The Amazing Late Blog Season whatever Week 2

Whoo! Late blog!

So here's what happened; I watched the Amazing Race Sunday night, had all sorts of great ideas. Monday I was going to write the blog but then I didn't want to. Deal with it.

So This week was "The Amazing Race takes a look at how destitute Africa is!". Here's the question: why? Look, as a TV show, there are two ways to approach Africa; 1. point out how crazy sad it is and encourage people to do what they can about it or 2. Don't. I'm not saying don't as in don't encourage people, I'm saying don't approach it. All that being said, The Amazing Race clearly suffers from an almost cripplingly small amount of self awareness. It's a fact I'm going to have to embrace ala "America's Next Top Model" or it will drive me away like <insert name of celebrity that takes themselves way too seriously and that I once enjoyed but now don't that's not Kanye West>

So, the racers (from this point forward I will call the contestants "the racers") first step is to travel from London to Accra, Ghana. They all race like mad men (and women) to get to Heathrow airport only to discover that there is only one flight to Accra a day... cue letdown trombone sound (you know. "wa whaa").

They all arive in Accra, get in cabs and drive through the worst part of town to get to a park memorializing Ghana's independence. Nothing exciting happens in the park, but on the way to the park every car is... well, "approached" isn't the right word, but neither is attacked... anyway, all of the contestants are aggresivley pursued -while in their cabs- by people begging for money. The cab driver advises the two A Capella singers to hide their money... they respond by harmonizing "get us out of here" while one of them complains that "that one spit on me!"... yikes. Ms. Somewhere guiltily gives a small child reaching into the cab a coin (I point this out because something tells me they were told not to feed the vagrants).

After they leave the park in the worst part of town, they then travel through the worst part of the city (that's not an oversight on my part) to get to a marketplace where they'll have to sell sunglasses to locals who exhibit a shockingly low interest in haggling, but a not-shockingly high interest in messing with the racers. The old Asian man from the Asian father/son team assures his son that this market is just like the markets in Singapore when he was growing up. He then proceeds to, unconvincingly, beg people to buy sunglasses from him... it's a bit of a letdown. The Home Shopping network team manages to win this section of the challenge handily by -as the producers would have us believe- slutting it up.

Once they've sold 15 Cedi (Ghana's currency) worth of glasses, they get into another cab and head to the "June 4th" district, where they pick between mounting a makeshift antenna on someone's house and hooking up their TV or carrying a novelty coffin to a showroom across town. I don't even have anything to say here... it's at least as bad as it sounds in print.

Eventually they all got to run through a crowd to Jeff Probst (it's not Jeff Probst, but it'd be better if it were) standing next to a woman wearing a basket of fish on her head. I think the couple that hasn't been together very long wins. And the Birth-Mother/Daughter team loses. Bummer.

Before we leave The Amazing Race gives us one last fact about Accra: Apparently their mass transit system consists of a number of mini-vans with no schedules or routes. Yup.