parties and police escorts

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CHANTEL - So Saturday night continued our introduction to Ghanaian party life and laid the groundwork for what would become our routine weekend schedule. An and I have adapted a very serious work ethic that we would like to call the work hard/play hard game plan. It consists of us working our butts off during a regular 9 to 5 like day, heading home for some dinner and a rest and then heading out to meet up with friends and enjoy whatever adventures the evening may bring us. We made the decision to head out with some of the American students to a bar of their choice before moving on to meet up with our local friends at a different location. I feel that we have a different idea of what is a fun night out than some of our American friends. They think drinking cartons of wine before heading to a nearly empty bar to sit around and chat is fun. We think heading to a packed bar to make new friends and dance is fun. Therefore within an hour of hanging out with Team America at a bar called Hypnotiq we headed down the street to the liveliest party we could find.
Lizzy’s is a well known street bar that sprawls out onto the side walk of one of the main streets in Osu. Local music is pumping, there are street performers, people dancing everywhere and lots of people having a great time. From their we head to Baze, an Asian owned bar with blasting air conditioning (a real plus when you are trying to dance in Ghana) and really good music, a popular chill out bar to “warm up” before heading out for the night. Next is was back to Tantra to dance some more. Tantra is interesting because you get different crowds of people depending on the night. Fridays at Tantra is very mixed with tons of internationals and a fair few Ghanaians. Saturdays are much more of a local crowd, packs of Lebanese men and Ghanaians with much less foreigners than the night before. Nonetheless it has remained my favorite place to go dancing in Accra. The thing about late night dancing in Ghana is that you get really hungry at about 5 am. Now there is always a street vendor or two around to serve some kind of unidentifiable meat on a stick but fortunately our friends are able to direct us to some good places from munchies, the number one choice being the amazingly good for Africa Lebanese owned pizza place two minutes away from Tantra, and the other being the also Lebanese owned bar/restaurant/club Jokers which has one of the best Western food menus in Ghana other than Frankies.
This night was also our first experience dealing with the lovely Ghanaian police force. I do believe that some form of corruption exists in law enforcement in developing countries and to be honest Ghana is no example. We learnt this as six of us were being driven home from the club back to the university. Everyone except the driver was asleep in the car as we got pulled over because apparently our driver “ran a red light”. Afterwards we were told that this is a fairly regular occurrence in Ghana but An and I had yet to have any interaction with the police yet and were fairly in shock when the police officer got out and approached the car. He argued with our driver for some time and then insisted that we go with him to the police station to get a ticket. Now I am sitting in the front in between the driver and another one of the guys when the police officer insists that we get out of the car, the guy next to me gets out and as I am about to get out as well as the police officer gets in and sits next to me. I have a minor panic attack as we learn that he will be accompanying us on the trip to the police station so I am now sandwiched between our driver and Mr. Police Officer. The guys insist that they should drop us at home before continuing to the police station. The officer agrees and off we go to campus with our police escort. I am freaking out because this is a pretty unusual occurrence and later learn from An that while I am having a heart attack up front the guys in the back are pulling out all their money and counting it to see how much they have to bribe the cop once we are safely at home. The next morning the guys tell us that the cop was expecting a bribe and that they ended up paying him roughly the equivalent of $60 USD before dropping the cop off at his house. Not at the police station, at his house. We were pretty shocked by it all but have since learnt that “this is Ghana, this is how it works” (to quote one of the guys after all this went down). We have learnt that you can get away with a fair bit in Ghana (traffic violations whether real or fake, speeding, driving without a license ect.) if you have the money. It seems somewhat accepted that paying off people is part of life here, particularly, as it seems in our experience, if you are male and foreign looking, even the guys that have lived here all their life but who do not have black skin. An and I have yet to be faced with a situation involving bribery ourselves but we now have witnessed to it on more than one occasion.

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