Hotel Hansonic

Arrived into Accra last night at just after midnight. Yesterday was a busy day.

6:45 am: Wake up, head to the Madrid Airport
Madrid's Metro is quite amazing. The trains are clean, run on time, and seem to go everywhere. Something for New York to live up to.

10:30 am: Depart Madrid, fly to Casablanca
A short one. Luckily our bags are checked all the way through to Accra, so we won't have to worry about them later in the day.

10:10 am: Arrive in Casablanca. Time travel!
The plan is to take a train into Casablanca, about 35 minutes away. Get some lunch, try to see some sights, and kill some time until our 7pm flight out. Got a good mozzarella pizza for lunch, had some killer sweets for dessert. Too bad Alia can't eat them--most things look like they could have almonds or almond oil in them.

We got back to the airport a bit early. Even though our boarding passes were labeled terminal 1, and the monitor didn't have our flight up, it took half an hour to figure out where it was actually leaving. Note to anyone flying there, all international flights go out of terminal 2. No matter what. Even if everything says differently.

7:00 pm: Leave Casablanca
More like 7:30pm, though nobody cares we're leaving late. The airport was hot and stuffy, and I was hungry. Had another sandwich.

Midnightish: arrive in Accra!
See Alia's blog for a good recount of the visa process. She's a better writer than I am anyway.

1:00 am: arrive in the hotel
The taxi guy asks for EUR 15 for the ride. From our research we see that it should cost something like $5 (screw our tanking dollar) and Alia doesn't feel like haggling much. The alternative of spending the night at the airport doesn't seem to be much better either. We end up getting a ride for EUR 10, though I think I could have gotten him down to 7 or 8.

Go to bed around 2:30am after showering, getting settled. I don't think I'm going to miss hot water showers. Cold water feels so good.

Highlights of the day:
-Delicious baked goods in Casablanca for... $0.30 each?
-walking around a lot. Didn't go for a tour of the mosque, but saw some of the downtown area.
-applying for an "emergency entry" visa in the airport in Ghana. What fun!

Lowlights:
-it is going to be hot this summer, very hot. It's about 90F inside the hotel room...
-I'm going to be hungry pretty often. Lunch took about an hour to arrive and we were the only customers in the restaurant.
-I'm hungry again already. Ate breakfast/lunch two hours ago, but portions were small, time to go find some street good. Maybe bananas or papayas or watermelon would be good.

I tried to upload some photos, but the internet is quite slow. Alia says to paint pictures with words... right. That's why I'm a mechanical engineer. Maybe another day...