time in Takoradi wandering about the markets (photos to come on that), going swimming at the private hotels (fancy pants eh!) and kickin' it at the beach which is now becoming an addiction!
The highlight of the last two weeks however was our trip (by that I mean me, James and
Andy) to see Ghana V Lesotho at the Sekondi stadium. It was mental! We only found out about the match randomly as we were on a tro-tro (minibus which takes people to the random places out of the cities) and heard that the match was happening on the radio. So one of the teachers at school, Lucas, offered to take us and told us that the tickets were 1 pound!1 quid for a world cup qualifier! We got to the stadium like 3 hours early as they didn't sell advance tickets so that touts couldn't buy them all up......FAILED!got there and went to que at the ticket office for like an hour. And when I say ticket office I actually mean like a little hut with a shelter thing beside it with about 100 Ghanians crammed inside it all shouting at each other because they didn't have any tickets left, because all the touts had bought them!We EVENTUALLY got a ticket each and went to go into the stadium....except for the fact that they don't actually have designated entrances for people. They have them for cars but not people! So you had to wait til a car went to go
Best seat in the house
Yeah they'll go to any length to watch the game over here!even climbing up the roof supports...bit mental! in and then about 100 people just rushed through!it was crazy but a definite experience!
For those of you who thought THAT was crazy it isn't over yet! So we got in and were like "ok lets just go get a seat".....eh good luck!About an hour before we got to the stadium there was a stampeed, the crowd RIPPED the cast iron gates of their hinges and rushed through and took up all the seats. So we got to the stand and there was a wall of Ghanians all trying to get a view from the aisles, stairs, basically anywhere they could. So we went around all the stands and it was the same at every entrance!Nightmare! Pretty much screwed...until this amazing little cleaner woman was like "come with me....", could have been dodgy but what the hell!so she took us up these stairs and was like "you can watch from here". Turns out she'd taken us to the roof of the stadium and the place was jumping with Ghanians having what was basically a bit party. So me, James and Andy ended up watching the whole match from the roof of Sekondi stadium, standing on the A/C units
to get a view! Have to say i've never watched a match quite like that before!craziest experience of my life!next time i think i'll turn up early and get a seat though, my legs were dead after 2 hours standing on an air conditioning unit.
Decided to check out the local beaches at the weekened aswell.....another experience......not necessarily a good one!Most of the beaches here are white sanded pictures of complete perfection. Then some are fucking rank! So our local town of Shama is one of those with a rather unsanitary beach. We got dropped off at the beach resort about 2 miles away and were a bit underwhelmed and decided to walk around the coast to Shama and find one a bit nicer.....we got one that was pretty good and stayed there a while and then turned the corner to Shama itself. You know it's not going to be pretty when the first thing you see is 2 vultures picking at a dead goat and a guy laying a brick on the beach. The whole beach is pretty much the local toilet which is lovely!bit of a shame really cause it could be really nice (minus the rubbish,
dead animals and shit), needless to say we wont be going back to Shama beach anytime soon!BUT!we did find the only cinema between Takoradi and Accra (about 100/150 miles), and the main feature a double bill of Arnold Schwarzenegger madness!Commando AND Eraser!thats getting done soon!Oh and when I say "cinema" I actually mean some dude who has a moderately sized TV and a DVD player!Ace!
So to make it up to ourselves, we're going to Brenu Beach this weekend for 2 nights (see here for photos - http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/1745463.html)which has been described as "totally gorgeous". Hopefully that also means its a poo free zone.
Oh yeah!also my phone was stolen on Friday so if anyone has tried to get in touch then that's why I havn't been contactable!one of our pupils (now an ex pupil) came to the school and stole it after hours and the sold it (i'm guessing). It's a bit of a shame as he'd only just got back into school, he couldn't afford to pay his fee's so he got thrown out and then they decided to accept less money and a sheep as payment....yeah, a sheep!but now he's out of school for good, hasn't been home in like 4 days and is going to get the full brunt of the village chief's rage when he shows face again. And i'm one phone down, gutted!
Thats my news!I look forward to hearing from you all and will try and get in touch again next week.
x
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