THURSDAY

For breakfast today I tried Katie’s latest concoction of rice laughing cow cheese onion and egg. It sounds like a funny combination but isn’t half bad. Before we started working on patterning we took a trip to the shell station since we were once again out of water; thanks a lot business. In addition to buying bottled water I also grabbed a bottle of mayonnaise to make ranch dip later on.

Patterning today had a rough start. I finished the tailored jacket and moved on into patterning a sleeveless blouse. I don’t have that much experience patterning shirts so it’s taking me much longer than expected. For lunch I decided to go over to the hotel to have a dip in the pool and get on the internet. The pool was really refreshing, its super hot today I think mostly from the humidity and lack of breeze. After swimming I got onto the internet and Skyped with Mum. It’s been since Fathers Day that we’ve spoken so it was lovely to catch up.

It took me all day to get that blouse finished but it’s done and ready to be sampled. Hopefully we’ll be able to take the patterns we have finished this week into the office to get sampled for next week.

For dinner we went out with Tanya for their last night in Elmina. It was Sarah, Nick, Katie, Tanya her husband and I. We headed down the same dirt road towards African Pot and Africana-Cuba is down towards Mable’s Table. We’ve heard mixed reviews about this place but we couldn’t really think of anywhere else to eat on short notice. On our walk to dinner we were joined by a group of young girls who bothered us the entire way there. One had asked me if I’m a funny girl and tell jokes; I replied with a yes but asked if she knew of any. Bad idea; it was like listening to a small boy tell a joke but it just keeps going and going and you wonder when its going to stop. Halfway through I joked with her saying that it was a terrible joke and asked when the funny bit was coming. She laughed and then kept telling the story. By the time we had reached Mable’s Table the story was still going and we stood in the road listening for a bit until one of the works greeted us and told them to bugger off.

Dinner was very good, I had vegetable curry which chips, but when the bill came around we were all a bit irritated. Each dish on the bill had been raised about two Cedi from the menu price; the beers were four Cedi when they are usually priced at two. So we paid the bill and asked for a take away box for my fries and Katie’s leftovers. He took our plates, boxed up our dinner and brought it back out to us with no problem. After the bill was all sorted we sat around and talked for a bit until the man came back one more time. This time he told us we had to pay him a Cedi for the to go boxes; really? I mean they clearly tried to get as much money as they could from us but that just pushing it too far. I argued with the guy for a bit but could see it wasn’t going anywhere so we just told him we would leave the boxes there because we would not pay to ridiculous fee. He finally left and I took my leftover out of their box and stuffed them into a plastic bag I had in my purse, that’ll show him. It’s sad to meet people like that but for everyone one person that is rude or tries to take advantage there’s a whole village of warm friendly Ghanaians that will take you in with open arms.