The Birthday Girl is on TV!

So, as many of you know, I celebrated my birthday yesterday. What most of you don't know, is that this year my birthday lasts for 5 days. Yes, my birthday is so big it's close to rivaling an Ed's New Years Bash.

We are now in Accra with Mus's family, and I woke up yesterday with Mus's mom splashing perfumed water on me (some kind of Ghanaian tradition, I have no idea...) She then presented me with a box of beautiful waistbeads.

Then she and |Mus went out shopping for me. Mus and i have been low on money lately (dad just sent some from my account, so we're good now) so Mus couldn't buy my present earlier. He came back with a pair of capris and two beautiful white skirts for me. Then we all went out to dinner- he, his parents, me and his sister.


We went to a Chinese restaurant that was really fancy pants and had lobster and cashew chicken and beef and mushrooms... It was delicious. And then, to top it all off, he had bought me a big cake! Yes, I thought we were waiting for the check, and all of the sudden they started playing Happy Birthday over the stereo and the waitstaff came out with a huge cake with my name on it in green icing (Mus asked for green cause it's my favorite color) and a sparkelr on top. It was so delicious and sooo fun!

Then on Friday we took off for Cape Coast. Mus kept telling me we were going to Mabels' Table, which is this restaurant/hotel on the beach- quaint and simple. Turns out, he and my parents were scheming together, and my parents had booked us to stay in the fancy really nice beach resort they stayed in November. This place has a pool, a gorgeous beach, expensive fancy food, ac, satellite TV- the works. It was sooo nice! I got one hell of a sunburn (I wasn't expecting to spend an entire day outside, so I didn't have sunscreen...) but it was totally worth it.

Well, I head home on the 6th :( Not too many more adventures on the horizon, but it sounds like we might have a few more trips before I go.


One last note: Mus and I were on TV here. His parents saw us. I guess we were on some sort of talk show like Oprah, but they were showing film of someplace outside- we're not sure where we were, but they said it was definitely us walking around! We had no idea. But I"m not surprised. Wheneevr I watch the news here, if there is one white person at a function, because they stick out so much, the film crew always ends up filming them like 5 times as they scan the crowd. So I always figured I'd show up on TV here someday.

Accra

Mus and I were walking around in Accra (the capital of Ghana) the other day and there were probably 40 policemen standing in one city block. We couldn't figure out was going on (but I felt like it probably was not a good place to be...) Turns out like 15,000+ people were protesting this new law proposed in Parliament here. They alerted the police before the protest and told them where they planned to march, so the city had 1,500 cops lined up along the streets they planned to march down- the police were there to clear traffic and keep things from getting violent, especially should supporters of the bill want to to go out there and rough the protesters up. I thought that was crazy. It was a protest but also like a parade. I just can't imagine our police in the US clearing the streets for a protest...

By the way, Accra is a crazy city. The official number in terms of population is 5 million, but it's really much higher because alot of people who don't work in office type jobs don't get counted, and hundreds of people move into the city everyday. But seriously, you can drive in Accra for an hour and not even cover the radius of the city. And the population density is unbelievable. A large, expensive fancy pants house would sit on maybe half an acre of land. And most houses are side by side, San Francisco style.