The road to...home

The day did not exactly get off to a brilliant start, you know.

I awoke this morning to thunder, lightning and heavy rain at 7:00 a.m.  I didn't see much point in getting up, so I dozed for awhile and finally rolled out of bed around 9:30 to begin the process of getting home. Normally, I consider this to be scandalous, and in my normal life, I have lost the ability to sleep in this late unless I'm sick. Realizing that this is most decidedly not my normal life, I decided to cut myself some slack.

I thought the road home would best begin with a shower.  And I was thinking that with all that rain, the problematic "water pressure issue" that was interrupting running water at the Osaken Beach Resort would be corrected.

Pleased at the steady stream of water flowing from the shower, I decided to give my hair a good washing and lathered up. And shaved my legs. And washed my face.  And then, just like that (snap fingers), it was gone.  The water. Not even a trickle.

No problem, I thought.  I'll simply switch to the bucket-shower-method to rinse my extremely-lathered head. Sadly, there was no water in the lower faucet either, and that posed a problem for this shampoo-full obruni.  I grumbled about how I had spent 2 years growing my hair long, only to have it end like this - a bunch of split ends and a head full of shampoo.  You know, like all dressed up and no place to go.

Fortunately, once I stopped grumbling I remembered I had 1-1/2 bottles of water on the table in the room, and that's how I managed to rinse my hair.  I'm not saying it was a great rinse or even a good rinse. I'm just saying that, except for standing outside naked in the rain, I exercised my only option.  Just sayin'.

Once past that crisis, I knew the deserted and rain-soaked Osaken Beach Resort would not be an option for food for awhile. The rain stopped, so I decided to try the snack shop Bea's brother had recommended in a building down the street. Shugar's. That's Shugar's. With an H.

While people are expected to give extra money to everyone for everything in Ghana, waitresses are the exception. Tipping  the waitress just isn't something Ghanaians do. Service is slow because there's no real incentive to be fast. Customers grumble, the waitresses grumble back.  It's not a good system.

The "omelet, toast, cheese, grilled tomatoes, sausage, oatmeal and tea/coffee" breakfast sounded like the best of the two options.  Of course, as is common in Ghana, the restaurants are often out of a lot of the menu. So it was omelet, bread (toaster broken), no cheese, no tomatoes, no oatmeal (big disappointment), no coffee but tea (better anyway), and sausage = a hot dog.  I rarely eat hot dogs even at home, and I was certainly not going to try one here. 

The breakfast was OK.  A bit pricey at $5.50 cedis for all the options not available, but what's a hungry obruni gonna do. I reminded myself that I was not in Wa or Ho anymore.  Accra is an expensive city. Heck - Wa doesn't even have a place go for breakfast.

I came here, to the Vodaphone Internet Cafe to check in for my flights, but the online check-in keeps coming up "error on page."  So I will call them when I get back and perhaps try again later.

Hoping for just a few more travel mercies...