My new TV

We have 5 working televisions at home in Kensington, I gave one away this summer and I know there is a small one in a cabinet. My son’s roommate this year has two large TVs his family isn’t using-he might bring one over…. Friday I bought a television. My group of teachers/mentors felt I needed one, were insistent in fact. They were worried about me being alone and being bored. I really didn’t want to spend the money but I figured I would be leaving it behind so it was more or less a donation.

Some things in Ghana are incredibly inexpensive: 8 limes for 20 cents, a cab ride for 35 cents, 2 yards of material for 2 dollars…you get the picture. Well some things in Ghana are expensive. Some you wouldn’t expect like butter($8) or dishwashing liquid ($5) and of course computers and electronics. My new television, a 19 inch Samsung, was $210. No wait, I had to get the $20 antenna oh yeah and the $15 surge protector and of course $15 TV stand (which is already buckling under the weight of the TV!).

The purchasing process was a riot. The TV place needed to deliver everything to my house since we came by cab and were shopping. So you’re thinking something like…. next Tuesday between 10 and 4 with a delivery charge, right? Nope. We finished our shopping and they followed us home. A young man was left at my house. He unpacked each box, built the TV stand, set up the TV, built the antenna which looked like something out of a 50s movie-see picture below-and then, with the help of at least three others and many on-lookers, hooked the antenna up to the roof. It has remote control which apparently rotates it in order to get better reception…hmmm we’ll see.

So what does an antenna get you? TV Africa (Ghana), GTV (Ghana TV), TV3 (Ghana), and Metro TV(Ghana) …I’ve heard that you can pay for CNN. On Friday night 2 of the four stations were broadcasting the Ghana/Libya World Cup qualifying game-which btw Ghana lost in the last minutes :( You can still catch replays of the game every day. I’m not sure how I’m going to stay up on world/US events-I guess pay for CNN and a lot of internet reading! I have seen several political commercials. Ghana, too, is having a big Presidential election in December- they have 8 people running. My favorite commercial so far was about a half an hour long ‘MTV ish’ kind of commercial which had no substance but some really awesome African dancing and drumming in support of the candidate- no bad mouthing or even mentioning the other candidates. I think I’m NOT going to miss our political commercials.