double naporization

this is my favorite photo from my trip. lindsay and i happened to be at a meteor-crater lake formed about a million years ago when these boys from the local village decided to kill two birds with one stone, bathing and bringing water home for cooking at once. i snapped it with some sly hand action and am grateful that it came out so beautifully.


i don't know where to begin in explaining my time here in ghana over the past 2 weeks. it's been unreal, enlightening, frustrating, sad, educational and fun.

i'm hoping the photos and my commentary will help tell the story a bit. it's not easy to get photos here, as it is rude to take pictures of people without asking (understandably so) and once you ask the moment is usually gone. this baby was sitting on the sidewalk in town all by herself. i didn't see anyone around. i'm sure her mother was inside, but it struck me as a typical ghanaian moment.

right outside of accra, the capital of ghana, there is a canopy walk, where you can walk high above the rain forest and look down at the trees. lindsay and i had fun jumping up and down on the wooden walkway while holding onto the ropes to test out the guides assertion that it was very sturdy. still, half the people who were there were too scared to walk over. it was pretty high up.

we went shopping in kumasi, the heart of the ashanti region, for some traditional kente cloth. lisa, my roommate from brooklyn, for those poor souls who don't know her, had dropped a hint that she could use some cool fabric from africa. i was happy to go on a mission. i believe lindsay snapped this shot right as i was thinking "you want how much for this?" bargaining here is part of the culture. if you are white, they automatically triple the first offer. it's ridiculous and can be frustrating, but lucky for me, i'm an ace at their game. hold tight lisa; christmas is coming.



my uncle rob used to live here and he recommended that we do some kind of tour to travel around. not being tour type people, we thought we could handle the buses, hotels, daily plans, meals, etc on our own. after 3 days in accra, i realized we were wrong. getting a bus ticket takes about 3 hours. finding a restaurant that isn't out of everything other than some really funky local food with unidentified meat in it can be impossible. airline tickets are impossible if you don't book them ahead of time, so we weren't able to go to mali. i found this out after i spent a whole day and $130 on my visa to mali. $30 of which was a bribe to get it done within the week. bribes are pretty common over here. anyway, we decided to take our wise uncle's advice and go to the travel agency he recommended. they hooked us up with a tour guide, driver and mercedes to take us to the cape coast, where the slave forts are, and to kumasi. we got pretty tight with george (the driver, on the left) and ben (the tour guide, on the right). they showed us a good time, despite their overprotective behavior and fighting about the radio station. ben ended up being the hero of my trip. ask me to tell you why when i see you in person. it involves my backpack getting stolen by a taxicab driver.

there are goats everywhere here. everywhere. i'm just goofing around here. notice i'm wearing lindsday's outfit from the previous picture. yeah, that's because all my clothes were in my backpack that got stolen. sweet.


the children here are precious, especially in the small villages. when we show up there, they hollar ABRUNE, ABRUNE!, which means "white person" in twi, the most common of the 49 national languages. the children want to say hello and have their photos taken. they also usually want to touch our white skin and then they like to observe our every move. some of them ask for money or pens. in retrospect, we wish we would have brought used clothes or books for the people here. next time.

everyone here walks around with stuff on their head, be it watermelons, a bowl of onions, a bunch of huge branches, or in this man's case an enormous amount of shredded cassava. seriously, i have the worst posture of anyone in this country because they all stand up super straight. most of the women have something on their heads and a baby on their






back just like this, tied with 2 yards of cloth, which is usually very colorful. i'm impressed.

my journey is coming to an end. i'm ready to go home to see my family, have a hot shower and get off this stupid malaria medication. then i'm off to jamaica with my ladies to help celebrate the end of angela's bachelorettehood. after that, i move to new haven and start school. finance and accounting is not going to be as cool as trotting around the world, but it will be good nonetheless.

dubai photos

dubai and the beginning of ghana

after a sleepless overnight flight from bangkok to dubai, i floated through the dubai airport with ease and was in utter delight at how user-friendly this place was. the customs people were smiling (i don't think i've ever seen a customs person smile before, in any country), the information desk was helpful and called my hotel to tell them i was coming, and the taxi drivers were so civilized (such a welcome change from asia where they run over one another trying to get your attention).

