Book Review Club - Payback by Margaret Atwood

Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt. A story is a string of actions occurring over time-one damn thing after another, as we glibly say in creative writing classes-and debt happens as a result of actoins occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot line: how you got into debt, what you did, said, and thought while you were in there, and then-depending on whether the ending is to be happy or sad-how you got out of debt, or else who you got further and further into it until you cebame overwhelmed by it, and sank from view."

Margaret Atwood is the kind of writer who makes me want to read more - not just more of her own writing, though certainly I intend to eventually read all she's written, but she also makes me want to read everything there is out there. Her breadth of knowledge and aquaintance with other texts is always astounding. In addition to writting incredible books, I'll never forget her wonderful sense of humour and fascinating talks - living in Edinburgh was a treat for a bookworm like me.

""He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a -year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twety pounds one he would be miserable." Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

"Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" is one of the CBC Massey Lectures. Inagerated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time, Atwood's series of lectures are from 2008. People often tell me I'm impossible to buy books for because I've read or bought so many of the ones I want that they can't determine what I wouldn't have. For future reference (mom), since the local English bookstores don't carry the Massey Lectures series and I've only read three (the other two were "The Truth About Stories" by Thomas King and "Race Against Time" by Stephen Lewis), so they are always a safe bet. All three have been incredibly fascinating books.

""In my part of the world we have a ritual interchange that goes like this:
First person: "Lovely weather we're having."
Second person: "We'll pay for it later."
My part of the world being Canada, where there is a great deal of weather, we always do pay for it later. One person has commented, "That's not Canadian, it's just Presbyterian." Nevertheless, it's a widespread saying among us."

In the first chapter, Atwood talks about the origins of a sense of fairness, balance, and justice - concepts that may go back beyond humanity - apparently monkeys also get upset if when they have been taught that they can trade pebbles for cucumber slices and then one of them gets a far more covetted grape. She goes on to examine, in Chapter Two, the connection between debt and sin and between debtor and creditor, both of whom have been considered sinful at different times in history. The third chapter looks at the use of debt in plots and the symbolisms of mills and millers, who were thought of as cheats and Devil-like characters as the Industiral Revolution and capitalism marched on through the nineteenth century. She concludes the chapter with an old Greek saying, that the mills of the Gods grind slowly but they grind very small (thouroughly). Chapter Five looks at what happens when it comes time to payup: debtor's prisons, loan-sharks, liquidating creditors, rebelling against unfair taxes, and blood-soaked revenge. The final chapter is a rewrite of the Scrooge story, reframing it to look at the debt we owe to the environment, which we destroy, and those in the developing world, whose labor we profit off of.

"By making amends then, Scrooge is paying a moral debt. To whom does he owe this debt, and why? In Dicken's view, he owes it to his fellow man: he's been on the take from other people all his life-that's where his fortune has come from-but he's never given anything back. By being a creditor of such magnitude in the financial sense, he himslef has become a debtor in the moral sense, and it's this realization that's at the core of his transformation. Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have value: good turns and gifts must also flow and circule-just as they do among chimpanzees-for any social system to remain in balance."

Assa!

Well, aside from the drunken 6 am weeknights making it problematic for my posts to be interesting, I made it. I can't deny that there was some fluffy filler, but looking back, the posting wasn't too bad.

I'm almost finished posting about my September vacation - we're already in Togo, so there isn't too much to go, as I didn't keep much of a journal in Toronto and Vancouver. And I bitched a lot about the extreme cold, which turned out to be silly, as it's back to hoodie-over-a-sweater weather - that makes me very, very happy. There were lots of trivia wins and cheap wine and I survived my second month of post-trip poverty; with yesterday's paycheque, things are back to normal again.

One thing I didn't get to do this year was discover more cool blogs - this is what comes of doing NaBloPoMo when you haven't got internet access at home. Time to post at work, but no time to read. I'll hopefully (with my lovely, lovely paycheque) be solving that problem this month, so I can catch up and hopefully visit some new blogs too.

