Day 4

"You'll look up & down streets. Look over them with care.

         About some you will say, 'I don't choose to go there.'

                      With your head full of brains & your shoes full of feet,

    You're too smart to go down any not-so-good street."

Today was a day filled with tons of information. We began walks around campus & had an information lecture on culture, health, & safety. The culture part was very fascinating while the health part was slightly terrifying so I won't talk about any of those details on here :)

On our walk through campus I saw some very interesting things. First of all, the campus is huge! It is very spread out & there is practically a whole town within campus. They said it could take 30 minutes just to walk to our classes... In other words, I will never complain about MSU's parking again!

This is a market place that is right on campus. It's called the Night Market because most people head there at night. It's filled with fruit & friendly people, just like everyone else here. They all say "akoaba" when we walk by which directly translates to "has gone, has come," but simply means "welcome". They also call us "Obrani" which means white person. The language that they speak here besides English is Twi & very hard to understand. We have the option to take a course in it once classes start so I most likely will.

All the professors at this school live on campus. This is a picture of one the professors houses. If we can't meet them during office hours, we can just go to their house & ask for help! I think that would be illegal, or at least frowned upon, in the states. Although, it could be pretty convenient but not an option I'm likely to use.

 This is termite mound right on campus. And there's tons of them!

Chickens accompany our walks to class.

 A few statues on campus.

 A few of us chased this lizard around for a little bit today in the rain. Our guides weren't sure what kind of lizard it was though, so that ended the chase pretty quick!

 These little cuties were also around on campus today!

 I saw my first monkey since I arrived today. And it was on campus. With a leash.

 I'm so used to curbs lining the streets at home but they have these giant ditch/gutter type things instead. They are wider than tires so you would think that the drivers would be cautious but they drive around like crazy! I can't watch out the windows when we are on the bus.

Another statue on campus outside of the music hall.

After the campus tour we went to learn about the culture from Professor Kofi Agyekum. He was hilarious, another awesome person! He told some very interesting things about Ghana. For example, funerals here are more fun than weddings, is his opinion. People drink & celebrate that life that was lost because they believe that there is life after death. Some can take longer than a year after the death to happen in the case that family would be traveling from outside of Ghana to attend. I think my favorite thing that he taught us was that when someone asks "how are you?", they respond by saying "by the grace of God." And when asked to do something in the future, they respond saying "if God wishes." I just love that! I think it is so precious. He said around 90% of Ghanaians are Christians, so this is the most common response.

This is a picture of the rain storm moving in today. They told us this was the dry season, which to me means forest fires & a sky full of smoke for about a month. I'm very confused about what this means to them because it rained like crazy & is humid as ever.

 After the tour we went to lunch & then back to the hostel. Then a group of us decided to go to a pub on campus since we had some free time before dinner.

The pub was called "Tacobel" but trust me, they were not serving any greasy Mexican food. Most kids got these giant beers called "Star", but I opted out because a) my dad warned me not to drink here & b) I really dislike beer. We met three Ghanaian men there who sat with us & talked  for a long time. The only one whose name I remember was Joe Boy. He was pretty funny & played us some local music while demonstrating how to dance to it. They invited us to a beauty pageant tomorrow, which I thought was kinda funny but we are going into the city to a market place for most of the day so I don't think we'll make it :)

I went to the front desk today to help get my mosquito net set up & met the guy working there named Raybon. He asked me if we could be friends & I told him yes we can. According to Joe Boy, this is a fairly common question here, but I still laughed when he asked me.

We just had dinner & it's about 8:30 pm here which means time to wash off the dirt we collected today & head to bed for the night. Love to you all!

Kasey