"Sweet Bite, how much?" I ask in terse Ghanaian English. The taxi driver shakes his head. "Sweet Bite, the restaurant" I try again. "The restaurant?" he asks. I confirm. "Ehee" he responds, confirming that he understood my message. "Give me 8 cedis" he says, his poker face trying to disguise that he's tripled his price for no other reason than me being an obroni. "2 cedi" I retort pretending to be a Ghanaian albino who was born and raised in this country. "Oh!" he exclaims in a way only Ghanaians can, expressing both surprise and disbelief in the audacity of my counter-offer. Then he starts playing his cards in the usual manner: Traffic, petrol prices, white man / black man we're all one people... After protracted negotiations that more or less adequately reflect the complexities of modern economic life we settle on four cedis, a price neither of us is happy with. Me, because I have no idea where this restaurant is, and him, because he hasn't sufficiently fleeced his white brother. As we're sitting in the taxi on our last night in Ghana, Abena and I listen to the familiar sounds of the warm Ghanaian evening. Loud reggae music and soppy love songs blaring out of the oversized and overloaded sound systems in the local spots, cars and trotros honking their horns, Ghanaians sitting on the street, gesticulating, arguing, laughing. The taxi stops and the driver points to the neon sign - Sweet Pub. "Sweet Bite" Abena repeats. "Brother, this is a pub, not a restaurant", she clarifies the obvious. "Sweet Bite, Sweet Bite" the driver mumbles trying to recall the correct location, then turns around the taxi and heads back in the opposite direction. After ten minutes he stops the car outside a Ghanaian chop bar that looks nothing like the Lebanese restaurant we were looking for. Clearly our driver has never heard of the place so we decide to give up and fill our empty stomachs at the chop bar.
"How much did you pay him?" I ask Abena as we exit the taxi. "5 cedi" she replies. "5 cedi!!!" I exclaim incredulously. "You mean you paid the guy more for overcharging us on the original trip and then taking us to a place we didn't want to go to?" "Well, I kind of felt sorry for the guy" she says. "So how much would you pay a blind cab driver, double?!"
As we sit down at the table the waitress reluctantly wobbles over to our table and stands next to us, barely acknowledging our presence. No smile, no akwaba, no menu. She just stand there and waits. "Do you have a menu?" I suggest. "Yes." [LONG PAUSE] "Would we be able to have a look at it?" Abena tries to progress the conversation. "Yes." [LONG PAUSE] "Would you like to move your ass over there and get it for us" was going to be my next suggestion, but alas, she read my mind. A brief moment later the menu arrives and judging by the extensive selection one could be excused for thinking we have arrived in the garden of eden. There are the stable Ghanaian foods in every possible permutation (banku, kenke, fufu, kontombre, emotuo, plantain, ...), continental dishes, all day 'break fast', a good selection of Chinese cuisine and a fair amount of spelling mistakes that remind me of my grade five, first year English as a foreign language, essays. With the obvious difference that there was no online spell check in those days and I wasn't allowed to get advice from any native speakers around me. "The flied rice comes highly recommended" I point out. "Better than fried lice" Abena retorts. "What about the Gordon Bleu or the spiky hotpot?" On closer inspection the menu looks more like the devil's dungeon than the garden of eden. "I'll have the potato salad please", Abena decides. "It's finished" the waitress mumbles. As it turns out most things on Ghanaian menus are 'finished', meaning they have either run out of ingredients or the person who dreamt up the menu blindly copied every single line from The Encyclopedia of World Cuisines. "So do you have the mixed salad available?" Abena enquires. "Yes." "And it has everything in it?", she probes in more detail. "Yes." "Even potato?" "No." "But it lists potato in the list of ingredients". "Yes." "So it's in there?" "No." "No potato?" "No." "But it has everything else?" "Yes, it has everything". "So it has carrot?" "No." "What about beans?" "No." "No beans? But it says beans here" Abena points to the list of ingredients. The waitress looks at the list rather surprised. "It has egg" the waitress pin points the one ingredient that is available. "So it is a mixed salad of egg?" Abena tries to clarify. "And lettuce." the waitress adds resolutely. "So it is a mixed salad of egg and lettuce. That's why it's called mixed?" "Ehee!" The waitress confirms emphatically. Whenever you hear an 'ehee' in the conversation in Ghana you know you have arrived at the true meaning, the essence of whatever you were talking about. Sadly in this case it is of no help. After enquiring about a couple of other options we retreat to the Ghanaian section of the menu. No qualifications here, it's all 'ehee'. So one last time we order jollof & chicken and banku & okra stew. Ghanaian food, it's finished!
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