i had one night in dubai, so i sprung for a fancy hotel. i let go of $5 and $10 rooms back in thailand after losing sleep due to a very noisy rat who apparently found something in my toiletry case tasty. i arrived at the sheraton and they actually let me check in at 7:30am for no additional fee, again, something i've never seen before. i guess when a place gets 40% of its income from tourism, they attempt to make everyone want to come back for more. after a short nap, i decide to hit the streets. i put on long pants and a modest black t-shirt, but i still look a bit trampy compared to the traditional black dress the local women wear. whatever. i let my instincts guide me around the streets. it's hot. incredibly hot. i'm feeling lightheaded and weak. i ask myself when the last time i ate a meal was. it was last night's dinner in bangkok with abina, where we got a little tipsy on wine (good wine is not easy to find in thailand and i was really excited). huh. maybe i should have eaten more solid food. oh well, i keep walking. i'm not really getting anywhere, and i'm feeling increasingly ill. i decide i need to eat. the only place i passed was a baskin robbins. considering what happened to my digestion the last time i ate ice cream, i decide this is not the best option. so i walk back to the hotel wondering why i'm so nauseous. then it hits me. THOSE DAMN MALERIA PILLS I STARTED TAKING YESTERDAY. it's all coming back to me now, my upper east side medical doctor warning me of the various side effects of the cheaper medication i opted for: anxiety attacks, lightheadedness, vertigo, etc. (i wasn't going to take anything, but when i told my dad he looked really scared and told me he trusted i would do what was best. i pictured calling home to him from africa with the news that i had malaria: nightmare! the whole "hey, i broke my knee surfing" was bad enough, so i spent $100 on the pills.) i ate some food and felt better. during the meal i looked at the map and realized my hotel was not in walking distance of anything. i also realized i hadn't slept more than 9 hours in the past 42 hours. so, i resigned myself to being a tourist and signed up for a 6 hour city tour. being carted around on an air-conditioned bus while someone tells me what to look at sounded pretty damn good.

i don't feel that i have enough experience to say anything valid about this city. i was really only outdoors for about 2 hours total. but, from my limited time, i would say if you mixed wall-street with the desert, threw in some forward-thinking architects and tons of people with disposable income, you'd get something like dubai. i've never seen anything like it before. in fact, i actually, at one point, had to ask myself "should i go camel-riding, skiing or to the beach now?"

i went to bed at 11pm when the tour was over. i crashed into my bed, luckily remembering to stop at the front desk to tell them i needed a 4am wake-up call so i could make it to the airport in time for my flight to ghana.

here's a small piece of advice for travelers: if you are about to board a 8 hour flight and want to get a little shut-eye, skip coffee in dubai. i have no idea what they put in the stuff, but i wouldn't be surprised if it was crack. if, however, 10 hours of in-flight tetris sounds good to you, by all means, have a double. like i did. then, have some free wine at 8am thinking, incorrectly, that it might knock you out. man, i can be a moron sometimes. it was 10 hours because we had "technical difficulties" before take off. lovely.

so, my hotel in ghana was set up to pick me up at the airport, but alas... they were not there. i used someone's phone to call (again, for a dollar) and she said she forgot. he'd be there in 30 minutes. i gave her a piece of my mind. i believe i uttered phrases along the lines of: "do you know how long i've been traveling and how tired i am?" and "in my country, this kind of behavior is incredibly unprofessional and plain rude. i wonder if i even want to stay at your stupid hotel." the poor woman had to take all my anger at the many, many airport pickups gone wrong in the past 3 months. but when my driver, Prince, showed up, i couldn't be mad at him. not with that smile and friendly-manner. plus, i was happy to observe the airport people doing their thing. when i met the swiss woman who owns and runs the hotel, we hugged and apologized to each other. now we're great friends.

if i had more time on this computer i would write about how i can't stop smiling in this country. the people, the food, the smells, the music, everything makes me smile. and everyone smiles back. maybe it's because everywhere i go men tell me i'm beautiful and ask me to go out with them tonight, or marry them. maybe i'm smiling because my sister is joining me in 2 hours. yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!! speaking of which, i should get going. the airport is a bit of a trek from where i am.

thanks for reading. if you've made it this far you obviously care about me a little bit. i appreciate it. and i'm looking forward to coming home in 2 weeks time. (sort of).

me, abina and 10,000 other party-goers

last week the lovely abina - who i worked with at iin, lived with for a few months, have spent the last 2 new years with in her hometown in vermont and is just about the smartest 24 year old woman you'll ever meet - came to meet me in koh samui. we planned to go to the full-moon party together and see what the eastern islands of thailand had to offer. it's been fun to have a friend who has known me for more than 3 hours.

we had many adventures, including: 3 thai massages, drinking a smidge too much with strangers from all corners of the world, being the only diners at a romantic restaurant who were not on their honeymoon, a heat-induced 4am panic attack in a beach bungalow, being minorly molested by a man running a temple with a mummified monk, and renting a car and getting through the day without getting lost (thanks to her map-reading skills) and not killing any thai motorbike drivers (thanks to my driving skills).

that first photo was in our favorite hotel, where we stayed during the full-moon party. the view was a little ridiculous. we couldn't stop looking at it. one night i just stared out the windows for 2 hours straight. the photo was taken at 9am after the big party - where literally 10,000 twenty-somethings congregate on the beach, dance to last year's music and drink hard liquor out of buckets. i didn't really want to be awake at that time, but we had a boat to catch.





a celebretory moment on the beach with some bubbly. drinking to abina's graduation, my trip and a bunch of other stuff that is nonsense to everyone but the two of us.

that deck was the spot where we had our fancy dinner. the setting was a little out of control. ah... thailand. i'm going to miss it. i'm at the airport in bangkok right now waiting another hour before i board my flight to dubai.