I arrived early this morning after a long delay at Kennedy Airport. I was rather surprised that Kennedy doesn't have an Internet cafe or shower rooms. Oh well, with six hours to kill I took a bus into the city and went shopping.
I was supposed to meet John here in Ghana but he missed his plane out of London and won't arrive until 3:00 am Monday morning. We then head to Monrovia, Liberia for the week. Too bad, not only because I haven't seen him in three weeks, but also because he is missing out on a great beachside hotel. Something we won't have in Monrovia!
This is my first time in Ghana and it is not bad. I hired a car and driver for the day so I could see a bit of the city. The air is clean and while there is poverty, it is not as overwhelming as in other places. It's very lush and green with red clay. Cars are the major mode of transportation yet one can still see women walking with baskets balanced on their heads (look Ma, no hands!)and young men pulling carts loaded down with sacks of grain.
There are fantastic neighborhoods where folks who made money in the US have come back home to live and work in their own businesses. There are also neighborhoods that have red dirt roads with rows of tin roofed shacks. They have no glass in the windows and colorful cloth is used as a front door.
Edward, my driver took me to a great local restaurant for lunch. I had Red-Red, fried red plantain with black-eyed pea stew and chicken, yummy. Fish, of course, is fresh but it was served intact, complete with head and bones. I don't really care for that preparation.
There was a strange occurrence this morning at the baggage carousel. People would pull off bags, examine the tags and then put them back on the carousel. The odd part was that the same person would pull off several bags that didn't resemble each other. For example, one bag would be black, another was plaid or brown. They would then walk away with a completely different bag, like blue. This happened numerous times. It was like they were taking inventory of who was on the plane. I remember thinking, "don't they know what their bags look like?"
I've never seen so much shrink wrapped luggage in my life. In fact, I've never seen shrink-wrapped luggage before. It was so heavily packaged that you couldn't even tell what color it was. Not only that but the shrink-wrap was held in place by silver duck tape. Pity the screener who had screening duty when those pieces came through the line.
Anyway, we are off to Monrovia in the morning. I will try to write from there but I've heard that very few Internet cafes are up and running. So if you don't hear from me, don't worry, I'll catch up with you when I can.
If I do get through, as always, feel free to forward these messages to family and friends.
Take care, See you soon, Love, Joni
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