The third week

Monday was Mary's birthday (a girl on the CIEE program), so we decided to make dinner. We attempted to tackle cooking plantains and pasta. Luckily, Gabriel (a U-Pal who works for CIEE) showed up and helped us with cooking the plantains, because after he showed us how to do it, I don't think we could have done it on our own. Turns out it requires a lot of patience and time stirring the plantains so they don't stick to the pan. If I can ever tackle plain plantains, I am going to try kelewele, which is fried plantains, but with spices so it has a nice kick to it. Unfortunately, I think it requires a lot of spices that can only be found here, so cooking them at home might be interesting,

We were actually quite successful with our pasta. We had purchased tomatoes and cut them up small, then put a small amount of vegetable oil and salt on the pasta, added tomatoes, and voila! It was really quite good. So I think a group of us from Pentagon are going to try to make that at least once a week. Right now I still really like Jolof rice and other types of rice, but I worry about getting sick of it, so I want to try to add some variety in my diet while I can.

Also, my Culture, Gender, and Reproductive Rights class met Monday, and I think it'll be great! It's a women professor, and she seems really interesting. She also said that the class will be very discussion based, which I think will be good, because the African students here are bound to have very different points of view than what I am used to. Unfortunately there was a lot of background noise going on around our classroom, so it was really difficult at time to hear what the prof was saying, but she seemed to realize that, and tried to talk loudly, but sometimes she forgot, resulting in me and the other white kids in the class being pretty confused.

On Tuesday my Human Rights in Africa class met and it is huge! Luckily, the prof uses a microphone, so hearing him was fine, although that doesn't mean I could understand what he was saying, haha. They have an interesting way of doing notes here. They aren't condensed at all, so the professor just rambles on for a long time and ends up giving you, more or less, a half page of one quote. Part of the problem of doing things this way is that when I can't understand what he's saying, it makes the rest of the quote hard to track. I guess I'll just need to work on getting more used to that way of taking notes. The other weird thing is how classes only meet once a week. I know it's for 2 hours at a time, but it still seems weird that I only have 10 classes of each left. I feel like it will be hard to learn anything that way, but I guess if this is how the school has been doing it, it must work out somehow.

Tomorrow is my first Twi test, here's to hoping I remember all my verbs. :)