Dan's Birthday Weekend

Sorry I missed you on Sunday. This post will be lengthy enough to make up for it! It was an eventful weekend... literally. Last Thursday was Dan's 29th birthday so the entire week was a whirlwind of get-togethers. Wednesday evening, we met some new friends for sushi at Monsoon. Amanda found me on Facebook as she is also originally from Florida. She and her fiance, Keith (a Canadian who appreciates my enjoyment of hockey), have been in Accra since 2011. We had a nice time chatting about things here that are "different" from back home.

On Thursday, Dan was sung to at work. Their iteration is the normal "happy birthday to you", then "how old are you now?", then "may God bless you now", then "when are we getting lunch?" Quite the long song, and apparently the birthday person is supposed to buy lunch for the group (which has apparently never actually happened). Luckily there were 4 birthdays in the office in the last 10 days or so, so those guys were kind enough to team up and get lunch for the team on Friday. Later Thursday evening, we had a birthday dinner at a French restaurant called La Chaumiere with Hannah and Robin. Complete with wine and steaks and even a local Ghanaian man playing the strangest catalog of tunes on a guitar. He belted some Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Happy Birthday... we even got La Bamba and Guantanamera. Friday was a standard, albeit groggy, work day with a quiet night in since we had been out a few times already that week.

Saturday morning, we headed out to La Palm Beach Resort for the night. We used to go to Vegas for Dan's birthday but given the geographic difficulties, we decided to just do a one night getaway. The hotel was really lovely. Very "island life" even though it was just 20 minutes away from our apartment. The pool was very nice, even had a swim up bar. The hotel has a casino but we have to admit we were disappointed by it. To be fair, we had seen that you could place sports book bets online and collect the winnings at the hotel casino. As a result, we thought the hotel casino had a sports book... even a small one would have been nice. Nope. Nothing. Just lots of slot machines and some table games that weren't open when we went through.

Saturday night, we got some tables down at an outdoor restaurant on the property and invited some friends to come have dinner and/or drinks. I think in total there were 9 of us: me, Dan, Hannah, Robin, Amanda, Keith, Jonia, Veronica and Pierre (the last three are coworkers of Dan's). We had a nice night and the breeze coming off the ocean was a nice ambiance for the evening. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the hotel and headed back to the house. The afternoon/evening was topped off with naps, football watching and pizza delivery (so American!)

Here are a couple photos from the hotel pool and the beach behind the property: