Made it!

Hey everybody,

I'm here! Everything went very smoothly during my travels here. Tremendously easy flights. I basically just walked through customs and was in my hotel room within an hour after stepping off the flight. Weird.

It's really funny being back to a place after having been away for two years. I end up just kind of stepping back into the pace of life here. Honestly, it feels really good. It's nice to know that I can get from point A to B without any troubles and know how to get decent cheap food. I was expecting this to be much more difficult, but here I am, just getting down to business.

I'm staying in the Asylum Down neighborhood of Accra... terrifying name for such a nice part of town. Getting back into Ghanaian food again, something I have missed over the past couple of years. Eating lots of fufu (paste of yams, cassava, plantains etc.) and banku with groundnut soup and fish. Just had a lunch of plantains with beans (called Red Red). Still working on perfecting my hand-eating skills as everybody seems to think that I'm doing it wrong, haha! I'm not sure if they're just shocked that a white person is eating fufu or if I actually have some work to do. All well. Fair enough. Makes for some funny conversations. The best part is that eating like this every day will cost me under 6 dollars a day!

I've run into a lot of people that I know from last time and it looks like this is not going to slow down. I've even started making some contacts with some of the people whom I hope to interview! This is a huge relief for me. I am confident that the "web" actually will open up. Last night I attended a "Night of Tributes and Songs" for a well-known and highly respected scholar on African music who passed away recently. Lots of brass band music, singing and spoken tributes. It was actually quite moving even though I had never met him and I got a number of additional ideas for how to go about my fieldwork. There will be many other events around his funeral over the next couple of days and I am hoping to attend a number of them. Might even end up heading out to the Volta Region this weekend.

It looks like I will end up staying with a family in Madina, near Legon, just north of Accra starting tomorrow. A number of people have been very helpful in getting me set up closer to the university where I hope to be doing a lot of my research. We'll see how this ends up working out, but I am hopeful. It also looks like I might be making the trip over to Cape Coast sometime during the middle of next week. Interviewing is about to begin and I get more and more excited as the time comes!! Time to nail down the final list of questions and make some basic interview plans (all of which will self-destruct of course... this is the nature of interviewing, but it's good to have a basic framework).

I kind of have the day off as there is not much in terms of fieldwork for me to be doing right now. Tomorrow there is a memorial service for the same scholar in Legon and I might make the early morning trek over there. Lots to figure out right now in terms of scheduling stuff and coordinating my plans around the funeral events, so I have quite a few calls to make today.

All things considered, things are going quite well. I can tell already that time is going to fly and before too long I will be headed home. No time to lose!!

Ok, off to buy a coke. I am pathetically dysfunctional without caffeine and there are definitely not any coffee shops around here (which is a good thing). That's all for now... Hope everybody is well.

Patrick