The End of Week Two

I had an actual class on Thursday! It was Regionalism and Ethnicity in Ghana and I think it'll be a good class. Unfortunately the professor doesn't do so well with speaking into his microphone, so there were a few times when I had no idea what he was really saying, but overall I was able to get the general idea. As long as he writes his notes on the board, I should be ok. I sat next to a Ghanaian student who is in his final semester here at Legon. He was really curious about what I thought of Ghana and the university and how it was different than home. It was nice having an actual class and not feeling out of place. I mean, I could tell that I was obviously a minority in the class, but I also felt like another student and just like someone else, which was really nice.

I spent the night with Clara's host family on Thursday and it was nice to have a home cooked meal, and to just be off campus for awhile. In the morning, we went to her families seamstress with fabric and now I have dresses being made. I can't wait to see how they turn out and have something nice and cool to wear here.

Friday night I went to a kind of, sort of, dance show. It was some of the dance classes here at the University showing the other classes what they had learned so far. The way people dance here is amazing! They move their bodies so well to the beat of the drums, and the drummers are something else too. I feel like they have a better sense of matching body moves to any type of beat than we do in the states.

Saturday we had a CIEE field trip. We went to a glass bead place, where we got to watch the process of making beads, going from glass, to dust, to coloring, to melting, to the final product. It was really neat to see. Then we went to Aburi Wood Carving, which is this area in the town of Aburi that was created solely from these wood carvers who found trees the liked, set up camp and just never left. There are small stands all over selling the things they make, and it's pretty amazing to see the type of details they can do. Our last stop for the day was the Aburi Botanical Gardens. The only other gardens I have been to were in New York, so I was expecting to see something like that, but this was really just a huge garden with trees. There weren't a lot of flowers or color. A lot of green and different types of trees, but nothing more than that. We saw one tree that was hollow on the inside. The way it works is that a tree finds a host tree and starts wrapping itself around this tree. Slowly, the guest tree takes over the host tree, and the host tree ultimately dies, leaving the inside of the new tree hollow! It was so cool!

There was a Durbar last night for all international students, and I met some people from California, here with a different program. As much as I like everyone in CIEE, it was nice to meet people that I haven't spent the past two weeks with. The food was delicious, and there were plantains, which I am slowly, but surely becoming addicted to, haha.

With two weeks down, I am starting to feel more confident that I can handle being here for four months. There are times when four months seems like a horribly long time, but then I realize how many things there are that I want to do between now and then, and I know I will be fine. As long as I keep myself occupied, I'm pretty sure the time is just going to fly by.