The theme for December is MITZVAH and it comes with a challenge: to give something, to someone, every day of the month, and then blog about it. The goal is to act with kindness, obviously. I'm considering following the theme for once, though I'm not entirely sure I'm that kind.

J'ai une arme chargée et je peux l'employer.

I seldom woke up (unassisted) before Ortencia, but for once, I did. Handy, as it allowed me to lay around reading, get ready at my usual snail's pace, and still be ready on time. Breakfast was an omellette on a baguette and cafe au lait - which was made with sweetened condensed milk and instant coffee, all served in a metallic bowl as we sat on stools nailed to the stand.

Our first goal was the post office, but that was mysteriously closed, in spite of the fact that Ortencia said it was usually open on a Saturday (the more serious errand, getting me yet another Ghanaian visa, had to wait for Monday.) After that we were waiting for Maas, a friend of Ortencia's, so that he could come with us to the Grande Marche. As we were waiting, I ordered carbonated pamplemous and ice cream - however, we had to wait for the ice cream until they could call a man to come and make it. Maas and his friend Pascal arrived on a moto and ordered beer and a Togolese palm wine which was very, very strong. Pascal mentioned having come from church but it still didn't occur to either of us that we had lost a day somewhere and that it wasn't Saturday at all.



Our plans to go to the Grande Marche now postponed (it's not open on Sunday), we instead took a walk around Lome. I must say, it's a much more pleasant city to walk around that Accra - no holes in the ground to dodge and considerably less traffic. Our first destination was the 2 Fevrier Hotel, which is the biggest building in Togo and presently being renovated by Libya. Our next stop was the Place to Congress - most of our time was spent inside (Maas asked the guards if we could go in) doing a very, very odd photo shoot.



Next we walked to the beach, which was not as dirty as I anticipated, though with horses galloping around, it was wise to look down regularly. There was a wharf, which according to our local guides is the home of drug dealers, and aside from the horse rides, the main entertainment seemed to be shell sandcastles and roped off areas to buy food and drinks. After Ortencia and I waded in the water a bit - the boys didn't want to get their feet wet - and discovered an odd fish, we ended up in one of the beach bars. The cokes in Togo are amazing - the standard bottle is 0.6L! If you want the smaller bottle, you have to specify that. I also tried Guinea fowl (too bony) and some beef.



And then the shit hit the fan. As we were leaving the beach, I took two pictures of the sunset. Immediately after that, a gendarme in a booth guarding some sort of building yelled at us to come over. He immediately confiscated my camera because apparently you aren't allowed to take pictures of the president's house and that was what was in the direction of my sunset. After a 45 minute conversation, during which it was stressed that he was a man with a loaded weapon and the ability to use it, I finally got my camera back, sunset pictures completely deleted. The most hilarious part of the entire thing, minus perhaps my slow uptake of all the threats because of my slow French translation abilities, was that at the end, the soldier suggested that now that were all friends (!!!), if he was ever in Canada, perhaps I could show him around!



We walked back to the restaurant we had started out with so that the boys could get their moto and then we went to a Lebanese place that Ortencia likes. We went to bed relatively early, but were woken up in the middle of the night by an arguing couple. The bits that I could actually hear seemed to suggest that the woman was very angry about the hotel reservation, or lack thereof, and something to do with wedding planning and the man's response was a concern that if she was so angry over such a thing, maybe they'd end up divorced.

Primum non Nocere

"People who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated, rather than monochromatic or plainly colored in the current custom, have always presented difficulties. Not only is our society distressed by masculine women, feminine men, and the androgynous; even the big man who embroiders, or the wife and mother of three who has a black belt in tae kwon do, a buzz cut, and no makeup in her gym bag, stirs a frisson of discomfort... I sometimes think that our culture is like the Church in the days of Galileo. We will not see, and we will silence and mock, even banish and punish, those who say that what is, is."

