Thursday, January 31, 2019

Accra, Ghana, January 31, 2019

What a horrible sleep!  The ground was super hard with rocks sticking up, there were lights on everywhere, a woman and man were having a huge argument outside the walled area, roosters were crowing, birds were making weird noises and at 4:30, a choir started singing and didn't let up.  Needless to say I was awake from 3:45 onward which was okay because we had a 6 am departure for the Equitorial Guinee embassy which is 35 km away in Accra.  We were advised by local taxi drivers that it might take us a few hours to get in because of traffic.  We got there in no time but were hugely ripped off at 150 ($39) instead of $13.  Oh well.  Once at the Equitorial Embassy, we were advised it would be better and cheaper to get our visa in a country closer to E.G. so we decided to try for another visa at the DRC embassy.  They too advised us to wait and thank goodness because there it cost $250 US, for a place we will only be a few days!  We were only 1 km from the National Museum so a few of us went there.  What a bust!  They are renovating so they only had a few photos of the city on display.  Our next stop was Accra Mall where believe it or not, there's a Second Cup!  I bought a pound of delicious coffee and am looking forward to drinking that!  I also bought a new cell phone, at least for half an hour or so.  In order to set it up with my iCloud account, I had to get a verification code and of course because I don't have the use of my home telephone number, that was impossible.  I tried with my credit card but they could not verify it so after a painful 20 minutes, the manager refunded my money. I paid with credit card but the bank the store uses does not refund on the POS machine so the store had to pay me cash.  That was a win for me because I needed to withdraw money and there are no "plus" debit machines in West Africa so I have to get a cash advance on my Visa.  I made the mistake last time of not having the money already in my account and even though I transfered some in the next day, it cost me more than $10 in interest!  

After another scorching day, I checked into the Marriot-



Pretty fancy!


Wow is all I can say.  I'm so looking forward to AC, a big beautiful bed, a shower whenever I want and on and on!  I planted myself on the bed and that's where I spent the rest of the day!  Looking forward to exploring Accra again tomorrow!

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