Nougat

After work on Friday I got some pants-fixin. A zipper replaced on one, and the other pair hemmed up. Then I went into town and wandered the market for a bit before heading back after it got dark.
I decided that it was about time that I make an effort to meet some other foreigners. There are quite a few foreigners I see around Tamale, mostly volunteers or NGO workers, but so far I have not met a single one. This is partly me being anti-social and partly because the guesthouse I am staying in seems to be occupied mostly by Ghanaians and very old Europeans. The biggest reason, though is that I completely avoid any restaurant or bar that caters to foreigners, partly due to prices, but mostly because I would much rather eat a $.50 meal of local food at a humble chop bar. It’s just more fun. Also, in the south it was easy to make friends with the Ghanaians as their English was much better, but here in Tamale most people’s English is barely comprehendible
But I started to realize that as long as I do that, I will never meet anybody else. So I checked my guide book for one of their recommendations of a good bar and rode my bike back into town and went to the “Points 7 Spot”. It was about 9:00 when I got there and it was all but empty. So I ordered a beer and about three minutes later I saw I white guy and girl wander in looking kinda lost. I waved them over and introduced myself. Nicola and Liz, both from France. They sat and ordered beers. Liz is also working with an NGO for about the same amount of time as me, doing a similar program as me through her school. Nicola has been traveling for about three months. He started by taking a boat from France to Morocco, then found a ride with a Mauritanian man, and he rode all the way to Mauritania with him. Then he traveled through Mali and Burkina Faso and has now been in Ghana for two weeks. These two were good company, and like true French people chain-smoked the whole night. I was glad we were in a fairly open air bar as smoking in Ghana is VERY rare, and people generally seem offended by it, a problem, I assume, for most European backpackers in Ghana.
I had asked if they had a bathroom and was told no, but later when Liz asked, the waitress took her around back. When Liz returned she looked horrified. “That was the worst bathroom I have ever used,” she said. I doubted it was that bad. I feel like I have traveled enough to have experienced some of the worst. However when I asked the woman to take me to the “bathroom”, it was true that I had not experienced this before. It was basically a 5’x5’ square room made of scraps of corrugated metal with a dirt floor. No hole. It was dark, so I was confused if I was seeing correctly. I laughed when I realized that I was. I walked back with moist feet from all the splashing that occurred on the hard dirt floor. J
Somehow we made two rounds of beers last until about 11:30, and the bartender had to come up to us and tell us she wanted to go home (the one other person in the bar had left much earlier) and made us quickly pay and leave. Nicola had just arrived in Tamale that evening and had not even checked into a guesthouse yet. Liz was pretty sure she was in for a long walk home as there were no cabs this late, plus she did not know if her host family would still be awake. I had not come home late before and was not sure on whether they would have closed the gate at a certain time. So we parted ways, all unsure of how our nights would end up.
When I arrived at my guesthouse, sure enough, the gate was closed and locked. This is not something I have not faced before, and the gate was only about 6 feet high. So I started to lift my bike (which had gotten a flat tire just at the moment of arriving at the gate) over the gate. It got stuck, and I was trying to fenagle it over the edge without it dropping too hard. All of a sudden I see a security guard running up to me, yelling frantically and I just freeze. “You no climb this gate. I see somebody break in, I shoot! I shoot, you no more! You might be thief, and I shoot! I apologized and asked what I should have done. “Next time, you call security!” he said. I was confused. I told him I didn’t have the phone number. “No,” he said, “you yell out, ‘Security!’ and I come and let you in.” Oh, that makes sense.
That night Liz angered her host mother for coming home so late, but Nicola didn’t have a problem getting into the nearby guesthouse.
The next day I rode into town at about 12:30 to meet up with Nicola and Liz and her two Canadian friends to watch the Ghana vs. Rwanda U-20 football match on TV. Unfortunately, though, because the match was on public TV, the guesthouse that usually shows games was not going to be showing it. Plus Liz and her friends were hungry so we decided to stop for food. I had already had a breakfast of rice and beans, so I wasn’t hungry. We went to one of the popular restaurants for Westerners that serves all sorts of European and American, at quite ridiculous prices. It took about 10 minutes to get menus, 40 minutes to take orders, 30 min. for food, and another 30 for the girls to pick at their dishes. Fried chicken, two cheeseburgers and a bowl of soup. We missed the match entirely, but I did get to see where all the westerners were hiding. They were assembling en mass around every table. It was kind of a strange sight, but I was part of the same group, so I couldn’t afford to be too critical. Then again I couldn’t afford $5.50 for a burger either.
At 5:00 Nicola, Liz and I went to the Al Hassan guest house to watch the Manchester United Game, just as I had done the previous week. It was a good game, Man. U. won 2-1, and people were mostly happy.
After the game we went to get some food, ($.50 cents worth of plantain and beans, plus about 6 oranges), then they wanted to find somewhere to have a beer. Liz, still traumatized from the previous night’s bathroom, wanted to find a new place. I offered to take them to one of the local “spots”, and they were down. We walked down a side street toward the thumping music and faint glow of a couple neon blue lights. I did not get any feeling from Liz that she was sketched out, so we proceeded through the front door (a bead curtain, except the beads were folded Coca-Cola caps, sweet) where there were maybe three other people there among maybe 6 plastic tables on a dirt floor. The matriarch of the bar quickly arranged a table with 3 chairs for us and we ordered a round of beers.
