Cleveland and The Henry Ford

Devotees of the Drew Carey Show will recognize this edifice:



If you didn't know, it's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. There's lots of cool stuff there, like Jimi Hendrix's guitar, Elvis's purple Cadillac, John Lennon's doodles, and Hank Williams's boots. There are also plenty of multi-media shows about the history of rock music. However, you get museum fatigue after a while and can't properly appreciate the outfit Roger Daltrey wore in the film version of "Tommy."

Next stop: Dearborn, Michigan, home of The Henry Ford. (It seems like the word "museum" should be included there, but it's actually called just The Henry Ford.) It's a complex of attractions including an indoor history museum and a place called Greenfield Village. You can tour Greenfield Village on foot, or take a steam train, a 1920s bus, or a model T Ford!



The village is a bizarre but actually captivating assemblage of historical buildings collected by Henry Ford and physically moved to this location from different parts of the US and even from other countries. For example, we saw Robert Frost's house...



...and Thomas Edison's laboratory.



We also toured Ford's Rouge plant, where they make F-150 trucks. Ford is trying to make it a (relatively) environmentally sound plant. Notice the "living roof" with greenery growing on it.



Back at The Henry Ford, we saw lots and lots of cars, motorcycles and trains...



...as well as the Dymaxion house, a circular house designed by Buckminster Fuller.



The museum is not just about cars, but includes a lot of artifacts from American history, such as the chair Lincoln sat in when he was assassinated and the bus in which Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back. But really, the cars exhibited were pretty great. Most were in pristine condition. The way this one is displayed, one can almost understand how it is assembled:

Oh Beautiful, for Spacious Skies...

America! We're back. Man, is it a beautiful country. We recently returned from approximately one month of travels via car around the U S of A. Coming from Ghana, some of our most prominent impressions are:
1) It's so CLEAN here -- little to no rubbish lying about, no public urination, and the air smells great (no burning trash!)
2) Abundance -- there's tons of STUFF, no shortage of anything, whatever you want is available at all times.
3) Pace -- everything moves really fast here! Order your meal, and it's on the table in 15 minutes (in contrast with an hour in a restaurant in Ghana).

This is the first installment in a series of posts about our trip.

First we headed north to visit some family and friends in NY and NJ, then westward through upstate NY. We had never been to the Catskills before and were impressed with its tree-covered hillsides and pretty lakes. We stopped in at the Corning Museum of Glass, where they have all manner of glass bottles...



...and sculpture.



The exhibits include historical objects, artworks, technological uses of glass, and even glass-blowing and -breaking demonstrations.

Next stop: The Chautauqua Institution. This place is a fascinating community that holds 9 weeks of learning sessions every summer. Each week has a theme, and experts on that theme (all people whose names you'd recognize or whose books you've read) hold lectures and workshops. We visited during the off-season, so we weren't able to attend any sessions. Still, we were able to get a room, so that's a plus.



The setting is lovely, as the town borders a pretty lake.



From there we moved further westward to Lake Erie, PA. Presque Isle State Park is right next to the city of Erie. It's a pleasant spot with forests, bike paths, places to fish and swim, and a couple of lighthouses.




It was remarkable how clean the lake is. Remember those stories about the water being on fire in the 70s? Now it looks pretty clear, and we didn't see a single piece of garbage. There are even some houses right on the water.



Stay tuned for the next installment about our cross-country jaunt.

Rear Window

Ghanaians like to profess their feelings to the world, using the back windows of their cars. You are likely to see on the rear of any taxi or tro-tro (micro-bus) a decal of words or phrases. Sometimes they are in a local language, but frequently they are in English. They seem to run from religious ("praise God") to rude ("shut up") to narcissistic ("darling boy").

Yesterday I saw a new one:



Then there were also some of the classics:



Some others seen in Accra include:

Still Wonderful Jesus
Pray For Life
Rock Fella
Showers of Blessings
Show Boy
In Jesus Name
Psalm 121
Don't Rush
Trust & Obey
Life is War
God is God
Say Yours
Still the Boy
God's Property
No Jesus No Life
Your Time Go Come
Dallas, Man

PCS* from Accra

We're moving! Last week was pack-out week. On Monday, movers came over and took away our air freight, which is going to join us in DC. Dan looks happy about it.



On Wednesday and Thursday, the movers came to pack, inventory and weigh the remainder of the stuff, most of which will be shipped by sea to Europe. We hope to see it again when we get to Italy in 2009.



They were supposed to load the stuff onto a truck on Thursday, but the truck was taking a long time to arrive, and then it started to rain. They decided to postpone the truck till Friday avoid getting everything wet.

We still had a little drizzle on Friday, but it cleared up, so they were able to load the stuff onto the truck.



It's Ghana, so some of the movers were barefoot and carried items on their heads.



Dan checked box numbers off the list from our porch.



Less than one week left for us in Ghana!

*PCS = permanent change of station, i.e. move

Ouch

The other day, Dan was playing soccer. Another player collided with him, and this is the result:



His ankle swelled up a lot right away. Luckily, according to the x-ray, it's not broken, just sprained.



Now he's on crutches. Any touch to the ankle hurts quite a bit.



Please send "get well" thoughts Dan's way. He probably will be sticking to such sports as backgammon and Boggle for the next few weeks.

Dan commissions school

Last week we went to Nkawkaw, 3 hours from Accra on the way to Kumasi. The occasion? The T.I. Ahmadiyya Primary School, one of the projects funded by the Ambassador's Special Self-Help Program, had been completed and was ready to be commissioned. Dan represented the embassy and performed the commissioning.

Between formalities and speeches, the school's choir entertained us with some songs.



After the singing and speechifying came the cutting of the ribbon.



Then we got to see the inside of the classrooms.



All officials present posed for a group photo.



The resource center has the one of the best views in Ghana.



The event got press coverage. Read about Dan's speech here.

Ghana needs ladders

So, the other day we came home from work to find some guys painting the exterior of our house. They were up on the second-floor balcony, which they had reached by climbing an unbelievably rickety-looking, crooked-runged ladder.



Are there no ladders available here? So if you need one, you just have to make it yourself? Or are these the kind that are available here?