Enough with the depressing dog drama, on to our first week long vacation in Ghana! When I last wrote, I talked about our upcoming trip to Mole National Park, Ghana’s biggest and most well-know park. Everyone who works here goes to Mole eventually as it’s the only place to go to see elephants. Elephants are arguably the most exciting big animal that Ghana has, as it doesn’t really have other big game.

Gavin has really fallen down on his blog writing responsibilities, so I will attempt to pick up the slack! As I type it is a Sunday morning and he is actually off on a little bird watching trip with some colleagues from school. They left yesterday afternoon and drove a few hours north to try to find a particular bird (I think a moustachioed sunbird). This trip involved both an overnight stay in a Ghanaian truck-stop motel and a 4 hour hike in the blazing sun so I am thrilled to report that I volunteered to stay home with Nell. Reports back so far are that the group is having a great time-I am very pleased that Gav has found some people to Bird Nerd out with so that I don’t have to do it.

Before we talk more about our first few weeks here in Accra, let’s rewind a bit back to our last few weeks in Yangon. The last few weeks of any school year are a crazy blur of activities, but when you are leaving somewhere the craziness is exponential. Luckily Gav and I anticipated this and from way back in January decided that we would try to not put a lot of pressure to do things or go places in the final days but instead to take advantage of time that we had the whole semester to enjoy our favourite places in Yangon. In the last two months or so, every time we went anywhere we mentally said goodbye to the place in case we didn’t get a chance to visit again. That worked pretty well and we had some really enjoyable times and lots of great cocktails!

Hello from Accra! We landed 3 weeks ago yesterday and things have been a whirlwind ever since. There is a lot to catch up on, like our departure from Yangon and our entire summer but we will get to that later. For now I want to record these first days in Ghana while they are still fresh in my mind.

Whoops. Quite a lot has happened since Gav’s post so we have a lot to catch up on. It’s been quite a lot of drama, but let’s rewind to a more simple time, our final few days of our spring vacation.

After we left the national park we were driven (at much safer speeds!) back to KL for the night. We found a place to eat on the street food street and luckily managed to nab a table under cover as quite soon there was a major downpour. This caused everyone to scramble for new seats. The rain soon let up and the street filled with people again.

When we returned to Yangon in January we were very happy to feel that the cool season was still hanging around. This was the first year that I actually felt its arrival-when we first came to Myanmar our friend Dave had told me “one day you will feel a cool breeze and know that the cool season has arrived!” Well, for four years I waited for this magical moment and it never happened.

We had a great time in Cambodia and now it was time to jet off to Vietnam! Gav did forget to document one memorable part of our stay in Siem Reap though. We noticed in Phnom Penh that Cambodia had many different national breweries and we made it our mission to try as many of them as we could get our hands on. There are lots of choices-Angkor, the confusingly similarly named Anchor, Cambodia, Hanuman, you get the drift. They also have the amusingly named Krud Beer. Their tagline? “Good Times, Krud Times.” Maybe that’s what Dickens had written before his copy editor got to the manuscript, who knows. Anyway, obviously that was a must try.

A few weeks ago we had a 2 day break from school. This was actually the Thursday and Friday of the week before Thanksgiving as we no longer get a holiday on actual Thanksgiving. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have that day off with this specific population of students and there are actually a lot of Myanmar holidays in November so a few years ago it was decided that we would shift the vacation days to coincide with something that most people actually celebrated!

Well, we had a great trip to Komodo but it’s been a bit of a downward spiral health-wise since we returned! Three weeks ago Gav started complaining that it felt like he had a bit of something stuck in his eye. I told him he was fine and also that THIS time I was not taking him to a hospital to have it taken care of. A few summers ago while we were visiting London Gav decided to clean out our gutters or something and blew some leaf detritus into his eyeball in the process. I ended up having to take him to the London Eye Hospital and wait ages in the urgent care area until someone could q-tip the stuff out. When he was still complaining the next day I figured he had pink eye so I gave him some drops for that.

One of Gav’s duties as the acting director this year was to get all of the new staff into Yangon and get them settled into their lives here. In the past, new faculty have all flown to Bangkok where we had about 4 days to meet everyone, have a few meetings and get our visas to enter Myanmar. The school has since decided to do away with that first step and just have everyone get their visas in their home countries and then arrive here and have a bit more time to settle in before the craziness of school starts. I think this is a great change but it was all up to Gav (and me!) to organize the intro week.