"Normal" by Amy Bloom is subtitled "Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude." I found it an interesting account of her interviews and experiences. The book didn't really change my beliefs regarding transsexuals or the intersex, however I hadn't really spent any time contemplating heterosexual crossdressers; I'm far more familiar with drag queens and kings. I have to say, by the end of the book, I wasn't feeling especially interested in making the aquaintance of most of the characters she describes: they all come across in her narrative as narcissistic, misogynistic, conservative Republicans. Not my kind of people. In her interviews with experts, there is a suggestion that the crossdressing is both a compulsion and sexual in nature; the groups that the men and their wives have formed instead stress that the men are expressing their feminine side. However, Bloom describes the wives as being very unhappy, going so far as to say that their husbands' crossdressing is painful for them. She reports one wife saying, "For twenty years he couldn't help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can't help because he's doing his nails. Is that different?" I wonder what support and accommodation these men are giving their wives, considering their wives seem to be giving an extraordinary amount of both. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be curious to read more about the subject and see if Bloom's findings are common.

"Not monsters, nor marvels, nor battering rams for gender theory, people born intersexed have given the rest of the world an opportunity to think more about the odd significance we give to gender, about the elusive nature of truth, about the understandable, sometimes dangerous human yearning for simplicity-and we might, in return, offer them medical care only when they need it, and a little common sense and civilized embrace when they don't."

I Don't Know About You...

...but I always leave room for the Holy Spirit in my hugs.

Christian Side Hug from The Fathers House on Vimeo.

And then go and check out the Ten Webcomics you should read.

I'm Not Sure That Candle Has Any Ends Left

I'm tired. I've been tired since, oh, a week after my vacation ended. It's not because I'm too active, since the post-vacation poverty hasn't allowed for paying for a gym membership yet. It's not because I have to much work to do - I'm on a 26 hour a week schedule right now.

It's my complete and total inability to go to bed at a decent hour of the night - sometimes at an hour that even is part of the night. I've been staying up far too late. I need to get more sleep.

I'm so shitty at going to bed. Even when I'm tired.

Candlelit Borders

Our last day at the resort started early, so we could pack and eat (French toast and pineapple juice) and hop in a taxi to Takoradi. It was during my long wait for a washroom that the insect bites on my feet were discussed, though I will sadly never know what they were. Sand fleas were my guess. After than we took a trou-trou to Accra and I managed to both read The Economist and snooze. We took a taxi to the New Haven Hotel, which I highly recommend, especially if all the singles (which actually have double beds, so they sleep two) are full, because the double rooms are swish and still only 37 Ghanaian cedis - I do wonder why the Ghanaian part is always added - are there other cedis out there? Anyway, the beds were gigantic - you could totally sleep four in them comfortably. We had dinner at the New Haven, which wasn't spectacular, so I fed a great deal of it to the hotel cats. An older man called Soloman came over to chat with us and told us all about the mistakes he had made with women, which had led to his having ten children. Ortencia told me a series of hilarious stories about some of her Peace Corps friends, particularly about W., who once shit his own pants during a business meeting, because his French wasn't good enough to figure out where the toilets were, and A. who split his pants while riding his Peace Corps issued mountain bike. Since I could barely keep my eyes open, it wasn't a very late night.



The next day I took my only hot shower of the trip - and used conditioner - pure luxury. After our standard breakfast of instant coffee, toast, and jam, I managed to get a fly stuck up my nose. UP MY NOSE. Not fun and the next thing I noticed was a blood blister on my thumb. I really am the klutziest woman who travels that ever existed. We took a taxi to the Arts Centre, where I bought a dress, some earrings, and a necklace. It was relatively low key, as shopping experiences go. We had Cokes and chocolate chip cookies to tide us over until we taxied back to the Paloma complex to each pizza at the restaurant there for lunch. Then Ortencia challenged my position as world-class klutz by falling into a hole next to a shop and causing a dress to fall down on her - however, since she then bought it, I think my status remains unchallenged.

We took a cab to Tudu Station and then there was a bit of a goof up where our taxi driver told us there were no more trou-trous going and the private cars going were charging 15 cedis each, about five more than was at all reasonable. Then Ortencia managed to find us another trou-trou in a different parking lot, though there was a lot of loud yelling between the apprenti and the passengers and waiting before we got started. I finished off The Economist and did some more Sudoku, slept, and mentally rehearsed my French.



