Hotel Byblos

Ghanaian food

by sachara

The first times I visited Ghana I learned to eat all kind of Ghanaian food. During the voluntary projects we cooked ourselves on the Ghanaian way. Also I visited friends and could have a look in their kitchen and try their food. I saw and learned how to pound the food and how to cook with firewood and with charcoal.

In Ghana I tasted yam, cassave and plantain for the first time. Mostly we prepared our meals with what was available. During one of the dry season, when the rains stayed away very long, our main food was maize, brought by an aunt, being a market woman who had to feed the whole family at that time. I never have eaten maize in so many different ways. When we travelled in another less dry region we suddenly saw lots of yams at a local market. The bus on its way back to Accra stopped and everybody in the bus bought as many yams as possible. So the bus got a second floor of yams in a few moments. In the rainy season we could bring lots of fresh vegetables from the garden or from the market.

My favourite Ghanaian food is fufu, being pounded cassave with plantain tilll it looks and feels almost like chewinggum. It is been eaten by the right hand after dipping your hand in the soup. Otherwise the stuff will stick at your fingers. Mostly we had palmnut soup, but my favourite is the groundnut soup. This one I make also at home at the European way with peanut butter and tomato sauce.

True Ghanaian dishes

by Alpha_Ghana about El Gringo

You feel in a real Ghanaian place, where everything is set for Ghanaians.
The restaurant is alongside a small street in Osu, and fully covered as a nice patio.
Tables and chairs are simple.
You received only local dishes for local prices. You have to eat Ghanaian tradition, with your hands, just receive a spoon for soups.
Red-red with plantain are particularly delicious there, a grilled tilapia with ***o is also very good.

Accra

by sachara

"where my Subsaharean African adventure started..."

My first experience arriving in Accra....
The first time when I arrived at the airport some guys of Volu (the Ghanaian Voluntary Organisation) picked me up from the airport. They brought me in the dark to a secondary school where I could sleep. At the moment I arrived it was totally dark, there was no electricity and there was nobody around in the school. The guys left me there and said to me 'You are totally safe here. We will come back in the morning and show you where you are'.
I looked for a bed in one of the unlocked dormitories and tried to sleep and experienced 'how dark Africa and can be'. There was no light and no noise till in the night I heard some people walking up the stairs. They entered my dormitory with a flashlight to look who has sneaked in. I found out that they were also European volunteers just coming back home and sleeping in of the dormitories nextdoor.

After a few weeks coming back from the voluntary project I made a lot of friends and could stay with Ghanaian volunteers and their families all over the country. So I did in back Accra and Madina just north of Accra. The hospitality of the Ghanaian people was absolutily amazing.

Accra is a lifely city. All the four times I came to Ghana I stayed in Accra for a few days or longer. The more often I came back, the more I liked the city. It's a rather easygoing place.

The last time in 2003 I came to Accra only for two days at the start of my Africa overland trip. In those two days I could see that since my first visits in the 1980s a lot has changed. A pity I couldn't meet any of my old friends. I knew that some moved out of the country, of some I lost the addresses and some died.