New York, New York
My flight to New York was uneventful and direct, two good things. I watched a variety of bad American cinema on the flight and readied myself for the coming culture shock (or possible lack thereof).
When the plane touched down, virtually every African onboard began applauding. I don’t know if this is a typical thing, or what, but it definitely caught me off guard (no applauding on our previous flight to Accra, for whatever that is worth).
We alighted the plane after filling out customs declarations (I bubbled in a “no” and then changed to a “yes” for a question on importation of soil) and I headed to wait in line. I was surprised at how completely cursory the customs process was (I told the CBP person I planned to eat a lot of junk food asap and she laughed, overlooking or just not caring about my red dirt importation). Also in this same vein, the security process at Kotoba (in Accra) had been exceedingly lax. I was told to go through the metal detector even though I had metal on me still, which led to a pat down search where they failed to find a large amount of cash I keep strapped to my body (I am sure they wouldn’t care it was there, but without finding it and determining that it is indeed just cash, well, who is to say what that lump taped to me is!). At a later checkpoint I received a second pat down and again the agent failed to find my lump-o-cash. Although this does make me feel like my stash-o-cash is well concealed for the purposes of avoiding robbery, so there’s an upside I suppose.
After clearing customs with my bags I placed a courtesy-phone call to my shuttle ($18 for what would turn out to be a 90 minute ride) and waited. In the ten minutes or so I was waiting I readjusted to the various little American/Western things that had been missing from my life. People who fluently speak English. No one staring at me. Other people looking more confused than me about how to go somewhere or do something.
A heavyset (but probably average for American) couple asked an information desk clerk how to get to a particular courtesy shuttle and were told to go with their baggage cart up a (100ft) ramp and take the airtrain to the other side of the road. The man was incredulous, “how am I supposed to get this cart up that ramp?! You want me to push it?!” It was at this moment that I thought, “wow, I’m back in America.” Ghanaians wouldn’t have blinked, certainly wouldn’t have complained, they would have simply made it happen. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an eighty-year-old Ghanaian woman with the equivalent amount of luggage balanced on her head, deftly walking amongst taxi traffic, uphill, whilst avoiding a 5 foot deep gutter.
I eventually caught my shuttle, the driver initially epitomizing the typical NY stereotype of gruffness, although once we had a vanload of German and Dutch passengers he lightened up a bit and pointed out a few interesting landmarks (the most interesting of which was a group of trees near Queens that had been torn out by a tornado last month!).
This was also the first time in six weeks that I’ve worn a seatbelt or ridden in a vehicle that wasn’t rattling uncontrollably. Ghanaians, or at least their taxi drivers, do not wear seatbelts, and generally the cabs don’t have functioning belts (or rather, they might, but if the belts work they will be covered with grease and dirt — we learned this the hard way). Luckily in Cape we rarely go more than a mile or so, and rarely get above 20mph, so there’s at least less risk. We also do not (I repeat, DO NOT) ride in trotro at night, this (in my opinion) is our number one risk for death while in Ghana.
Dom told me a story about a trotro he was in at a station catching fire whilst everyone was waiting for it to fill, the passengers evacuating and the fire being quenched, and then everyone re-entering the vehicle. The other passengers were quite upset with him for refusing to do so as it meant one less passenger (e.g. more time to wait before it is full). Trotro are efficient and cheap, but they are not in good mechanical repair generally, their drivers undertake questionable maneuvers, and riding them at night is a bad idea in my opinion.
As I sit here typing this I’ve just consumed my third piece of NY pizza, my eyelids are growing heavy, and in short: I’m a happy camper. I miss Cape Coast already, but am also excited to see a bit of New York. I had a brief moment of seeing a girl with a bulldog on a leash and immediately subsequent finding myself skipping happily across the street … it’s weird the little things I’ve missed that make me appreciate the US. I don’t miss the media, the politics, the culture of divisiveness (those first two contribute to this third, I suspect), but rather I miss seeing people walking their pets, people jogging, greenspaces, and (sometimes) my relative anonymity.
