Nigerian Food :)

Friday, February 25, 2011
This weekend I did not travel, so my Friday was completely free. I had full intentions of working on the twenty page paper I was assigned that is due on Wednesday, but instead I ended up out for the night. I did spend the day with my roommate and doing my paper sporadically. Later on some of us decided to go to the Mausoleum of Kwame Nkrumah and visit the museum. The exhibit was very interesting, we learned all about the first president of Ghana that led them into independence. However, I also learned that I am not in favor of any of his policies or the people in which he aliened himself. There are two pictures of him and Castro inside the exhibit and also with other dictators around the world. He attempted to turn Ghana into a socialist country, but was inevitable assassinated with all of his dreams for the country never being fulfilled. The museum consisted of about fifty photos of the president along with some items from his dorm room when we was in college, it was an extremely bear room with little to look out when comparing it to a museum you may see in the states. However, we did enjoy our day and after we finished exploring the grounds we made our way to The Rising Phoenix, a restaurant in the area. We had to walk through a small part of the slums to get there, which was extremely sad, but the place was surprisingly beautiful. The restaurant was based on entering the magic and there were signs and quotes all over the walls and shells placed in the ground with different sayings. Dinner was delicious although as usual they essentially sold five different items with the remainder of the menu just made up. We waited for about two hours before we got our food, which to no surprise to us was wrong. The mistake was fixed and we received our food in due time. We left and made our way back to the trotros, which is always an adventure when you have more than two people to find seats for. We finally got onto the trotro and made our way right in time for dance. I attended dance class which wasn’t as much fun as in the past. I am having a hard time with not having mirrors to looks at. In ballet I know once I perfect a step that I am doing it correctly and that I look like everyone else in the class. Conversely, in African dance after my feet are correct I have no idea if I look right or if my feet are actually correct or not.
I had plans with Demola (who is Nigerian), Peter (Ghanian), and Sarah (American) to go out to dinner in Osu. Demola said he was going to take us to House of Ovation the best Nigerian food in Accra. Dance ran late so we did not leave the hostel until around nine. By the time we got to the restaurant it was relatively late and the food on the menu no longer resembled what they actually had available. In the end we allowed Demola to order for all of us after we gave him an idea about what we would like. I got Eba with some soup that was made of leaves called efo riro. The dish resembled the presentation of fufu (which you can see a picture of on my facebook). Eba is ground up cassava, which looks almost like bread doe and it is placed inside a soup that is spicy. Everyone else got pounded yam and “soup” called ewedu, which was not like American soup. The soup was not liquid it was made up of spinach and tomatoes with some spices and a small amount of liquid on the bottom. The pounded yam is also like bread doe that is eaten with the soup. Sarah didn’t like her dish because she doesn’t like spinach, so we swapped meals and we were both in heaven. I loved my dish and the best part was I got to eat it with a fork! Demola used a fork so it gave me the perfect excuse not to use my fingers like both Peter and Sarah were eating.
When we arrived at the restaurant we sat right away and it took about twenty minutes for a waitress to come, although we were the only people at a table. Then it took an additional fifteen minutes to obtain menus and more time for the waitress to come back o take our order. After we finally ordered something that the restaurant was able to make, we left the table and decided to play a game of pool. The time went by quickly and it was only a little over an hour before our food came out and we were able to eat. When we were finished the check came and we waited about thirty minutes before they took the money to return and say they didn’t have change (something that happens everywhere we go in Ghana, no one has any change not even five pesewas).
After dinner the three people I were with decided that we would go to the Container to get some drinks, even though I had a paper to write and was greatly opposed to going out. On the walk over it began to pour and we got soaked. It had rained earlier in the day when we were in the cab on the way to the restaurant and our experience was terrible. The car did not have any way to defrost the windows, so the driver had to keep wiping the windshield off with a cloth. Additionally, we were forced to put the windows up because of the rain and the car became so hot it was hard to breath. So we were better off walking in the rain then getting into another cab. They each got some drinks and we waited the rain out. We got in another cab and went to Purple Pub, which was essentially the same as the Container with worse music. We didn’t stay there long although we did meet up with several other students from our program and their Ghanaian friends. We left the pub to go to a club, and by this point it was to late for me to start my paper so I was content with making my way to somewhere that I could dance. We went somewhere new named Twist, which we clearly had no idea how to get to. The cab had to drive us around in circles several times before we finally found the club, which played mostly Nigerian music. It ended up being a lot of fun and thankfully it was free for everyone to get into. We danced until three when the club closed and then we went over to Duplex because it is opened until five. We met three boys at the club that we had met at another time a couple of weeks earlier. They are Americans that are in the Military and have been stationed in Ghana for over a year. So their driver took us to our next generation, which we remained at until closing. We finally made our way back to the hostel by 5 am. As I am sure you figured out I got nothing done in terms of my paper that night.