School

I am actually able to get internet again. Hooray!! But we still have no running water. It is quite sad. I never thought I would miss being able to wash my hands this much. But anyways, on to talking about the University of Ghana.

The school is really cool. The first thing you notice is the sheer size of the campus. It is huge!! I think you could fit at least 4 Rice campuses inside one of these. It is literally a town unto itself. There are 5 banks, a post office, hair salons, laundromats, lots of restaurants, bars, bookstores, gift shops, anything you can think of really. There is even a mini-market where you can bargain for goods. It is insanely big. I mean over 20,000 students attend every year and about 1,000 international students come from all over the world. Most people are from the US though, I have noticed.

I still haven't met my roommate yet, but she is supposed to come today. She will be a fourth-year Ghanaian student who has chosen to be paired with an international. So that should be fun. I am really looking forward to meeting her and I really hope we get along. The rooms are pretty small and definitely a step down from Rice's dorms. The floors are interesting. They are tile, but then I think in the 70's, they decided to put down some linoleum in a weird orange color (for my room at least). But they ran out so only sections are linoleum. The rest is still tile. It is quite odd.

The beds are a slab of wood with a thin cushion over it as a mattress. It was really hard to sleep the first few nights, but now I'm used to it so it's not too bad. We also get a desk, wardrobe, chair, and bookshelf. The furniture itself is fine, just really old and out-dated. We are a little afraid though, because the wardrobes all smell like mold. One of the girls has already had to change rooms because she was getting sick from the mold.

Classes haven't started yet and aren't supposed to until around the 20th. They said it might get pushed back a few days. However, we have started registration. It is so different from how we do it at Rice. At Rice you go online, type in five or six codes and you're finished. Here, you have to go to each department and register for the classes individually. The only problem is that they don't have the timetables out yet. So you have to register for a lot of classes not knowing if some of them will conflict. And some of the departments just tell you to come back later. I have to go back to Archaeology on Thursday after I tried to register on Monday. It's very unorganized and inefficient. But everyone has been really nice and helpful throughout the process. So that makes it a little better.