things to note during a trip home

From gate A52, Frankfurt Airport --

holy crap, there are a lot of white people here. Here being everywhere from Kotoka Airport, Accra, and onwards. Oddly, they don't seem to be staring at me.

I'm now at least Ghanaian enough to role my eyes at the poor baby-wrapping job that the woman sitting in near me on the plane did. In Ghana, babies are carried around (all the time) on their mother's backs using a simple flat sheet. The baby is held onto the back by the middle of the sheet, and the free edges are wrapped around the front and roll-tucked at the top and bottom. The main loadbearing point should be below the baby's butt, which derives its tension from the strength of the anterior inferior tuckage, leaving little baby feet dangling out by each of the mother's hips. Suffice it to say that this woman had it all wrong.

On another note, Americans are immediately identifiable by their ability to embarrass me for being amongst their ranks.

First let it be said that I was told by my single-serving Italian airport friend, Elena, that she though I was German, because I don't speak like an American. Which is to say that she expects Germans to speak better English than Americans. But I've been told similar things several times, always by people without an ear for my obviously American accent.

But anyway, it turns out that the airport in Frankfurt is close enough to America for me to start being annoyed by Americans. This came to pass as the yankee woman behind me in the passport control line droned on about the inferior quality of her recent tour. She and her husband had done some pre-fab tour deal to see the "Christmas Markets" of Europe. What? Sure, whatever. Well -- the couple's Christmas spirit was truly tried by what (I hear) were terrible hotels, with terrible food, and terrible tour guides in Austria, France and various points in between, not to mention a tour group that "was full of morons." I would propose one of two things as regards this comment. First: rarely, if ever, has the person making sweeping derogatory comments about the intelligence of others been an intellectual powerhouse in their own right, in which case (second) she may have been correct, in the inclusive sense.

The man whom she was speaking with was an unoffensive American who had just toured Egypt with his wife.

"Oh! For the Christmas markets?"

Seriously? Egypt? for the Christmas markets? Save me, Baby Jesus.