Sunday May 19^th, 2013 8:30am

Wednesday I finally got to see out job site for the next month at least.  It is the new building at the Pentecostal University College (PUC) in Accra.  It is a seven storey building that will be used for teaching.  It is being built in collaboration with a Chinese firm who are supplying all the steel construction knowledge for the main structure.  Steel construction is not typically used in Ghana, as they rely mainly on concrete and cinder block construction methods.  The head engineer told us of the difficulties in trying to convince the owners that steel construction was a viable alternative to the more traditional Ghanaian options.  The owner took a lot of convincing to be persuaded to accept steel for their building.

Thursday I came down with my first and hopefully last African sickness.  All day Thursday and Friday I could not keep any food or water down, I was very sore and could not sleep.  The intense heat did not help matter much.  Lucky for me we did not have any work as our boss was away at another of his projects, building a sewerage plant outside of Accra.

 

                Saturday I felt a hundred percent better after my illness.  I decided to have my first tourist day in Accra.  I started by visiting Osu Castle, it is the presidential residence, so no pictures are allowed.  It was very interesting to see and learn of the battles the past governments of Ghana have had over where the president should live.  They also have a large building called Flagstaff house that some governments of Ghana have used, but it was also formerly used by the British when they controlled Ghana as a colony.  So not only do they fight over control of the government but also over where the government should be located. 

After visiting the castle I took a piece of advice from Don Sawyer’s Avuncular Travel Tips as seen in Verge Magazine (January-August 2008)

34.  The WATO bar in downtown Accra may be the most interesting place on earth to spend an afternoon drinking beer.

The first challenge was finding the WATO bar, one person told me it had closed and a few didn’t know where it was.  I finally found one gentleman who knew of it and pointed it out to me.  It was visible from about 10 feet away from where everyone was sitting so I don’t know they didn’t know about it.  I have to agree that the WATO bar is a very interesting place.  It overlooks a rare six street intersection with no discernible sense of order. Red lights are totally ignored and if enough people walking get together they just start crossing stopping all traffic regardless of the color of the street lights.  It is also a very loud intersection with hundreds of people going about their business and just as many children running and playing.  On top of it all for all the commotion there are an equal number of people sleeping and resting on the side of the road. 

After checking out the WATO bar I went to Nkrumah Memorial park and mausoleum and looked around the nice park and monuments there. 

  After that I met up with the rest of the travelers I have met and we all went to Krokrobite beach for their nightly reggae show.  It was not quite what I expected.  It was much simpler that I was expecting, just a small band and a couple of performers doing some basis circus tricks.  We had a nice pizza dinner and a couple of drink on the beach which was very nice.  Krokrobite is a tourist beach and was populated by almost exclusively Europeans on holiday. 

Johnny