It turns out they really liked this place, especially simplicity and dinginess of it. I agreed. When Liz pondered asking for the bathroom, I assured her that it would not be worse than the previous night. So she was led to the bathroom, and when she returned, she was wide-eyed and said, “oh yeah, it’s worse!” She pointed to the dark corner of the bar, where there was a little wooden and corrugated metal gate, about 4-feet high, again, just a square with a dirt floor, though this one was indoors and had no privacy. When I went, I was able to pee, and wave to my new French friends at the same time. This was a feature I really liked. Imagine if it was like that in America. Girls could never take big group trips to the bathroom, an event that I believe causes great insecurity to most men.
I asked Nicola what he did for a living back home. When he first answered, I figured I misheard him, or at least something got lost in translation. He repeated, “I make nougat.” Liz looked confused too. We were both like, you mean the candy? Oh yeah, I kid you not, this guy makes his money by making and selling high-end nougat, which apparently is a French thing. I wonder if Americans knew that they would start calling candy bars, “freedom bars”. If only.
We hung out for quite a while, but Liz had to leave around 10:00 so she stayed on good terms with her host family. Nicola and I, however, ordered another round. By this time, the only people left in the bar were us, the teenage boy serving us, and raving mad drunkard sitting in the corner. This guy just kept babbling in Dagbani at nobody in particular, though sometimes he raised his voice and it seemed he was angry with us.
We started chatting with the young guy working there. He said his name was Joe, but his real name is Abulio, which means “from the cemetery”. I liked that. Meanwhile, the drunk guy keeps babbling. We asked Abulio what he was saying. “Oh, he wants you to buy him some bitters”. Well, at $.20 for a shot of the locally made liquor, Nicola was all about fueling this fire. He sent him a drink with two shots of bitters.
Eventually Abulio told us that he was going to close soon, so we finished our beers. Then I asked about the drunk guy, who was now stumbling around the bar, just kinda yelling and hitting things. “Doesn’t he have to go too?” I asked. “Oh, no,” Abulio said, “he’s our security guard.”
Nicola and I died laughing. We couldn’t tell if this was a brilliant idea, or a terrible one. At this point the man had started yelling at us to leave so he could get some sleep. He started to set up his bed of plastic crates. Abulio just laughed, locked up the liquor room, and we all left together. We could see the drunk security guard through cracks in the wood walls still walking around inside, just kinda babbling.
Nicola and I walked toward his guesthouse, but stopped first to have a kebab some people were grilling on the sidewalk. As we ate our kebabs (at only $.20 I ate two) I remembered my brilliant purchase from earlier in the day. Two huge bottle rockets. I asked the kebab-griller, a guy in a South Park t-shirt with Towelie on it, if it was alright if we lit them. He seemed excited and even let us use a crack in his table to stick the rocket in. Well, he put the bottle rocket in a bit too firm, and when we lit it, and did not budge, but screamed and eventually exploded into a huge burst of sparks all over the kebabs. Luckily everyone laughed. We stuck the second one in the dirt and that one went off much better.
After doing my laundry on Sunday I went back in to town to meet up with Liz and Nicola again. We were kind of a little crew by this point which was fun, but unfortunately Nicola would be leaving the next day. We walked around looking for something to eat, and decided to try Tuo Zafi (better known as T-Zed) for the first time. We found a little stall serving it. It was a squishy white ball made of pounded millet, served in groundnut soup. Surprisingly it was Liz’s first time eating with her hands. I didn’t know how you could be in Ghana for 2 weeks and never eat with your hands. We all decided that it was a very good meal, especially as it was very filling and only $.50.
After wandering around town, Nicola wanted to take us somewhere. He seemed to know a lot of people around town and was always running into people he met while traveling. One Dutch girl he knew was staying with a host family that owned a bar/restaurant and that’s where we were headed. It was a long walk to get there, but it was a really cool place out of the main part of town. A wide area all under the shade of a ginormous mango tree. The mangoes had started to get ripe as we sat there, dropping like fruity green bombs. I was just waiting for one to shatter our plastic table (it never happened, but some of them did get close). The Dutch girl’s host mom was very nice and she sat and talked with us for a while. I told her that I was staying in a Guesthouse, but I was still looking for something cheaper. She offered to look for a home stay for me, and I told her I was down. At a cost of $100/month for a room and two meals/day, I was excited about this idea. Two hours later she came up to me and said she found a place for me. So I might be moving soon.
We sipped on beers for a while and ordered some banku, a food I did not like my first time having it, but thought it was great this time. The sauce on the side of it was very spicy this time. All of sudden a guy behind me said, “Buenos noches,” I replied, “Buenos noches, como estas?” “Bien bien y tu?”, and then he started speaking French all of a sudden. Liz and Nicola took over for me. He was from Cote d’Ivoire, and I was so confused as to why he approached us in Spanish first, especially since he didn’t speak much Spanish. He told me because I looked like I would be able to speak Spanish. That was weird. He sat and spoke French with Nicola and Liz for a while, and somehow got us to buy him a Guinness. When he asked if he could have a beer with us, I of course said yeah, not knowing he was going to put the beer on our tab. It felt like Belize.
We left with Liz around 9 so she could get home in time and we walked her to get a taxi as we said goodbye to Nicola. He had to be back in France in 10 days so he could make more nougat. I am kinda glad that now I have a good reason to go to France: Nicola’s nougat.