Manic Monday

Small view of traffic backed up in Central Accra

Yesterday at work, the library let us go souvenir shopping!  We don’t have a lot of time after work closes to get what we want to get, and we were planning on going this past weekend, but we were unsure of the plans at the time.  So aunty Gifty let us go to Central Accra so we could buy some souvenirs.  Justice came along with us too!  

Traffic was terrible.  It took us an hour to get to Central Accra, and it should have only taken 20 minutes.  Traffic in Ghana may be worse than any traffic in the U.S. because the cars here don’t often have air conditioning, and the temperature (at least yesterday) was 92◦ F with 90% humidity, and no breeze.  The trip definitely felt much longer than an hour.  

The puppies Amanda and I wanted to take home

Finally, we arrived at our destination.  We paid the taxi driver 15 Cedis, and crossed the street to the craft area.  As we were making our way to the entrance, there were two men holding these two precious puppies.  Amanda and I both got really excited at seeing them, and the two men brought the puppies to us so that we could pet them.  I told Justice I wanted to take one home, and he laughed.  “There are plenty of puppies in the U.S., no?”

It only took us about an hour to purchase our souvenirs, and we walked away with some great deals, because Justice was present and able to help us bargain with the craftsmen.  We purchased our items, and walked back to an area where we could hail a taxi.  

With Justice just after our purchases.

The drive home took far less time than the drive to the craft center, because this taxi driver knew the shortcuts.  Thank goodness for that!  We returned to the library and had been gone for about 2 ½ hours.  We showed our souvenirs to aunty Gifty and to Henry, who both loved what we purchased. 

During our remaining time at the library (about an hour or so), we were able to learn a new scanner that had been set-up over the weekend!  We were introduced to the Kirtas Kabis II scanner.  It is a completely automatic scanner which can scan up to 2,000 pages per hour.  It uses puffs of air to separate a few pages, and then a mechanical arm acts as a vacuum and sucks the top page to the arm, and flips the page.  It uses mirror technology so only one camera needs to be used to take pictures of the pages, and the mirror is rotated/flipped so the camera takes a photo of the opposite page.  It is one of the coolest things I have seen yet.  Kirtas Book Scan Editor Software is used to quickly process post-production enhancements of the images.  This is a really neat scanner, and I also enjoy using this one!