I never knew what a hard job this little piggy had! Well…at least if it was going to market here, it was not an easy task at all!
Chuks, Mandy, Chichi, and I caught a taxi this morning to Madina Market. Madina is the town next to Adenta (where we live), and is older than Adenta, so has a much larger, more established market (which is unfortunate because the one in Adenta is very close…but it doesn’t have everything all the time, and the prices are usually higher). When we got there, I was overwhelmed by the size of it all! It’s HUGE! I don’t even know what to compare it to…but I definitely would’ve gotten lost if I hadn’t have stuck to Mandy like glue the whole time (which was difficult because there are so many people and they walk through the markets like taxis drive on the roads here). We dropped Chuks and Chichi off at a restaurant in the corner (restaurants here are few and far between…pretty much everything is just food stands or drink spots) and, of course, I had to use the bathroom - which was a wooden stall outside with a concrete floor (and a small hole in the corner for drainage) and walls so low that I could see all of the people passing by a couple feet away…haha - and then it was off to shop.
The whole place was crowded and busy and chaotic. Outside there are tons of people selling, well, everything, and taxis and trotros and people all trying to get around each other. Then inside, it’s even more packed, but luckily with no automobiles. I don’t even know how one decides which person to buy from because there are tons of ladies selling the same products…but Mandy skillfully wound us through the maze, finding all of the things that she needed. Now, when you don’t have a shopping cart, the load becomes VERY heavy and burdensome. I swear, if our grocery shopping in the states were changed to mirror market shopping in Ghana, gyms would go out of business. We got our cardio and weights…and I was definitely sweating just as much as when I go to the gym…haha = ) Oh…but I guess we’d still need gyms for the men because I could count on one hand the number of men I saw. But yeah…it was so sad, too, because there were all these young girls walking around with buckets on their heads asking us to use their services (you pay them to carry what you buy). My heart just broke for them because some had to have been only 7 or 8...and when I, a grown woman, struggled with the load for just the half hour or so that we were shopping…I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for them. I was just glad it was Saturday because if it had been a week day and I knew that they were there instead of in school, it would’ve been all I could do to not drag them out of there and into a classroom = (
The produce in the market was just beautiful! I’ve never seen such red tomatoes in my life! And there were mangoes and bananas and pineapples and plantain…mmmmm-mmmmm! That was actually pretty much the extent of the fruit that I saw…there aren’t a lot of kinds of fruit here it seems…but the variety of vegetables was amazing! There were so many things that I’d never seen before…and unfortunately it’s not an atmosphere where you can stop and ask questions, especially if you’re not buying. But yeah…there were the fruit and vegetable stands, as well as fish stands, baking stands (with bags of real wheat! - Mandy’s gonna teach me how to cook a breakfast with it = ), packaged product stands, egg stands, a groundnut paste stand, yam stands (oh man…the yam here are so delicious and SO ugly! - never judge something by its appearance = ), leather stands (where they sell the skin of cows, and goats, I think), snail stands, and that was just the food stuffs (oh gosh…I’m sure I’m forgetting tons of them). But yeah…our last stop was to get meat, but I had to wait outside because it’s this room full of men (here was where I saw 90% of the men I saw in the market) cutting up animals…and just the sounds and the little bit I could see through the screens told me I wouldn’t be able to handle being inside.
At this point the bag was cutting into my hand so badly (Mandy had TWO!…and used to go to market by herself! I really have no idea how it would’ve been humanly possible to carry our load on her own…talk about a strong woman!) and was so heavy (she said that one passerby told her that she was really making the obroni, white person, suffer…haha…I guess I gotta toughen up), but by some miracle I made it outside = ) We met up with Chuks, caught a taxi, and headed home. These are the experiences that I really love!…getting to see what it’s like to live as a local = )
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