A Taste of the Town

About half our group is heading out on Friday, so we took yesterday and part of today to actually do a few tourist-y things....

The main event of yesterday was a canopy walk. We took a bus (a very small, very crowded) bus to Cape Coast, which is to the west and takes about 3 - 4 hours to get to. We arrived at Kakum national park for the canopy walk, which proved to be quite exhilirating. The entire tour is about an hour long, about half of which is spent doing the actual canoopy walk (you kind of have to walk through/up a trail first to get there. So, for the canopy walk, envision a bunch of wooden planks strung together from one tree to another, suspended from a rope bridge type contraption which hangs from two steel cables about a hundred feet in the air. yep. It was really awesome. There were about seven of these bridges, which went from one tree to another (with a tree-house-like platform at each) and wrapped around back to the started. Rather freaky, really fun.

We were going to try to take a tour of the old slave castle on Cape Coast as well, but it ended up being too late. We did get to stop there for a few minutes though and just look at the outside. And we were about a hundred feet from the ocean too, so we had some really cool views. (Some of us also may have gotten a bit soaked by one particularly large wave that crashed up against the cliffs... about that....). Then we took the four hour bus ride home, got back nice and late, and went to bed. [By the way the road to Cape Coast was the most annoying thing ever -- like every 1000 feet there are two sections of these things half way between speed bumps and rumble strips, but with all the worst features of each lol. just part of the experience lol.]

Then today we went to Accra mall (which is pretty much just a normal mall) for a few hours. Andrew and I are staying right in the city, so everything we've seen so far has been more of the market place vibe, whereas this was an actual indoor mall. It's about 20 minutes away, so we took a taxi to get there. (Me and Andrew have become quite the city-slickers, experts at bargaining with cab drivers lol. We got there today for 4 cedis, or a little less than 3 dollars.) I got a soccer jersey and a shirt that's of the local style (kind of loud-patterned button-up shirts). That'll probably be the extent of the souvinirs I get for myself lol. We also got some well-earned pizza at the mall lol -- we've been sampling the local fair they whole time we've been here, and experienced our share of interesting meals lol (a combination of yams, rice, or plantains with a peice of meat/fish along with this kind of mix of vegetables and this orange oil is usually the normal building blocks for a meal, give or take. then there's fufu. no comment. and i'm pretty sure I was eating intestines last night... probably better not to know lol.)

So tomorrow our team leader is meeting with the country leader from Ghana to discuss the trip and future plans for this same type of trip. We've done a ton of good so far (more than we realize I think), but of course things can always get better. Then the first half of the group ships out firday morning. That'll be really strange....

But we're really hopeful for some great things to come in the next two weeks for the remainder of the team. We'll be praying that we God lets us really do some wonderful things in this second half of the trip, and we've got a few cool prospects. I'll let you know what we decide for sure (we'll probably get going at the beginning of next week)....