Zoo, Tro-tro, semi hitchhiking, badminton, party, barber all today but in a different order 🤣

Soo yesterday evening Ajit organized some traditional Indian food which was made out of simple ingredients, yet was very delicious.

From left to right:

Spinach with cottage cheese

Traditional Indian bread

Onion

Chickpeas sauce

Indian snacks

Later there was also fried rice.

There was also traditional desert. What you see on the top is not aluminum foil, but a very thin slice of silver which is edible.

I slept like a baby after this 😂

We started the next morning at 6:30 with Ajits special tea and went then to his badminton club. The people there are super friendly and I thought about joining the game but they are also extremely good so I rather passed on playing and just watched.

There was a get-together with food and drinks afterwards.

In the picture is fish, egg with tomato, chili-tomato dip (extremely hot, I cried again 🤣) and something that is made out of corn but also has a sour taste to it and is cooked in corn leaves. I couldn't finish the corn thing it was just too much. You might notice the lack of cutlery. Thats because I ate with my fingers. They're actually pretty convenient. These fingers I mean.

The local beer is really easy to drink and has a lighter taste then pilsener to it. The bottles are quite big with 625ml tho.

Sometimes they sell water in loose plastic bags (dont have a picture but I'll give you later one in a different blog post 👍). Since there is no deposit (german: Pfand) on the bottles here, its cheaper to just put it in bags.

Apparently the same goes for gin:

After food and drinks Ajit went to have a nap and I decided to go spontaneously to the zoo that is nearby. I took an Uber since it looked like a difficult place to hitchhike to. The Uber driver kind of scammed me tho and left me way too early so I had to walk 20 minutes. Luckily this truck with a family was coming my way and I could ride in the back of the truck.

I guess not everything can be super awesome because this zoo definitely was not. There were guides for different groups passing through the zoo and each guide said something different. For example one said that the turtles can get up to 40 years old, another said its 250 years. Also one said the lion is female, the other one said its a young male who is lacking its mane due to the fact that he isn't grown up yet. There were hawks but the question which hawk it is or from were it was couldnt be answered. Lacking knowledge of the guides and missing signs was not the worst tho, the territories for the animals were terribly small.

While walking through there I felt huge pitty with the animals. Oh and in the end there were free living geese but they cropped or just broke their wings so they couldn't fly away. I honestly feel like I have visited some shady animal trader and not a public zoo 😱

Ok now I stop for real..

If you click on all pictures of this blog entry you will also find happy animals tho, like these 🐗 🐗 🐗

Buuuut atleast after the zoo I found the same family again which brought me to the zoo and drove with them back to the next big road 👍

The zoo didnt take so much time, so I decided to check for a barber, both my beard and hair needed some work.

The close ones had all google reviews below 4,0 but after checking up on them I gotta say the Ghanaian people seem to be really harsh or reviews (which is actually a good thing) so I just picked the closest, went there and asked the barber if he was good at barbering. A bit startled he told me he believes he is and I told him to cut me what he feels like, as long as I have atleast some hair on my head and some beard left. His name was Gabriel and we had lots of fun, good talks about neo-colonialism, chinese people getting more and more influence in Africa and South America, social credit systems and capitalism. By the amount of topics you might already sense that Gabriel wasnt the fastest Barber in Ghana but that didnt matter since he owned the place. He also trained me in this unique Ghanaian (or African? I dont know actually) handshake, where you shake hands, then slowly glide the hands apart and hold the middlefinger of your handshake partner with your middlefinger and thumb until you pull it apart and snap with your middle finger and thumb. Not sure if that makes sense to anyone who never saw it but its really cool.

Anyway that was just the first half of the barber experience, then Gabriel asked me if I believed in god. I should have just said yes. Buuuuuuut I did not and he started talking about souls, Jesus, God, the great masterplan for everyone, how the big bang is linked to some genesis chapter in the bible, that he is not Christian anymore but a spiritual person and that all non believers will eventually believe. With every new sub topic he he made a biblical stop on working on my beard or hair (he switched from one to the other without a pattern I could explain) and kept talking. But I sat comfortable in that chair and he was really cool to talk (or more listen) to, so I dont really mind.

So this is the result

(Please dont judge what Im doing with my fingers there, I have no clue 🤣)

It kinda looks like the hair on the aide is way shorter in the second picture but thats actually just the light..

In the end I asked Gabriel how to get to my place by Tro-tro (these small buses which cost around 20cents and are usually super crowded) and he told me to just wait at a street which is my direction and tell the Tro-tro operator (the operator is the person who collects the money from the people using it. There is also the driver and the person who stores all the money. I still didnt completely understand whats going on in there but thats OK) where I want to go.

That worked perfectly and I had to walk less then 2 minutes to Ajits place. Tro-tro is the best!

I slowly really feel like I have arrived 🤩🤩

Tonight I'm most likely going to meet another couchsurfer and we plan a cool trip which he originally started. Im super stoked 👍