classes & cape coast

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classes have been decent so far. both of my political science professors have really thick accents that are hard to understand and most of the two hour lecture consists of them reading information while expecting us to write it down verbatim. tutorials for these classes are supposed to start next week. other than that, we don’t really have any interaction with the professors. I ended up dropping the history class I had registered for and am taking literature of the black diaspora instead. the class is small and is taught by a native english speaker, which is a nice because she is very interactive with the class and I can actually understand what she says. my other female professor is fairly easy to understand and although the class is large, she still makes an effort to lead a discussion instead of straight lecture. a few of my classes are really big -at least couple hundred people in them. and the grading here is much different than I’m used to -in most classes, your grade is based off of one final comprehensive exam. granted the exam period is a few weeks long, it’s still scary not knowing what the exams will be like until then.

there are a few of us who don’t have class on friday’s so we made a trip to kokrobite beach which is a couple of hours away from campus. there are beaches that are much closer but they tend to be more crowded, a bit dirty and most are paid-entry so we figured it’d be worth the trip. the ride there was a bit confusing at first but we ended up on a tro-tro that let us off pretty close to where we needed to go. we started looking for a taxi when a nice australian man offered to let us ride in the back of his truck for the remaining five or so miles to the beach. it turned out that he owned a hotel/bar/restaurant right on the beach so we hung out there for awhile. the beach was beautiful and the sun came out for awhile so we could play in the water. as with most places here, we did get approached by people wanting to sell things and whatnot -among them were a nice man who co-founded a NGO that works with refugees in ghana and a crazy old lady who claimed to be from san francisco selling jewelry to help children’s music programs.. right. the ride back was equally confusing as the first but a cop saw us at one of the stops and rode with us until we were on a tro-tro that went to campus -but then asked for our phone numbers so I don’t know if his intention in helping us was entirely noble.

saturday morning we left for cape coast. we went to both the cape coast castle and elmina castle and both of the tours were based around the transatlantic slave trade. the feeling inside of the slave dungeons was very solemn; i don’t know how to explain it any better than that. it was a lot to take in. there were fishing boats and locals around the coast and it was cool to watch them work. the elmina area is one of the prettiest places i've been to. that night we stayed at a place called hans cottege botel. we went swimming and hung out at the bar -watched the crocodiles, birds and live band for most of the night. on sunday we went to kakum national park for most of the day. we went on a tour through the forest and on a canopy walk which was pretty much walking really high up in the rainforest on wooden boards with rope on the sides. it was raining the whole time we were there so it was kind of slippery and a little scary but very beautiful. we headed back to campus after kakum and got here by early evening. All in all, it was a great weekend.

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