Arriving at an African land border after dark is maybe not the way to go. When several people make runs for the border and get beat up, it makes you a bit skittish, especially when you are in the process of being ripped off when exchanging dollars for CFA (according to the LP, it might have had something to do with the calculators, and a police officer comes and gets involved. In the end, we just crossed the borders before exchanging. Turns out, I only had a single visa for Ghana, in spite of paying for a multiple and being asked on a date by the man who issued it - apparently I should have made that date. But, into Togo we went, where my passport was stamped by candlelight and bargained for a better rate for my dollars (though I would never have guessed that you can get better rates the bigger the bill).

Unfortunately, we could not find a taxi - the only one that went by was asking a completely unreasonable price - and Ortencia doesn't have Peace Corps approval to take a moto. While we were standing around in the dark, and Ortencia was talking with asshole cabbie, I started chatting with a Liberian named Charles, who is a Rastafarian musician in Togo for a festival and he got a friend of his to drive us over to the hostel. It was only 9 PM. When we checked in, not only did we have mosquito netting but for the first time, we had sheets. Ortencia had mocked me (gently) about having packed a sheet for a double bed - but the LP told me to bring one, and so I did. The double sheet is the only one I own. We walked down the sand roads to find credit for Ortencia's phone, water, and spaghetti at a stand for 300 francs - cheaper and just as good as the food in Ghana.



By the time we hit the hostel again, I had the grossest fee in the history of feet: dirty, covered in bug bites, and with a nasty weeping wound on my ankle. A pedicure would not have made it any better.

They Come in Twos

We won both at Orange Tree and Phillies trivia and I'm starting to believe that we can only win them together. Plus, I had two Thanksgiving dinners over the weekend. And I finally got ahold of the two Battlestar Galactica movies. Perhaps two is my new lucky number.

Sick in Paradise

I woke up sick in paradise, sadly, and missed a canoe trip to see turtles - and while apparently there were no turtles, I'm not sure my morning of reading in the most uncomfortable hammock in existence was a better call. I finished The End of Faith and moved on to reading Travels in West Africa while travelling in West Africa, which has some hilarious quips about dying. Ortencia and I chatted, wandered down the beach to the Oasis Resort for lunch (though I stuck to water, in an attempt to settle my stomach). There was much debate about whether we should stay another night in the hopes that I would start feeling better or move on. We attempted to order more chocolate bars and ended up instead with hot chocolate with milk and sugar to be added - though considering how chilly it was when the sun wasn't out was just fine. I had plain rice for dinner and Ortencia refused to plan any board games with me! Apparently I'm too intimidating a Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit opponent, so I did some Sudoku by the lantern light and went to bed.



My Moleskine notebook from the trip is just made up of short notes most of the time that I'm having to translate (rather after the fact) into a narrative. One of the few actual sentences in the notebook was from the beach:

"Are travel and new places the norm now? No disconnect in suddenly find myself in Rome, Accra or on a beach with pounding Atlantic surf, a flickering lantern lighting my book and crabs coming out of the holes to climb up legs."

The next day remained restful, as I spent most of it lying on the beach reading Time and The Economist and doing Sudoku. I skipped lunch and coffee in the hopes of healing my stomach yet again, and when Ortencia finally caved, there were no board games available! There are notes about coconuts and handwash, though I have no recollection as to why now.

"Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining-room table. I have no interest in doing it." Barney Frank, Congressman, regarding health care reform town hall question that compared it to Nazi policies.

Not All My Students Belong There, I Suspect

A very interesting article about whether the push to send more students to university is worth it, via 11D.

Almost Paradise: The Water Could Be Warmer

The Green Turtle is an eco-lodge along the coast. It may take hours to get to Dixcove, but it is well worth it. The dorm beds, which at only three bunkbeds to a big hut were pleasantly spacious, also had mosquito netting hanging from the ceiling to cover my top bunk, which made me feel a bit like a princess crossed with an explorer. The bar is made out of an old fishing boat. There are self-composting toilets lit at night with lanterns, some of them candle lanterns. The showers are outside - cold water, but with the sunlight and ocean breezes and the natural stone structures, they were the best showers I had on the entire trip - in fact, possibly the nicest showers I've ever had in my life. With the Jack Johnson and Bob Marley playing, in some ways it reminded me of all the other beaches I've been to - Thailand, the Philippines. However, the chilly water and the rip tides made swimming unlikely and in the shade the breeze made it a bit chilly.



