{"id":401,"date":"2016-08-09T09:20:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T09:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/?p=401"},"modified":"2016-08-09T10:45:35","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T10:45:35","slug":"life-in-ghana-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/2016\/08\/09\/life-in-ghana-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in Ghana – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
This year, Lancaster University is holding a public health\/tropical diseases summer programme together with Boston University in Ghana, where we are taken care of by Lancaster University Ghana (surprise! We have a campus in Ghana). The programme has been running for more than four weeks now, but because this is my first post, an introductory post is surely necessary. Welcome to Ghana, where life is music, and music goes hand in hand with dance. One of our dance teachers told\u00a0 me that when they taught us in the first week. We had a dance lesson on our second day, that\u2019s how important it is. Well, it\u2019s also because we have to perform at the end of our programme, but that\u2019s not a concern for now. Together, music and dance fill up our day-to-day life in Ghana and here is an example:<\/p>\n
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The Wheels on the Bus Go AAAY!<\/div>\n
We have the privilege to spend time with Lancaster Uni Ghana students and have their company for most of the trips. The length of the trips vary, but most of the time, it\u2019s more than an hour to get to a tourist site (it lasts longer due to the traffic). However, they never allow the bus rides to exhaust us before we get to our destination, and the way they tackle that issue is by blasting a LOT of Hip Hop, Afrobeats or sometimes just general new music (they play Adele\u2019s \u201cHello\u201d every now and then). If you\u2019re not familiar with Afrobeat, you\u2019re definitely missing out; it is definitely one of the most danceable music genres there is. It is able to transform the busy traffic with its Tro-Tro* with the open (but tied up) back door, jaywalkers, food vendors with food on their heads, to synchronised dancers that move to the beats of Drake or the constant clap-clap-clap-clapclap<\/i> of Afrobeat.<\/div>\n
\n
\"Elita<\/a><\/div>\n
\n
Sometimes, we get to take a taxi, which is also not your regular taxi. Most of them have patchy colours and they don\u2019t have a meter, so roll your sleeves up (\u2018cause it\u2019s hot) and get your bargaining skill ready! The taxi rides are also very musical, but out of three taxis we took, all of them played reggae (out loud). It really creates a picture perfect scene: your windows rolled down, wind on your face, the car riding rather smoothly down the road and some reggae, tying the whole thing together. But then some maniac behind your car won\u2019t stop honking.<\/div>\n
\n*Tro-tro: minivan-shaped public transport<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year, Lancaster University is holding a public health\/tropical diseases summer programme together with Boston University in Ghana, where we are taken care of by Lancaster University Ghana (surprise! We have a campus in Ghana). The programme has been running for more than four weeks now, but because this is my first post, an introductory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":547,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ghana-summer-school"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6SVJb-6t","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/547"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/studyabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}