Random Accra

My new roommate. I’ll say no more.

Don’t let them get wind of this in Canada

Ladies Kitchen Insurance. That’s right. Apparently there are a host of special hazards and accidents in Ghanaian kitchens but no fear. Ladies Kitchen Insurance can be bundled with home and auto. It is so indicative of the gendered nature of household labour here.

Except at Suma Court where we have a new chef. An excellent man from Burkina Faso who only speaks French. I knew all that time pouring over the menus and snooty French restaurants would come in handy. I am hoping for crème caramel again! An unexpected treat!

Sartorial Hawker

Seen on the road, and me without my camera …. An elegant young man, sunglasses, gleaming white shirt, pinstriped pants and natty, astonishingly bright chartreuse bowtie. What was he selling? He was holding three or four pairs of polished and gleaming men’s dress shoes. More remarkable is that fact that his own dress shoes were also gleaming in defiance of Accra’s ubiquitous red dust.

This young hawker stands in contrast to another, a middle aged woman walking with a red plastic laundry basket on her head. The basket was over flowing with brassieres, hanging from the sides, threatening to tumble from the basket: red lace, utilitarian white, sexy black, purple with astonishing padding, bras of all shapes and sizes…. But how you get a good fit at the intersection is beyond me….. and the driver won’t engage in conversation so it must be a little risqué.

Signs of the times

They ride ponies, too! As an addendum to Animals of Accra, another creature to add to the list, although not personally sighted, must be the polo pony

…. unless I am misled by the sign for the Accra Polo Club. Incidentally, this has surpassed the “Golfers Crossing” sign in Achimota Forest as the most incongruous site in Accra in my estimation.

And then try this do not trespass … a little different from our

Canadian custom of closing the campus roads one day a year!

Finally, there is the sign that captures the historian’s eye. The intersection of three eras captured on one traffic sign: colonial; traditional and generic modern.

This little piggie goes to market

So immediately upon lamenting the absence of a pig sighting, what is ahead of us in the traffic but a pickup truck (they ride lower that ours and are not nearly as intrusive on the road as a result) stuffed full of half a dozen pigs clearly on their last journey. These were not happy pigs. There was one teenage boy in the back with trying to keep them all lying down but really, six swine against one boy… you know the rest.

The pigs weren’t tied down or on leashes or in cages or anything like that. He just had to keep grabbing whichever one was trying to make a run for it and stuff it back into the truck. It was like a life size game of wack-a-mole with a lot more wriggling and a lot more screaming and better odds for the wackees. I do mean screaming:  not the boy but the pigs. I had never heard a sound like really unhappy pigs being led to slaughter.