I had been wondering where and how people drink socially here. Osei and I have a beer with each meal, but I'd expected people to sit around the fire at night and booze it up. I was just starting to miss this social drinking when I was invited by my friend Kwadwo (aka Eric aka Loverboy aka Lova' aka Lovalova) to go into town.

At 7AM, 4PM, and 7PM, a woman comes to a shady spot in the middle of town with a big cauldron-like pot full of palm wine and a basket of half-gourd bowls. She scoops the wine into the bowls and hands it out to all the guys who eagerly sit around waiting for her arrival. When you're done, you pay her c300 for each scoop. The two of us went crazy and drank three bowls apiece, spending $1.90 like we were rockstars.

Palm wine tastes much like any other fermented fruit drink. I guess Mad Dog 20/20 is the closest comparison. The local gin, which is distilled from palm wine, tastes like 160 proof Mad Dog.

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"Have you ever been to other planets?" Someone asked me. "What? No!" I said. "Oh, I heard some Americans went to other planets." Surely he had meant 'other celestial bodies', so I'll chalk that up to a translation issue, but he was right. Some Americans did go to other planets. The funny thing was that to a rural Ghanaian, this was perceived as just as amazing/ridiculous as if you had told them that some Americans built a triple-high bike, or some Americans get paid to taste-test Oreos, or some Americans drive up and down the street with the stereo painfully loud for fun. Just goes to show how inaccurate a generalization can be when you're talking about a whole country.


"I bet it's nice there, on other planets," he said, "but I hear that it's very very expensive to get there." This, I explained, was the only reason why I had not gone myself.