I smell lots of ganja! Not because I’m smoking. I’m actually sitting in my 8×7′ room with the door slightly cracked. It seems the type of clientele this hotel attracts has things other than work on their minds. For example the 10 AM beer guy. Or the upwind Pan-African-supporting Rastafarian.
Yesterday Jess left and I started organizing all the computer work I have to do for GFW, WBP, and 晶. I was a little uneasy – what am I doing by myself just wandering around Africa? I tried to tell myself that I’m awesome for doing this, but there was a big part of me that says “Hey you slacker! Get back to work!” The grass is always greener I suppose… After some emails to friends at home and some met on the way, I feel better about traveling. I’m not the only one, you know! There’s a bunch of people like this!
Washed some clothes that needed it, and boiled some water to kill all the junk growing in our towel.
I moved in to a single-occupancy room from the double Jess and I were sharing. Its about 8′ x 7′ square, with the bed taking up 40% of the room, the desk and chair taking up 15%, and the “closet” taking 10%, leaving an interesting maze that I’ve got to navigate through depending on what I’m doing – sleeping, computer stuff, or stretching.
On the way home from the internet café last night, I got stopped by an Indian and a Ghanaian. Both insisted that I was the richest of the three because I had dollars. I promptly informed them that while 1 dollar was more than 1 rupee or 1 cedi, what was important was how much we each had. That seemed enough to get off the topic for a while. The Indian has traveled here with a relative, a movie producer in India, who turned out to be quite a funny guy. He explained what he did as simply gambling. I had to push him to furthur define the role of producer, because at this point I was thinking of a guy sitting in a Los Vegas casino all day, so he did so by deciding to organize a book that I was going to “write.” He told me that I was the author of this book, and that I needed to say only a few sentences, and hire a translater who would then elaborate on that, hire a secretary to type everything the translater said, and hire someone to come up with a good title (he could provide this for $20,000) and some good illustrations ($30,000) for the cover. Then he’d put my name on the book, and try to sell it. So even though I wouldn’t have actually written the book, I organized and funded all the necessary pieces of it, and therefore I would have produced that book. And since you’re putting all this money up front without knowning how people will react to the book, its a lot like gambling. Makes sense now?