Shopping

1. This is the campus Supermarket, what we would call a convenience store:

As you can see, they sell toilet paper and Fru-telli juice. But they also sell the usual run of convenient store items: groundnut butter, schnapps, freshly bottled fruit smoothies, and 2 litre cans of mosquito repellent.

They don't worry about people taking the shopping carts, for as soon as you leave the sidewalk, which is only to be found directly in front of the building, the carts stop rolling in the soft Ghanaian dust. 

Last week the insides were painted with super toxic enamel paint that a week later you can still smell a block away. But much to my surprise the paint has dried. I just wouldn't want to spend much time in the store until it has finished off-gassing (probably around August).

2. This is the real convenience store (found at every intersection), what we would call dangerous or at least illegal:

 

At every traffic light on the major road (really a highway) from the University in Legon to downtown Accra (and on most secondary roads) crowds of sellers swarm out into the stopped cars with goods for sale.

And everything is for sale, from cell phone scratch cards (for recharging the time on your phone) to fruit, vegetables, snacks and drinks, to belts, blue jeans, dress shirts with ties, to toilet paper, tooth brushes, mops, pails, light bulbs and hammers, to newspapers, magazines, DVDs and CDs to home-cooked meals and, my favourite, the guy selling wall maps of Ghana. It's staggering on first encounter what people are selling, and buying.

I've actually seen a vendor sell an item into a car window, collect money, run to his stash on the curb for change and then chase the car up the street with it.

3. And then this is the "night" market (most shops closed by 7 or 8 pm, but open all day except Sundays), located across the street from the Supermarket and very near the International Students' Residence:

And here are some of the stalls in the night market. Ghana is famous for small businesses that invoke the owner's religious spirit: