After Monday's double scoop of clusterfudge ice cream (extra nuts), the rest of the week's research time was spent interviewing hospital staff, which was entirely successful and therefore not very interesting to write about. So I won't bother.
I spent the weekend in Accra, kind of because MakerFaire Africa was in town but kind of because I really wanted to get out of the village for a few days. Having said that, MakerFaire! What a strange and surreal thing. For those who don't know about it, MakerFaire is sort of a Bay Area institution in which weirdo hobbyists get together to show off all their DIY projects. In San Mateo it's a kind of 'hey look at this bike I made out of hemp and an old Nintendo' atmosphere but it's an entirely different beast in the developing world where small-scale innovation could actually be Kind of a Big Deal. I made a few good contacts, basked in the air conditioning and free wifi, and fell a little bit in love with this girl I met. This was probably just because I hadn't spoken to a white person or an American in two weeks, and she was both so it seemed like we had *an incredible amount in common.* Anyway I'll never see her again so let's assume she was a lesbian.
The other surreal event of the trip was stumbling into an English pub (well, walking in, stumbling out). This was not an Irish pub, which usually seems to be the only kind that gets widely exported, but an actual, honest-to-god bangers-and-mash carlsberg-by-the-can watch-the-manchester-city-match have-a-portion-of-chips-and-rest-a-while English pub full of drunken English expats.
Mind you, they didn't have pints. Right. No pint glasses at all. Other than that I have no complaints. And I guess you've got to leave something out or what would be the point of actually going to England? I'll be there in under seven weeks now.
Weird.
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