Ghana, Part 1: Visiting Jim

Senya is beautiful.  It’s green, first of all, with a huge blue sky and brightly colored little shops and houses on the road that leads to the ocean.  The people are friendly and incredibly nice (we got two or three free rides from people we didn’t even know, just because they wanted to help out), there’s watermelon and fresh pineapples, and on a cliff overlooking the beach, there’s a whitewashed castle where you can sit and drink a cold beer with friends.

Senya is where my friend, Jim, lives.  Jim is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana, but more importantly, he lived in the same college (dorm, house, whatever) as I did in college for all four years.  This means that he gets all of my inside jokes from two years ago, knows all of my college friends almost as well as I do, and will happy chant “JIBA, JIBA!” at the top of his lungs with me after a couple of beers.  Or, you know, before.

Anyway, so after a year in Benin, it was amazing to see someone from my previous life.  And lord, did he treat the three of us like princesses. He and his friend Bob picked us up after a hellish trip from Benin to Ghana and not only did they take us to a place with fresh fish and dollar beers ON TAP, but they also found us an awesome hotel WITH AC for the first night.  Which was good, because the first two hotels we’d planned to stay in were... um... full, and/or nonexistant.

• Jim ‘n Bob then organized our entire first couple of days in the old Gold Coast – I think the biggest decisions we made were what new beer we wanted to try (Ghana has milk stout!) and whether or not we wanted mayonnaise on our morning toast (they have toast!).  We were in Accra the first night, and then went to Jim’s village.  Highlights from our village sidetrip:
• Jones nostalgia, hands down.  Remember how I melted my favorite Jones water bottle while trying to make tea last August?  Guess what he brought me all the way from America?  Yep.  Not even kidding.  Oh, also we made a pact to get his friends and my friends together at Flying Saucer before the end of 2015.  Friends, save the date.
• Milk stouuuuuuuuuuuuut!  Real beer, what?
• Cool photo ops: fisherman boats slipping in between big waves, 6-foot-tall red dirt termite mounds, and that one lone car coming down a hill after nightfall. 
• Sitting on the top of the old castle (yes, it’s really from back in the colonial days) with a cool drink, a camera and some good friends.  Next time, I’ll wear sunscreen (and/or take off any band-aids I happen to be wearing), but besides the unintentional rosiness of my shins at the moment, it was a pretty spectacular afternoon. 

Thanks, Jim ‘n Bob, and can’t wait til you come to Benin – get ready for a crash course in voodoo, sodabi, and the many joys of zemidjan transit.

The tall things are termite mounds.

Jones reunion!  Note how well we color coordinated.

Walking to Senya's village center from Jim's house.

Rediscovered the long exposure setting on my camera...

Feel like this should have a really dramatic
caption, but Victoria's just walking to meet
Jim at the top of the castle on the coast...

The view from the top of the castle

Four of us (thanks Bridget for taking the picture!) drinking cold beers
on the top of the castle.