Yefre wo sen? Yefre me Adwoa.

Cape Coast is four hours away. The road is sometimes paved, and people weave through traffic throwing bags of plantain chips or bags of frozen yogurt into an upward arc through our bus window as eager hands catch them and release coins into their baskets. Every few miles or so, you'll pass a huge, decaying piece of machinery. Bulldozer carcasses and rusty car graveyards. Groups of children wave emphatically at the bus of foreign faces. You pass by wooden shacks with rusty sheet metal roofs with names like "When God Say Yes Cell Phones" or "Jesus is Lord Enterprises" or "God Is Good Fast Food". Goats meander through trash piles, chewing lazily on plantain peels, and roosters peck and strut through the long, winding gutters of sewage. Then the cityscape will dissipate and there will be nothing but grassland and tall bonsai-looking trees for miles until the odd coconut cart or field of unvarnished bed frames crops up. After more than a month of being here, it still feels surreal just to have my eyes open, to see the billboards for tomato paste lit up above a blanket in the street where five children are sleeping in a row. It's still amazing to see so many shades of peeling paint, so many presidential election posters that say "we are moving forward" with the Adinkra symbol of a peacock picking an egg from its back, symbolizing a return to your roots, painted below. It's still astonishing to see how far our of their way a stranger will travel to help you figure out where you're going.

We went for a traditional harvest festival. There were masses of people in the streets, dancing and yelling and beating on drums. There were carriages on the shoulders of men carrying members of royal society, who waved and smiled with gold-drenched wrists and necks. A bull was led through the streets on a rope, bucking and followed by an undulating, fiery mob, and then sacrificed to the gods. I missed the slaughter, thankfully, but saw the body being carted through the streets from the second floor window of a street-facing house that several of us simply wandered into, past the hallways of children playing with pots and pans, of women washing clothing, up to the faded green window where we also watched a man in a grass skirt dancing with a giant flag. Rifles were fired, along with a human-sized slingshot.

There was a gorgeous beach near the Cape Coast slave castle, which we had visited before, and we walked onto the cliffs and felt the mist spray our faces. Enoch and I found several strange shells and were in the process of looking for more when a gigantic wave came up from behind us and quite literally swept me off my feet, that ol' romantic Atlantic. I was fully-clothed and laughing uncontrollably, because what else can you do. A chorus of children joined in the laughter, running up to me and tugging at my dripping shirt, asking me if I'd like to buy peanuts or fried corn balls or sachets of water. Then they proceeded to help us find more funny shells, and I drip dried within a couple of hours. We went back to the beach that night and found tiny glowbugs in the sand that would shimmer and then vanish if you swept your hand over the shore. It's probably the most like an alchemist I've ever felt.

The next day, four of us went on the canopy walk at Kakum National Park. We wobbled across six rope bridges high above the rainforest canopy with the echoes of birds all around us. It was so gorgeous, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to take any pictures. From there, we went to a restaurant on a lake called Hans Cottage Botel where patient crocodile noses protruded from the water, slowly weaving their way through the schools of fish. We managed to fit six passengers into a taxi, two of us sitting on laps (I wish I could see my mom's face as she reads this. It's okay, I promise) and drove home to the hostel all while dancing up a storm. In front of us, we saw ten boys crammed into a station wagon, the hatchback open and their feet dangling down. Well, they saw us dancing, so I guess they found it all a bit irresistible, one in particular. As far as I knew, they were all just dancing in their car, until I turned away for a moment and heard a rapping on the window and the door opening. At first I was terrified, but the guy, who must have been in his twenties, just climbed right in the backseat, sitting on the laps of two guys, and began dancing up a storm himself (!) and singing a song that wasn't on the radio. Most of us laughed until we wept. He got out several blocks later, wishing us all a wonderful visit, disappearing into the wild crowd.

Well, now we're back home, exhausted muscles and sun-kissed cheeks (telegram to mom: all is well on the spf front. stop. don't worry your lovely head about it. stop. please send fruit leather. stop.) and enough imagery to sustain us through the tap-dance routine that is Ghanaian Academia.