On our first morning at the beach, I was up incredibly early, as always, but was still the last one up. Finally, real coffee! Along with the French toast, honey, and bananas we had for breakfast, it was fabulous. The fabulousness was slightly hampered by the suicidal flies that kept dive-bombing our cappuccino foam. I had managed to acquire, the night before, about fifty bug bites on each foot and a nasty scratch. I assumed mosquito bites but when we left the lodge, I used a public toilet and two women discussed the bites extensively - unfortunately, they didn't know the English word for what had bitten me.



Lunch didn't happen until 3 p.m. and involved a gin and tonic, plus fresh orange juice, so far the only fresh juice we'd had in Ghana. We spent our day on the beach, sitting on chairs made of old boat seats, listening to the crashing waves, in the shade of short palm trees. Ortencia was taking notes from the Economist and I was reading the magazines I had grabbed in the airport, interspersed with chapters of "The End" of Faith." We read until it was too dark, got a lantern, and then finally had dinner at 7:30 - I only ate mashed potatoes and chocolate fondue. The first was supposed to help settle my stomach, the second I just couldn't resist.



"The End of Faith" was very much a book that preaches to the choir; I don't see anyone but an atheist reading it. I have to say, a lot of this book resonated with me. Back when I worked in the bank, I worked with a guy about my own age who loved to come out with comments along the lines that atheists don't have any self-discipline because they never have to give up anything. It was an almost daily occurrence, his comments on atheists, but had I ever stated my beliefs about religion in detail, I'm pretty sure I would have ended up in quite a lot of trouble - you can insult atheists, you see, and generally that isn't considered a rude thing to do. But to take on religion - there's a reason you don't discuss religion, politics or football in Scottish pubs. Then there was that whole ridiculousness surrounding the Golden Compass movie and books. I've yet to ever meet an atheist or agnostic who would deny their children the chance to read the Narnia novels, but apparently the atheism in the Golden Compass (which, interestingly enough, I didn't even pick up on my first read of the book as an adult, though it isn't really obvious until you hit that last book) is going to convert all the kids who believe in religion - though Narnia really failed to convert me. Anyways, as I said, preaching to the choir: one of his main beefs is the way atheists are unable to even question religion in the public realm without being seen as rude. I very much agree.

"Sex kills, and so does this kind of blushing prudishness." re. money squandered on teaching abstinence.
Nicholas Kristoff

"Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H Bomb." Bertrand Russell

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens

"To see how much our culture currently partakes of the irrationality of our enemies, just substitute the name of your favorite Olympian for "God" wherever this word appears in public discourse... Clearly the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs."

"The most sexually repressive people found in the world today - people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch - are lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as an al fresco bordello."

"But the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is only a problem because the fundamentals of Islam are a problem. A rise of Jain fundamentalism would harm no one."

"What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society."

"In neurological terms, we surely visit more suffering upon this earth by killing a fly than by killing a human blastocyst (150-cell stage), to say nothing of a human zygote (flies after all, have 100,000 cells in their brain alone)."

"When was the last time that someone was criticized for not "respecting" another person's unfounded beliefs about physics or history? The same rules should apply to ethical, spiritual, and religious beliefs as well."

re. the limits of intelligent dissent: "People who believe that the earth is flat are not dissenting geographers; people who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred are not dissenting historians; people who think that God created the universe in 4004 BC are not dissenting cosmologists; and we will see that people who practice barbarisms like 'honor killing' are not dissenting ethicists."

"Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual'. No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realise, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish."

"And yet it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society, or to even observe that some religions are less compassionate and less tolerant than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense."

