Weaving from side to side, in fabric and cars

It’s amazing how fast one adapts to one’s surroundings.  For example, I can now ride in the front seat of a rickety old car, with no seat belt, as the driver careens wildly from one side of the road to another at 40 mph to avoid potholes, pedestrians, and the occasional cow, and pulls out to pass going head-on into oncoming traffic (and barely missing both the head-on collision and the passing car), with no second thoughts.

Of course, my first thought is usually “Holy-cow-mother-of-jesus-I’m-going-to-die,” followed by a fervent prayer not to reincarnate as a ground squirrel, but hey, you can’t have everything, right?

Things are going great in Ghana.  Kwame and I have been working on weaving a sampler, a single long strip of kente with quite a few Ewe designs in it.  Today I’m going to ask him to help me weave a placemat, so I can get an understanding of how they get those designs to line up so exactly.  It’s very slow work, about 7 hours for about 3-4 feet of woven strip, but even that should be enough to get me a small placemat, spread out over the next two days.  I hope, anyway.  I’d settle for a napkin. 

Ghanaian food is rapidly starting to wear on me.  Mostly what I’ve been offered so far consists of some kind of starch (boiled yam, a sticky mixture of cassava and corn flour mixed together, eaten with the fingers, a “bread” made from corn but not resembling cornbread in the slightest) and some kind of spicy, tomato-based stew with fish or meat, coconut or palm oil in it.  Tasty, but day after day is a little much.  I’d give a bunch for a burger right now.

Speaking of burgers, there appears to be a place in Accra that serves various bits of interesting game meat ““ zebra, kudu, antelope, etc. (nothing endangered).  I may try going there once I get back to Accra.