Kumasi Times

Our accommodation was pretty well placed near the centre of town and so we did a bit of exploring. Found a supermarket to get some Imperial Leather (have to treat myself don't I) and bulk buying of Fan Milks! Me and Dree spent the day on the Internet; myself trying to catch up on the blog, which I am still behind on - sorry! - and Dree sorting out some details for his start date at Freshfields in February. We took a break to go for lunch, and eventually found a small cafè hidden in some backstreets, where we ordered the plat du jour. This turned out to be some rice, dried fish sauce and a few chucks of unspecified meat. Not great, but worth trying these things. While we continued on the net, Barney and Kez had gone to visit a fort in the town centre.

That evening we decided to hit the town, as it was a Saturday night, and got dressed in our smartest gear. Well as smart as you can be when travelling - shower, deo and trousers! We had some food at a Chinese in town, where the waitress was obviously ready to go out for the night and rushed through everything. Dree and B ordered beef stroganof and it came out in a tomato sauce...

Then we headed to one of the "happening" spots in town, a little bar called the 'Old Timer's Club'. But when we arrived about 8:30pm it was empty; so we decided to try later. We picked a maquis out on the street and bought a few rounds of the local beers (Club and Star). We then had to try out the toilet, which was a ceramic cupboard round the side of the building. The inside was all tiled, but there was no urinal or toilet, it was just a hole in the floor, like there had been a shower in there. After checking with the waiter again he confirmed it was right, and we did things the Ghanaian way. When in Rome eh.....? (Another funny thing that happened in that bar was that Dree took off his flip flop to undo a bottle of beer - there is a bottle opener on the sole - and the waiter seemed to be quite offended. That or just very shocked!)

We headed back up the hill after a few more bevvies and checked out 'Old Timers', which was shut at 10pm. While deciding what to do, Kez heard some loud music, and we chose to check it out. As we turned the corner, we saw about two hundred people dancing in an empty car park. There were huge speakers blasting out awful African hip hop (imagine someone had found the different settings on a keyboard and was shouting into a mic at the same time!), beers for sale by the side of the meleè and even a Fan Milk bike! As we got dragged into the centre and attempted drunk African dancing - far more difficult than regular UK drunk dancing like 'big fish...' - the atmosphere was great.

But then someone spoke to one of the guys and found out that it was, in fact, a wake! We stayed for a little while but felt awkward enough about it being a wake and didn't like being the centre of attention - loads of people had gathered round us. We made our escape and found another drinking den called "SADisco". Unfortunately, this wasn't an actual disco, even though we had our dancing shoes on, and we just had a few drinks. I then spilt most of a beer over my crotch, and we decided to call it a night!

The next morning (Sunday) we crawled out of bed for a breakfast at possibly the best omlette lady in the world - giant mugs of tea and omlettes filled with tomato and greens of some kind in sweet bread. Really good grub. Then we discovered that you cannot do anything on a Sunday in Ghana. Shops were shut, restaurants closed (we luckily found one that was still open - think I'm still full from that mixed grill hahaha), and barely anyone was around. The only people we actually saw were in their Sunday best on the way to church.

Religion in Ghana is crazy. There are flyers and posters EVERYWHERE for 'Power packed Crusades', 'Healing Services', 'Prayer Sessions' and so on. Most of the religion seems to be Christian, but that can be split up into hundreds of different types - evangelical, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovahs, Protestants, Catholics, the list just goes on and on. Shops are mostly names with this in mind - 'Jesus Loves You Electrics' and 'Righteous Ray's Wholesalers' - and cars or vans are emblazoned with 'Good God', 'Jah Bless' or 'Jesus Walks'. Wow it's serious!

So as everything was shut we had a cheap day before trying to find bus tickets to Cape Coast the next day. However, we got the standard helpful Ghanaian lady behind the counter ("Its full"), and so had to risk it the next day.