"It seems doubtful that a person could know that he was successfully practicing addition unless he already believed that 2+2=4. It seems just as certain, however, that you did not wake up this morning believing that eight hundred and sixty-five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-two plus two, equals eight hundred and sixty-five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-four. To really exist inside your brain, this belief must be constructed, in the present moment, on the basis of your prior belief that two plus two equals four. Clearly, many beliefs are like this. We may not, in fact, believe most of what we believe about the world until we say we do."

Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Some Fish Are Scary Looking

Yet another morning of not-seven, this time so we could pack up, dump our bags in a left luggage closet, and having breakfast at a little stall on the corner that turned out to be the best of all our breakfasts in Cape Coast by far. After a rip off taxi ride, we were in Elmina. Through the window I caught sight of one of the Asafo Posts dotted around the town (originally army units they were then used to run the administration of Elmina. Today they are shrines functioning as military altars, colourfully decorated with statues drawn from nature, the military and the Bible and used in festivals and funerals) and the church in the center of town and then we got dropped off right in front of the castle. Elmina Castle was very similar to, though smaller than, Cape Coast Castle. I actually preferred Elmina in terms of architecture and since it hadn't been renovated as much it felt a bit more authentic. From Elmina we could see both the fish market and Fort Jago, which planned the rest of the day.







To get into the fish market you actually have to pay. Once in there, it was incredibly busy with people and fish and boats. We saw some very cool and freaky looking fish, but as people seemed to be very anti-fish photos, I don't have much pictorial evidence.







I got some incredible pineapple, cored and sliced for me into a bag, and then we headed up the hill to the fort. On our way, we picked up a group of curious girls, who were fascinated by seeing themselves on our digital cameras and my hair. After sharing some pineapple with them, we went into Fort Jago, which was much like the castles we had already visited. They are planning to make it into some sort of hotel, I believe, though I'm not sure the bathroom facilities are ready just yet. The views of Elmina Castle and the fish market were amazing. After a short walk, one where I caught sight of a woman carrying on her head the same sort of old-fashioned sewing machine that my mother has two of at home. It's funny how the oddest similarities strike you when you travel.



Before we left Cape Coast, I needed to grab some cash - though several banks claim to have ATMs in Cape Coast, according to the guards, most of them are advertising the ATMs that they intend to soon install. However, there was one at Lloyds bank and certainly none at our next stop: the Green Turtle Lodge at Dixcove. The line-up was sizable, so Ortencia disappeared off hat shopping while I waited for some cash (I did have plenty of American dollars on me, but I thought it was wise to save them for Togo.) Afterwards, I sat down on the steps to start in on my second book of the trip, "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris.

Ghana seems to me to be quite a religious country. To be honest, the Christianity combined with the slave castles - it gave me pause. Interesting that a book so accepting of slavery could continue to be okay with that book while confronting the historical realities of the slave trade. Granted, as an atheist, I suppose how most people can read the Bible and be okay with so many of the messages it sends that are incredibly negative is something that has always confused me. I'm not saying that I don't see that some of the messages are also positive, but considering the overwhelmingly negative result of that book on innocent people over the centuries...

Anyway, my book aside, once Ortencia returned, we got some chocolate Fan Milks - a frozen chocolate milk snack that is not bad, but a poor substitute for ice cream. At the hotel we had to hang around to see if the manager (he of the odd TV-room insistence) had her cell phone, which we had left plugged in the room when we dumped our stuff into the left luggage room. Once we were successfully reunited with our only form of communication (though we never did figure out how to send text messages in Ghana), we took a cab to Pedu Station and began the wait for a trou-trou to fill up.



The first trou-trou ride started off with plantains and preaching - while I was reading an atheist book, no less. Rather amusing. Thankfully our preacher wasn't on with us long. At Takadori (no idea if that is spelt right...) we changed trou-trous to head towards a roundabout where we had to switch to a taxi - a very, very expensive taxi. At 15 cedis to get to the lodge, it was the equivalent of three nights stay in the dorms; I noticed in Cambodia as well that prices when you are travelling sometimes just do not compute. It was incredibly late when we arrived, past time for dinner, but the staff kindly made us some incredibly delicious spicy beans and rice. And bottles of Coke and chocolate, naturally!