Around Accra again

So have been staying in the city now for the past few weeks. There is not a huge lot to do in Accra.....but it makes for a very relaxing/or boring weekend.

At nights there are bars and clubs where there's a good chance of seeing most of the white population of Accra, Ghanaians not really being hugely night people, although there are places where they have live music and dancing, but its generally starting very early and finishing early.

During the day, I've been going to a nearby market, which has huge amounts of materials, and just generally everything you could ever need so its always interesting to look through, although sometimes need to run as the bottom floor is all the food, and apart from huge piles of eggs, plaintains, yam, onions, flour, tomatoes and more more...there are the meat and fish sections which are not the nicest smelling, but you can see everything just sitting out there on the benches! As well as live crabs and snails.

There are some beaches around Accra but sadly because they are so close to the city, they are overpopulated with annoying people who want to sell you something every second, or become your friend because they've always wanted to live in your country, even if they've never heard of it! There's also a lot of rubbish in the water, from the countless plastic bags around mainly, but also old shoes seem to wash up a lot.

The weekend also gives the chance to go out for some nicer food, to escape the rice and stew of during the week, there is something which looks very much like a normal cafe, that does real breakfasts, and also the other day we went to an Indian restaurant which actually had very very good Indian food, and some amazing naan bread, so there are places around, you just gotta know where to find them which is always the hard thing here.

Directions in this city are not the easiest, where a street sign is a very very uncommon occurance, most the 'addresses' of most places consist of sayin they're down the road from, next to, or opposite, some other hopefully more well known landmark, which can make trying to find places very challenging sometimes

Traffic is also insane here, from 7am through until 7pm Mon to Fri and most of the day Saturday sometimes, there is standstill traffic, and the raod system means you have to use the main car locked roads as there is no alternative to getting places around back roads at all, people are also everywhere all the time, selling things on the side of the road, blocking all the footpaths, which you can only see when walking past 9 or 10 at night once they've gone to sleep, and then walking amoungst the traffic on the road selling mainly water, but generally I've seen a wide wide range of things being sold through the windows of cars.

There is also one shopping mall in Accra, where its quite nice to escape to sometimes if you want to walk around but have the pleasure of doing it in air conditioning. Any walking through the markets gets too much after half an hour due to the heat and people, every second you are stopped with someone telling you to buy something.

The worst place is the tourist orientated arts centre where there is hundreds of sheds with each person selling his/her craft type stuff, wooden statues and carvings, paintings, bead jewellery, materials and material made bags and clothes are the main ones, and as soon as a white person walks into this space there is a crowd of people instantly there ready to help show them round, or take them straight to their shop, they can be very annoying sometimes, but will generally go away if you ask them to. It makes it very hard just to wander around and look at things at your own leisure thought, there is always someone hovering.