Beach, Sun, and Lobster

Alan and I headed to the nearby beach this weekend with some friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. It's hard to believe, but despite living in a coastal city, we have yet to go to the beach. Part of the issue is that the beach right in Accra is a health hazard and I wouldn't step near it. I'm really happy we finally made it out to the ocean though. About an hour outside of Accra is a little strip of mostly clean, relatively safe beach with one little restaurant with the freshest fish ever and some little plots of land that one can rent. One of the families we were with rents a plot with a few other families and that is where we gathered for the day.




The water was a little rough for my taste and after hearing about a friend who got a worm in his foot that made it's way up his thigh after hanging out at the same beach, I was a little nervous but we had a really good time anyway. One of the women who joined us has adopted two twin Ghanaian boys from a local orphanage and they were ridiculously cute. So they kept us entertained throughout the day.






After playing some games on the beach and relaxing in the sun, we got ready for lunch which entailed buying fresh lobster from the local women selling up and down the beach and throwing them in some boiling water. But, as most things in Ghana, it was a bit complicated. The first women that came over showed us their lobsters (which they carry in a bucket on their heads) quoted us a price that apparently was almost double what our friends normally pay. Several other lobster-selling women came over and still the price was too high. Jen and her husband, Michael, who rent the plot insisted that they buy from a women almost every weekend for much less. So we all were gathered around buckets full of crawling lobster as the price never got low enough. Mind you, we were talking about 50 cents for one lobster and they wanted $1 for each but it was more the principal I suppose. After Jen mentioned the name of her usual lobster women, one of the women who was there said, "oh, she's my sister" and quickly made a phone call and her sister agreed to come to us and sell. After waiting about an hour, she arrived and quoted us the same price the other women did! We finally talked her down a bit and bought about 30 lobsters for all of us. After turning a nice pink over some hot coals, we spread some garlic butter on them and ate them up.






We left early enough to avoid the horrendous weekend traffic that can potentially make a 1 hour trip 4 hours and made it home sandy and tired but happy to get some fresh ocean air.