Sunday, June 30 Accra

We've had power outages at random times which have thwarted my posting. Today, in the intensely Christian nation, everything is closed, so I've spent the day doing laundry and reading. Most of my hostelmates have fled northeast to a festival. Tomorrow is a national holiday, Republic Day. I plan to move my location down to downtown Accra (this place is in the suburbs) tomorrow. Then on Tuesday morning, the first business day of the week I'll see if I can get a Cote D'Ivoire visa. If that is possible then I'll be obliged to stick around Accra for a few days while they process my application. In the larger picture these two lost days won't matter but for now I'm very impatient to get on the road.

Someone once propagated plants here. 

Yesterday I spent several hours exploring Ghana University. I was most interested in the Botanical Garden. The university is expansive, maybe too big. Why centralize all public education in one place? Why not put some of the schools about the city? The area around the school is surprisingly infertile to commercial activity, unlike most other university towns I've visited. There was one modern, nearly empty supermarket across the main highway. Other than that there wasn't much.

I stood outside one of these lecture halls and tried to listen but all I really saw was some kind of supply-demand curve on the blackboard. How the students in the back could hear or see anything is beyond me. The students mostly looked like students anywhere, bemused, moderately attentive, eager for a diversion (like the white guy hanging around outside)

A long-neglected potting shed. Someone undoubtedly removed the glass  long ago. 

The botanic gardens, I read in my Lonely Planet guide, are neglected. And they are. Some of the decaying buildings bore the name of the university botany department but my sense is that no botanist has been in the gardens in years. A terrible shame. Reminds me of the gardens in Yerevan, Armenia. Same thing. In Armenia they had the excuse that the gardens were a remnant of Soviet leadership and thus tainted. Since I was at the school on Saturday I didn't meet up with any professors and couldn't find out why the gardens are ignored.

Students are the same everywhere. A sign on a university building. 

The gardens are fairly large, perhaps tens of acres, though I saw only a handful of people in the park, mostly congregated near an entrance adjoining a major thoroughfare. I sometimes wish I could get a job as savior for the world's botanical spaces. I bet there are many. For a couple hundred thousand dollars you could bequeath a treasure to future generations.