6 August, 11:00pm GMT - Kwadaso, Kumasi

We discovered this morning - after we had eaten and packed for the day - that our outreach had been cancelled by the nurses. Instead, we met with Dr. Kate at a hair salon in Kwadaso. Kate is incredibly organized, well-traveled, and put together. She wears perfectly styled hair with a different color-coordinated professional outfit each day. In the salon, she answered emails on her iPad (the first Apple device I've seen here so far) and told us that she's been to the US several times, including to Silver Spring, Maryland, my hometown. While Kate was having weave put in and her sister, Gifty, had her nails painted, we laughed at the number of American music artists whose faces appear on salon and barbershop posters (so far we've seen Rihanna, Beyonce, Usher, P. Diddy, Chris Brown, and Ice Cube).

For lunch, we had hands down the best dish I've had here, which also happened to be the cheapest: fried plantains with beans for GHC1.5 from a street vendor. The salon was nice enough to help us find it and serve it to us on their own plates, and it was amazing, just the right amount of spicy with a soft but not mushy texture. I have yet to find another dish that blew us away as much as this one did, even at upscale GHC20 per plate restaurants. So far, I've found that taste and price of a dish are not correlated; restaurants with four walls and a wait staff may have better cleanliness standards, but I've generally preferred street vendor dishes better; they're ready immediately, you can see what you're getting, and vendors usually only makes one or two dishes every day, so they are professionals at how to make that one meal taste amazing.

After lunch, Kate taught us how to play Ludo. It's a simple game somewhat like Sorry involving four chips you try to advance from your home square around the board to your end square. It grows tricky, however, since you can sometimes move more than one piece per turn, can move backwards if it lands you on an opponent's piece, and must throw a six to leave your home square. Rules can be found here. It's simple enough that you can make your own from objects around your house, but challenging enough that I am still terrible at it.

After the hair dresser, we took our cloth to a seamstess, where we could pick out designs for tops, skirts, and dresses from dozens of posters each with dozens of styles. I gave them 3 yards of cloth for a dress (GHC20 for labor), 2 yards for a skirt (GHC12 for labor), and 3 yards for two pairs of shorts (GHC10 each for labor). Overall, the final cost for each piece from fabric I chose, styles I chose, and fitted to my measurements was $17.50 for the dress, $11 for the skirt, and $7.50 for each pair of shorts. Not bad! I'll post pictures of them when we pick them up from the tailor in a week's time.

We took a taxi to Santasi, the first roundabout of Kumasi, where we found a produce and meat market where they were selling fried fish, live chickens, giant yams, bananas, and pineapples and mangoes that you could request to be cut up as a snack. For dinner, we ate at Sanbra, another obruni place which is a UFS volunteer favority because it's cheap, has a huge menu, and is within walking distance of the chrochro in Central Market. We just got to catch part of the US v. Canada mens soccer game, which the US won, on our way out.