An Interesting Ride to the Beach

I took a short trip to be beach today, but with Accra's traffic, I ended up spending more time traveling there/back than relaxing. On the ride there, the second tro-tro (minibus) I picked was blaring music out of a tape deck, and there were cassettes strewn across the front seat. "Only in Africa is there still I thriving cassette market," I thought.

I was quickly put straight when I hopped out and picked a shared taxi, who was blaring music off a USB memory stick plugged straight into his CD player. When he stopped at a junction, he yanked it out to swap with his buddy, and I saw that there is a USB port right on the face of the CD player (when did they start making such things!?). We cruised on to the beach listening to Burning Spear.

Juxtapositions like this are all over the place in Accra. If I had to describe Ghana to someone who doesn't know Africa (something I was totally unprepared for on my recent trip home), I would use stories like this.

Thoughts on Accra

I often try to place Accra within the context of Africa as I know it (from only a short trip to Kenya last year). I used to describe it as an African capital city, but also a coastal town. Or, "more similar to Mombasa than Nairobi". But the more time I spend here, the more I realize that it's not very similar at all to Kenya. Accra has neither the exoticism of Mombasa's mixed African and Arabic cultures nor furious extremity of Nairobi's vital urban center and equally vital shantytowns.

Accra is rather a sprawling suburb of mixed communities, each with its own micro-culture. There's no "bad part of town" and no city center. It's a place characterized most by its lack of extremes. It has never felt particularly unfamiliar or even very foreign.

I try with this blog to deliver unexpected and (I hope) intriguing nuggets of Ghana's culture as fodder for the imaginations of my readers (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) when they picture my life here. But the very fact that I find it more interesting to seek out and identify differences over similarities betrays the fact that Accra is not that strange. As often as it's the differences that make life interesting here, it's the similarities that make life easy.