Spring Rolls!

Day 2 – April 25, 2010

    What is this Asian influence that has permeated the very fabric of Ghanaian culture? Spring rolls and fried rice! At every turn one can find a woman selling spring rolls or another woman selling fried rice with choice of a piece of chicken and/or pasta salad on the side. I came to this startling discovery as we stopped a FanMilk cart outside the New Haven Hotel on our way down to the Paloma to eat some breakfast. While we bought Strawberry FanYogo, a flavor that isn't found in Togo, I saw on the top of the cart a couple of wooden shelves with what looked like some type of fried roll. I bought one for .20 cedis and once I bit into it I realized it tasted like a poor man's Americanized Chinese restaurant's spring roll. The strange thing is that besides the couple of expensive Chinese restaurants (word on the street they taste like an Americanized Chinese restaurant) in Lomé you can't find them anywhere in Togo.

    Breakfast at the Paloma was a pleasant experience. I had an omelet, bacon, toast with real butter, and baked beans. From there we headed to the Accra Shopping Mall I had heard so much about. It seems a little ridiculous to be so excited to be going to a mall, especially one that was nice, but nothing that deviated very much from the American mall norm. However, when I got there it was pretty awesome especially since there was a movie theater in the mall. We bought tickets to Clash of the Titans and then went exploring the mall at our own leisure. I headed upstairs to a book fair that had been going on a few days and was ending that day. I thought I might find some materials for my library and the English course I'll be teaching in the summer. It was small. A mix between a couple publishing companies selling their books and a couple people selling new looking used book. I bought quite a few and by the time I was finished it was time for the movie. The movie theater was so cold that it was almost painful, but I liked it. It had been so long since I had been that cold, but it didn't matter because the seats were comfortable and I had popcorn. I also bought a ice cream bar as well.

    The movie was pretty terrible. I enjoyed the special effects and I like ancient mythology, but the movie fell short. Nevertheless, I enjoyed watching a movie in a movie theater immensely. Afterwards, we headed to the food court and I ordered a chicken sandwich. Then I went out to check out the brand new Apple store to see if they could repair my iPod, but turned out they don't do repairs there. We headed next to the beach, being that Accra is on the coast, and stopped at the hotel, Labadi, to have something to drink before we headed out to walk on the beach. There was a problem, however when we tried to go out on the beach there was a guard and he said that being we were not staying in the hotel we would have pay something exorbitant, like 20 cedis apiece, to simply go on the beach. We tried to explain all we wanted to do is stand on the beach, but he wouldn't hear it. So disgruntled we left and walked down a ways and tried to enter by another route, but there we had to pay 10 cedies apiece. Lorena and Matt W tried to reason and coax the guards there to let us in for free, but to no avail so we headed to get some ice cream.

    This time at the gelato place I got a donut along with 3 scoops of ice cream. By the end of that "meal" we were all pretty full so we decided to walk a little ways in the direction of our hotel to let our food settle. However, during our stroll I caught sight of Papaye. I had heard that Papaye is supposed to have the best chicken in Accra and possibly even Ghana. It is packed at all hours of the day with people downstairs getting food to go or upstairs, sitting in a booth for a quick bite. It was pretty delicious chicken. I enjoyed it, but nothing that different from Chicken Republic. A side note, Chicken Republic's slogan is, if I remember right, "Extraordinary chicken for extraordinary people."

    We headed back to the hotel after that to call it a night because the next morning Matt Whalen, Lorena and I would head to Kumasi. Kumasi is the second biggest city in Ghana after Accra and 4-5 hours North. Matt Hix was just going to stay another night in Accra then voyage back to Togo because he had some things he had to finish up.