Jaywalkers Unite!

I have some great stories from the funeral, but they will have to wait until I get home so I can put the great photos and video I took there in the post. So fun stuff to come.

So in other funny foreign news...

I was again having an illuminating conversation with my friend from Germany, and she informed me that where she lives, you don't want to get caught jaywalking. If you do, you can lose points on your driver's license, or if you don't have you license yet, the offense can actually result in a postponement of when you can obtain your license. She admits that some cops will let you go, but she also says that she knows people who have been penalized for jaywalking.

And the Ghanaian media never ceases to amaze me. After a recent power outage, we turned on our TV to find that TV Africa- one of our two TV stations- had static in place of the sound, though the picture was crystal clear. The next day, we switched on the TV and found the sound was back on, but after watching it for a few seconds we realized that the sound and picture didn't match at all. A few minutes later a voice said, "You're listening to Joy FM, the station with a heart!"

Yup, for over two days, TV Africa broadcasted a radio station to accompany their picture. Quality entertainment. (By the way, there are more than 2 TV stations in Ghana, but we live in the sticks and only receive two of them).

And I think the funniest surprise of the week was in the bathroom. Lately I've had a sharp increase in the number of ants in our apartment. I've been finding them crawling in my bed and a whole colony set up shop under a loose tile in our bathroom. But it wasn't until I walked into the bathroom and saw that Mus had put a sealed plastic baggie around my hair gel that I figured the whole thing out.

I asked Mus about the baggie, and he said that he kept seeing tons of ants crawling all over the bottle, so he thought he would seal it up. I had noticed a few ants on it myself earlier in the week, but thought it a fluke. Then I went and read the label.

The second ingredient of my hair gel was sucrose- AKA sugar. No wonder the ants were all over it. And this is some expensive, salon formula hair gel I bought cheap in a grocery store here (I think the brand name is Sebastian). And they put sugar in it! So I put this in my hair, go and lay down on my pillow, and pretty soon every ant in the house is crawling in my bed!

Now, obviously, putting sugar in your hair is a really really bad idea in Ghana, the land with hundreds of species of ants. But even in America I'm not sure if it would be a good idea... I mean, most bugs are drawn to sugar, and would therefore be drawn to your hair. Lately when I've been going out, I've been feeling like the evil stepmom in the Parent Trap- everything that can fly has been hanging out in my hair...

Sugar in you hair. Geesh. City people do the strangest things.