Every morning, I have the same thing for breakfast: Bread and coffee. The coffee is Nescafe Instant, to which I add sugar, Ideal Condensed Milk, and a little bit of Nestle Milo for an instant mocha. The bread is fluffy and sweet, like all bread here, and its texture is almost closer to angel's food cake. The preserve varies as we go through the jars: Orange jelly, apricot jelly, now honey. I take it at eight, and most people have been awake for four hours, so sometimes I invite a guest to come take coffee with me. "Ghana breakfast," says Emmanuel (the kindly old weaver), "is when we can get it."

The other meals consist of rotating starches and rotating stews. You tear off chunks of the starch and use it to scoop up the stew. The starch can be plantains (boiled or fried), yams, cocoa yams, cassava, banku, rice balls, or fufu. The stew is based on either garden eggs (almost like an eggplant), coco yam greens, whole fish (good- an intact eyeball means a fresh fish), or goat. It always has red palm oil, onion, tomato, and hot pepper.

So you see I can actually go a few weeks without having the same meal, yet every meal seems the same. It's all delicous, and I'd love to learn to fix it, but so far I've failed at my efforts to convince Rosina that at home I actually cook my own food. I am not allowed in the kitchen.

I bathe from a bucket, and in fact all water is drawn from a well. I don't mind- plumbing is one luxury I've found that I do not miss. I don't miss air conditioning, either. Yet I sure miss the American tendency to make all the stairs in a staircase the same height- it's amazing how much this matters to the climber/stumbler.

The Three Unreliables of Power, Phone, and Windows had failed to align in more than a week, so I went to Kumasi to check my email. I paid 40 cents per hour. The staff, in a kind but misguided attempt to make me feel comfortable, put on a dinosaur-country-rock CD. With the exception of hip-hop, all of the American music imported into Ghana is shlock. Hip-hop is pretty shlocky these days, too. But fortunately most of what you hear is reggae or Ghana's local equivalent, which only sometimes gets a little too World Music. But sometimes, you'll go places, and the hosts will try to accomodate you by putting on some Celine Dion.

While in the big city I went to FOODS INN (a subsidiary of Mobil Oil) and had a "beefburger with chips". It was pretty close. Thousand Island dressing, almost like a Big Mac. With a smattering of white people in the room, and the flat rectangle aglow with flourescent light over the gas pumps, I could almost pretend I was home. Just like the Pringles they had there- so close to potato chips, and yet so far.

When I first arrived, I thought the weather never changed. Then I realized that it did, in fact, change: Somedays it got a lot hotter, and other days it merely got a little hotter. Now it has started to rain off and on. The sky has been clear two nights now, and I've spent a lot of time looking at it. I'm also always gawking at the local florae and faunae, which the locals seem entirely disinterested in. "What's that?" I say, pointing at some flourescent miniature alien that seems designed to look like some equally exotic plant. "It's an insect," is always the reply.

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Ghana is *dark*. I guess there have been streetlights everywhere I've lived before. At night, I've found myself riding by feel and sound. Just ride straight, and feel for when the road turns from pavement to dirt, and then to grass. Listen for other cyclists, they make squeaky sounds. It's thrilling, coming down those huge hills, but I think I need a headlight.

The Ghanaians lack the aspect of shock that Americans express when they see a tallbike. To a Ghanaian, it makes perfect sense- if a bike is good, a taller bike is better. Nobody has said to me, "Why would you build that?" They all understand. It also makes perfect sense that a kwasibruni would ride a majestic and lofty bicycle.

On the other hand, they're baffled by the category of bikes that are deliberately hard to ride, like swing bikes. "Why would you build that, if you can't ride it?" They say. Well, so I can learn to ride it, of course! But if someone masters one, you can see them get it. Now they can ride a bike nobody else can.

I went to the shop the other evening to find Kofi, the youngest student, back at the Telecenter hours after class had ended. He was riding the sidecar bike up a hill, then backing it down. He had come back because he couldn't stop thinking about the bike, and wanted to master riding it. The force is strong with this one.

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I've found it surprisingly difficult to deal with trash in Ghana. My familiar home the Dumpster is not to be found. Actually, trash doesn't exist, just garbage. Anything that has a potential use (the object with the most potential uses is by far the motorcycle cylinder block) is not disposed of. So what's left is, well, plastic. If you have garbage, drop it the moment it becomes garbage, such as that point at the end of a popsicle that you take the wrapper off and go at it with just the stick. I get funny looks for putting trash in my pocket.

At first I was puzzled- why isn't there trash everywhere, instead of just some places? Turns out that it's expected that anybody who cares about a piece of property will keep it litter-free. So it's not rude to litter in someone's house. It's just like leaving your plates at a restaurant. Trash accumulates where noone's living ('nature'), so the best I can do is to litter where I know it'll be picked up. Then all picked-up trash gets burned. Aii!