Ron’s Birthday

Today is Ron’s 38th birthday and we are still in Ghana, a place halfway around the world he never imagined himself to be. With all of our recent sicknesses and struggles, I thought it would be nice to throw the budget out the window and have some fun American-style. The first luxury was two cups of coffee with breakfast, followed by a taxi instead of a tro-tro to the Accra Mall. Stepping inside was surreal, not only did it feel like stepping into a fully westernized shopping outlet, but seeing all the well-to-do Ghanaians in one place was shocking. We still felt massively out of place but in very comfortable surroundings.

We strolled the shops and stopped for a delicious pizza cooked amazingly well on a conveyor belt instead of a traditional oven. Next, we stopped in Rhapsody, the only ritzy bar we saw in Ghana for cocktails and some soccer. Interestingly enough for two unlikely sports fans, Ron and I have both been enjoying the World Cup, cheering loudly with the rest of the country as Ghana beat Korea.

Off to a movie in the cinema, Pelham 123 with Denzel Washington. The theater was new and modern, charging modern prices of 10 cedi ($7) a ticket. As everything else is late in Ghana, it should not have been surprising that on the scheduled start time of our movie the last movie had not yet finished. I couldn’t fathom how you couldn’t calculate the running times correctly with 10 minutes of clean-up in between. But I’ve learned not to ask questions, it just gets you bent out of shape.

For dinner, we went to a Chinese restaurant in the Osu area, called Dynasty. It was nicely decorated (a rarity) and well-staffed (even rarer) with polite waiters (the rarest of all). There actually may have been too many wait staff as six pairs of eyes waited for me to finish the last bit of spring roll before swooping the plate away. We were also seated next to the kitchen door, the constant swooshing of which distracted me from the tasty food and the birthday boy. Ron had his favorite lemon chicken and I had soft noodles with pork, that was such a big portion I tipped our taxi driver with the leftovers. We were too full for dessert but Ron blew out the votive candle on our table to make his secret birthday wish. (He won't tell but I'm fairly certain it's for Mexican food.)