2 more weeks here and gone!

I still can't get over how it seems my time here in Ghana is slipping right through our fingers and standing still just the same.
Another two weeks have come and gone but we have continued to fill our time here with adventure and excitement (and school). In Kumasi, ISEP stayed at the Engineering Guest House at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) which was very nice -- it had water heaters in every room! We visited several craft villages to buy Kente cloth, Adinkra symbol stamps, and wood carvings. A portion of the group visited the largest natural lake in Ghana, while the rest of us wandered through the market, which happens to be the largest market in all of West Africa!
Of course I was one of the people that had to get sick while we were travelling, but fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it) I did not have malaria. Unfortunately, not having malaria meant that it was more difficult to assess what I did have in order to treat it, and assuming it was just a cold, I did not seek treatment until I was completely miserable about the middle of last week. The cough I had was giving me raging headaches, I was congested, and just overall felt terrible. Thursday I went to a private hospital where they did a general blood test to determine whether my issues were being caused by bacteria or a virus. It seems I have a bacterial infection so they prescribed antibiotics (and several other basic medications for my various symptoms) and now, even though I still have a cough and a slight runny nose, I am feeling 100 times better :) -- ready for another week of classes.
Next weekend I'm planning on going to Togo (the country bordering Ghana to the East) for a few days, with the full purpose to be that upon re-entering Ghana I will receive a new 60-day stamp validifying my student visa. This will give me a chance (or rather, force me) to brush up on my French speaking (and probably reading) skills and will just be an over all great opportunity to see another country in West Africa!!!
More to come after that :)

(almost) 4 weeks in!

I still cannot believe how quickly time is flying by. As of Saturday this week I will have been here, in Ghana, 4 weeks! Since my last post I have made another trip to Cape Coast (this time with my program) 7 of us left Friday morning and stayed in Fort Patience in a little coastal town called Apam Friday night on our own and had the group pick us up on their way Saturday morning. I did the canopy walk at Kakum National Park again -- and it is just as much fun, if not more, the second time around. We wandered through the town of El Mina but did not do the tour of the castle, and we stayed at Hans Cottage. Sunday, we did the tour of Cape Coast Castle and drove back to Accra. Another week of classes has gone by, and many people are leaving in the morning for Togo (a neighboring country) to renew their visa stamps if they only got a 30-day stamp upon arrival in Accra. I plan to take it "easy" this weekend; I'm hoping to volunteer in Adenta tomorrow at a school set up by a few Rastas, Saturday I don't really have any plans so I thought maybe I would check out the Botanical Gardens on campus, and Sunday we have been invited to the church of one of our Ghanaian student guides (where he is in the music group and his father is the Pastor). We'll sit through another week of lectures and ISEP leaves for Kumasi next weekend! Very excited about that because I have no idea what that trip holds in store for us.