Last Day In Africa: Accra To Chicago Via AMS & DTW

I got up and worked on blog text until about 9am.  Then went to Busy Internet.  They were in the process of rebooting all their computers.  Not good.  I asked the girl if this would less than or more than 10 minutes.  She said they're working on it.  "So that means more than 10 minutes..."

I left and got a cab to Osu.  Only GH¢2.  I'm getting better at this.  I went to the internet cafe in the Osu food court.  But I had a GH¢10 bill and nothing smaller.  The internet cafe at the food court couldn't give me GH¢9.  But no problem--I'm in a food court right?  I went to buy a pastry.  Nope--they can't break it.  I went to another place to buy an Orange Fanta.  Nope--they can't break it.  Then I realized that I actually had a GH¢1 coin, so I used it.  I didn't think I'd have these liquidity problems in Osu.

I went to Frankie's.  I figured since all I wanted was a small beer, I'd just go to their lounge.  But even though there is only a door separating the lounge from the restaurant, a small Star costs GH¢3.30 in the lounge and GH¢1.80 in the restaurant.  And there is no TV with CNN in the lounge.  So I went back out to the restaurant.  I watched more soccer then went to Ryan's Irish pub at noon.  I had a hamburger and a couple of beers.  I had a nice chat with a couple of men.  One left early after a while and then the other, who has been in Ghana for 14 years, and I compared our levels of travel savviness with stories of our travel experiences.

After that, I took a cab to my hotel where I just picked up my bags and then went to the airport.  I ate one last little bit of food at The Landing.  I had hummous and a Russian salad.  Maybe food with garlic and onions is not the best thing before a flight.  Oh well, I smell already.  I filled out my Ghana immigration card.

Than back to the airport where I went through immigration and then just waited for my flight.  There were a lot of white people carrying stuff sold by the merchants.  Wow!  People actually do buy that stuff!

Soon we boarded the big plane and it was nice because they had stairs at the front of the plane and at the back so I didn't have to walk all the way through.  Not bad.

It was a 6 hour flight and I was between 2 people.  Yuck.  Then a small time in Amsterdam.  They had a McDonalds but no Sausage McMuffin with Egg and that hash brown thing.  So I didn't eat.  Then a multiple hour trip to Detroit.

 

Immigration was pretty good.  No questions, really.  He typed forever, I suppose because he typed in my list of countries visited.  Then I got my bags and went through customs.  Naturally, I was smelly, unshaven, and jut got back from a trip to Africa--that means a full inspection of my bags.  I did it and it was thorough.  Lots of questions which were easy enough to answer.  I had only one thing that I was worried about--my prescriptionless prescription drug, Savarine--and they totally missed it.   Then after the X-ray security scan, they hauled me out for the full body scan which was kind of neat.  I had to stand on some foot prints and hold my arms up, then rotate 90 degrees and hold my arms a different way.  Cool, where I had a small hamburger at small fries at McDonald's to get my American fast food fix settled for the next several weeks.  Then a short flight to O'Hare.  I got my bags (whew) and went out to the Hilton lounge to get a beer and call my brother.  He was actually really close to O'Hare by coincidence and picked me up.  Then, because it started snowing a few hours before, it took us 3.5 hours to go 15 miles.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008 10:03 Chicago local time