Am I a tourist or not?

I don't feel like a tourist, but I also don't feel like I live here. We're in that in between.

If we had stayed 9 weeks in one place, I would feel like I was a part of the community, but with a week here, a couple of weeks there, I don't feel that. I also don't feel like a tourist, and get tired of people telling me how to get a taxi, that Ghana has mosquitoes, and have I tried fufu (the next time someone younger than me asks if I've tried fufu, I'm going to ask them how old they are and respond by saying I've been eating fufu longer than they have been alive). I realize that people who tell us these things are just trying to be nice, but it does get tiring. The longer the trip goes, the more I wish I looked more Ghanaian, because then I might not get as much of this sort of thing.

There are things in Ghana I like doing, that I don't like doing at home. I've grown to really like taking bucket baths. We have a working shower in this hotel, but I find myself not using it. Bucket baths remind me of my childhood in Nigeria. I don't remember taking showers in Nigeria.

I also (unbelievably) like washing my clothes by hand. I wash every other evening (Lauren washes her stuff on my off days). I wouldn't want to wash a week's worth of laundry every seven days, but washing two days worth of stuff is (almost) a relaxing end-of-the-day activity. I had to break out my "third shirt" today. For the past several weeks, I've been able to get by with just two shirts. Due to my every-other-evening washings, and because things dried so fast in Cape Coast, I was able to wash two shirts in the evening, and wear one of them the next morning. Alas, that is not the case in Winneba, and today I had to wear something different (I should mention that I do have more than three shirts on this trip), but these three were pegged as shirts I didn't want anymore (although I've grown to really like one of them) and could give away to someone needy, when we left Ghana.