togo

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last friday morning, anouk, taylor and i headed out for togo, the country directly east of ghana. getting there was fairly uneventful but we drove through the volta region which was really was beautiful. after a few hours we arrived in aflao. we got through immigrations
and realized that lome, the capital city of togo was just on the other side of the border -we had expected to have to travel further into the country to get there. after exchanging currency -cedis to francs- we headed down the main road of lome.
the first thing we saw after crossing the border was the beach about twenty yards to our right. the waves were really intense so swimming was out of the question, but the water was a lot warmer than it is at any of the beaches i've been to in ghana so it was nice just to wade. after hanging at the beach for a bit, we decided to find a place to eat and a hotel. one of the first things we noticed in togo was how much more expensive everything was. compared to prices in the states, things weren't bad at all. but we've been used to eating really inexpensively so paying three thousand francs (about ten cedis or seven dollars) for a meal seemed like a lot. the food was good though and having anouk there to interpret the french for me made things much easier.
we found a hotel nearby called 'la galion' and got a room for the three of us. (it's safe to say that our standards for niceness are pretty low and the only downside we found with the room was how many misquitos were in it. we spent a good part of the night watching for them and killing them with our hands). after dropping our stuff off at the hotel, we flagged down a few moto taxis and had them take us to the artisan market further into lome. we found some cool stuff but knew that we'd have the whole next day to visit the markets so we just checked out some of the stands but soon went back to the hotel. our room was in an annex and at one point we went to the main building and saw that there was a live band playing in the courtyard. they were singing covers in both english and french and the atmosphere was really cool. we watched them (along with a lot of other foreigners) for a couple of hours. we spoke to a spanish woman who wrote down some places for us to visit in togo and also some places if we ever get up to burkina faso and mali. it was a mellow night and we headed off to get some sleep.
the next morning we started looking for another hotel (there were a lot of them in the area and we just wanted to check out another place). we found a hotel by the beach called 'hotel lily.' this hotel was a bit nicer, cheaper for us (we split a room with a full size bed) and had a better location. the next place we went to was the local fetish market. we had heard from some other students that it was worth checking out. i'm not sure exactly what the belief is, but the fetish market has things that specialize in voodoo and traditional religion. we got there and were immediately approached by a man who claimed that if we wanted to enter the market we each had to give him 3500 francs. no one had mentioned this to us before so we questioned him about it and he kind of smugly told us that he kept all the money and if we didn't want to pay, we could leave. he was quite an ass. we went to one of the shops to verify that he wasn't trying to rip of us but they told us that's just how it is, even though the sellers don't receive any of the money. we didn't really feel like it was worth it to give the asshole guy money just for us to walk around the market so decided against staying. we were there
long enough to see some of the stuff, like monkey an alligator heads, locks of hair and small human dolls. it was kind of creepy but interesting.
we went back to the artisan market and bought some of the stuff we had seen the day before. shopping in africa takes a lot longer than at home because for everything you buy, you have to negotiate the price. it took even longer here because anouk had to interpret everything between us and the sellers. the first price sellers give is always high presumably because we're white, and we're expected to be naive about how much things should cost. but after some discussion we got things for pretty reasonable prices. we found a restaurant nearby to have dinner before going back to the hotel. it's funny because it was a really nice place but the power went out a couple of times while we were eating, kind of reminding us where we were.
we had heard of a few clubs to go to but after getting to togo, we were warned multiple times by both other foreigners and the local police that it's really dangerous at night and not to go anywere after dark -which is about six pm. so we spent the night in our hotel room, but we were in good company so it was just fine.
the next morning we stopped by the big market to get baguettes with guacamole (something we were told to try while there) and it became very evidenthow much poor of a country togo is than ghana. there was a lot of garbage on and around the roads. there were people begging for money everywhere we went -this doesn't really happen in ghana. there are people selling stuff everywhere but it's really rare to see people simply asking for money.there was one guy who woulnd't stop following us until a togolese woman came up and yelled at him to leave us alone. i love when people help us out like that. after getting food, we went to the beach to eat and i couldn't help getting in the water for a little. the undertow at beaches here is really strong but not usually unmanageable but this day i ended up getting pulled down by the undertow. it wasn't a big deal though. i stopped back at the hotel to change out of my wet clothes then we left for the border.
going through immigrations was interesting because it wasn't very formal. there was an immigrations officer that we saw both entering and leaving togo who asked me to show him all my piercings. it was so weird. we found a trotro (a bright pink one!) to accra right away and made it back to legon pretty early.
our initial reason for going this weekend was to get our passports stamped so we could legally stay in the country -so, mission accomplished.

there's usually plenty to do here as far as night life goes. when we haven't been traveling, we have been going out with our ghanain friends. karaoke here is just as much fun as it is at the trapdoor in the states. and last night we went to a club that had been rented out for a girls birthday. we were supposed to be going to benin for the day to go to the ghana v benin football game but the bus was hours late and at five in the morning, we got sick of waiting. it turned out to be a good thing though, the international students weren't allowed through the border and had to come back anyway. good ole ghana.

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