Here or There

The rain started at precisely 3:00pm this afternoon--sudden and strong--and four+ hours later it hasn't let up (photo: view from my bedroom). The low lying clouds and grey skies against the green hills remind me of Malaysia during its rainy season. But the papaya is a Ghanaian memory. And the arroz con pollo was not the white-rice-and-fried-chicken-leg of Accra, but a bland version of chicken-fried-rice KL-style.

I always compare new places to ones I've been to before---and it's something I hope to curtail...just not in this post! As my plane landed yesterday the landscape also reminded me a bit of Sierra Leone for the colorful tin roofs, but here is not nearly as impoverished nor am I on the coast. I had the general feeling the scenery was also like Laos, but in a way I can't quite pinpoint since my memory is always failing me.


I'm reminded vaguely of Bywel's, my Accra home. The walls of my bedroom here are slightly more green than a tennis ball is or maybe it's the color of a yellow highlighter...I remember the Ghana living room green fondly after this! I was forced to resort to my Ghana suck-in-your-breath-at-the-moment-you-enter-the-cold-stream-of-shower-water tactic. At least the water was flowing, which is more than could be said of Bywel's a lot of the time. But our apartment advert had said we'd have hot water, so this afternoon I inquired ("Tenemos agua caliente para la ducha?" For those of you who speak Spanish and can tell me just how wrong that sentence is, save it! I'll know myself in 10 months' time when I look back at this!) and the landlord fixed it up...though I think our concept of what constitutes hot water differs considerably. The stairs leading up to the bedrooms are a bit precarious, but not nearly as bad as the spiral staircase in Ghana. There's no bar outside our backyard, but there are two yappy neighbor dogs and maybe a couple of birds (?). We've got cable, a washing machine, a microwave and internet, though no oven or screens on the windows (but also no malaria). Overall, it's a cute little place. And the landlords are super nice--the woman brought us a hot snack yesterday after I arrived---flat fried egg on a thin tortilla, coffee for my German roommate Kathrin and "fresca" for me (turns out it's a bottled soft drink).

At lunch I managed to communicate that my roommate doesn't eat meat or chicken (ella no come carne o pollo, tiene algo sin carne o pollo?) and this evening figured out how the washing machine works from the landlord, though that was largely demonstrative. That month of self-study seems to have given me some useful phrases and I'm hopeful about how much I can learn while I'm here. Now it's just a matter of putting my ego aside and being willing to make mistakes! It dawned on me hours after the fact that I think I asked how much something cost...in French! I certainly said "merci" to numerous people yesterday before I could stop it from popping out of my mouth---and I don't even speak French!