Like this:

Having lunch at the beach

 

24/7 Sarah and Felice: about flying peanuts (penises) and other adventures

 

How it all started:

8 pm 21-2-2009: the beginning of three months sharing trotros, breakfast, clothes, sunscreen and attention from guys. After 1.5 hour of waiting at the airport with  a name plate saying SARAH, finally the German girl arrived. Felice was pleasantly surprised by the small amount of luggage Sarah was bringing (she had/ has this image of Sarah as a girly girl that would bring lots of unnecessary luggage for living in Africa; which was partly true, for she had her hair blower in her hand luggage). The small luggage was however not on purpose, because her backpack was lost. This meant three days of suffering in a jeans for Sarah (thanks Edil for the t-shirt!) and three days of suffering for Felice because she had to spend all of her time in shopping malls searching for clothes.

 

Living:

While some of you might be living in houses made of cow shit in remote areas, our greatest frustration is that the internet is sometimes not working. Hard life. We live in the first floor in a huge compound, with two bedrooms, bathrooms and a private kitchen and a maid who cleans our rooms and makes our beds everyday. We even have a private security dog named Killer (who runs away if you sneeze to loud). Accra is a extremely pleasant city to live in. The combination of living close to the sea and nice sunshine makes us forget about all the first term study problems. We travel around by trotros (small buses), which are steered by maniacs but which also always assure funny conversations with strangers. Felice likes the trotros so much that she spends four hours a day in them travelling to her research organization.

                                                                                                                   

Research:

Are you really interested?! Nahhh….!

 

Leisure time:

On the first weekend together we fled from the noisy city to the relaxing (at least for the 5 minutes a day that the guys left us alone) beach village Cape Coast. Here we did all the compulsory stuff (visiting the former slavery fort in Elmina, buying souvenirs and doing a canopy walk in a ‘wild’ park). The only wild thing we saw was a goat, who didn’t last long because it was run over by our trotro. This almost brought Felice to tears and it was a good thing that the driver was out of her reach. We planned to go for a swim in Cape Coast, but we accidentally saw how much garbage and feces would join us in our swim. Nevertheless, we enjoyed ourselves getting rid of the beach boys and eating loads of fried plantain and red-red (bean stew).

 

Back in Accra we finally wanted to experience the amazing party scene that should exist in Accra. In Cape Coast we met a guy who recommended us to go to Paloma, so on Tuesday we totally dressed up (nice clothes, good hair day, make-up) for a lovely night of dancing. However, when we arrived there were 5 big screens with soccer and no music whatsoever. Words cannot express how overdressed we felt. But we decided to make the best out of it and settled ourselves at the bar with a margarita and a Southern Comfort. Maybe it was because we didn’t expect anything good could follow after our dramatic entrance, but we had the best evening ever. We were spoiled by the other visitors (mainly too old men and a horny Nigerian guy), who provided us with champagne, chocolate cake, red wine and even a free taxi home. (That taxi was a big disappointment for the Nigerian, who was sure that he could persuade us to spend the night with him, LOL).

 

This weekend we had the pleasure to meet up with Kwaku, his wife, daughter and cousin in his home country. We celebrated the national Independence Day together at the beach (you are allowed to be jealous). Sarah felt extremely white (obroni) while we went for a swim, but Felice is convinced that she looks more like a obibini (black person) already. On Saturday, Kwaku took us out to a place where real dancing occurred and where we didn’t look strange wearing a short skirt (Felice) and a rather revealing dress (Sarah). We really enjoyed ourselves finally dancing.

 

False assumptions.

Some of you might wonder how we are surviving each other. Before we left some people expressed the differences between us and even we wondered if we wouldn’t kill each other when we had to spend 24 hours together (Sarah even dreams about Felice; note from Sarah: NOT TRUE). But, as always, prejudices are there to be broken. Thus:

• Felice is not ‘melig’ (loud and hilarious) all the time. Although Sarah is still not completely used to her rather blunt comments.
• Sarah is not as posh as Felice thought. She is more a freaking hippie.
• Felice is not as messy as Sarah thought. She seems rather organized, but with food….
• Sarah and guys…(Note from Felice: I am not to allowed to type something about that, that would ruin our freshly established trust).

 

Still existing pre-assumptions:

• Sarah needs LOADS of time to prepare herself in the morning, according to her she is just adapting to the African rhythm.
• Felice is shameless in her comments, even in a packed trotro.
• Felice is a sport addict, she went running in Accra (under loud cheers from the Ghanaians) and she will have her first handball training tomorrow.
• Sarah is not sporty AT ALL (dancing is the only exception).

 

After word

Yesterday, Felice exposed to Sarah that she loves eating penises. And that she was very sad that she hadn’t had any that day, for the first time since her arrival. Sarah was shocked for a second, until she realized that Felice was pronouncing peanuts in a very Dutch way. From now on Felice swears to only talk about groundnuts. And if somebody wants to know about the flying penises…we will tell you in Amsterdam.

 

Have a good research/ holiday!!